Yahoo Unveils Search Assist, Improves Search - Getting an Assist with Search
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Not surprisingly, Yahoo promotes its new Search Assist right at the top of the page, where you can’t miss it if you’re there to do a search.
Look fast, though, because that little yellow note disappears after just a few seconds.
So the search assistant is supposed to pop up only after you type something in and then hesitate. One reviewer tried it with UN (United Nations) and was amazed at the relevant concepts suggested. So at the risk of showing a prejudice for my own country, I decided to try a search on US presidents and see what Yahoo came up with when I hesitated after putting in “presidents.”
This nifty little screen scrolled down as soon as I started typing. As you can see if you look to the right, you can turn Search Assist on or off, which is an excellent touch. Looking at the list of suggestions, you’ll notice two things. First, the list takes up a finite amount of space on the screen, because you can use up and down arrows to move your place on the list. Second, in this case Yahoo assumed that I was interested in a list of US presidents, which is not unreasonable.
But what if I wanted to find out something a little more complicated? Say I wanted to compare the foreign policy of US presidents over the years. (Bear with me; I majored in history in college). Seeing the kind of focus I got from Yahoo for this query, I decide to make a few modifications. First I tried “Presidential foreign policy;” that got me a little closer, with “separation of powers” being one of the items suggested. The real winner, though, was “US foreign policy,” as you can see below.
You can see my perfect choice is highlighted: “history of us foreign policy.” There is something I’d like to mention, though: most of the searches I started contained the actual key words I typed in. If you want to explore the concepts involved in your query, you have to click to do the search and then click on the little tab that appears below the search box (you can see it in my first screen shot, on the left). In that case, Search Assist gives you something that looks like this:
Sorry the image isn’t clearer; I had to crop and reduce it to fit. But you can see that a number of concepts are correctly listed, as well as people. Do you see that arrow all the way on the right? That’s for scrolling in the concepts section. And, though you can’t see it in this picture, Search Assist includes a “feedback” link at this point.
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