Yahoo! Instant Search

September 15th, 2005

Yahoo! Search blog announces the addition of Yahoo! Instant Search to Yahoo! Next, Yahoo’s showcase of cool new projects and developing technologies.

Instant Search Screenshot

As you type your search into the Instant Search box, it checks to see if there is a single, relevant answer for your query. If there is, that single result instantly appears on the page, just below the search box in a kind of “speech bubble”. You don’t even have to hit the Search button or the Enter key, and you don’t have to sort through pages of results (though of course that option is still available to you).

I’m not a big fan of Instant Search. It’s not really instant; it suffers from a problem many other XmlHttpRequest-enhanced pages also have - latency. You don’t get your instant result straight away. In addition, it’s nothing like the XmlHttpRequest “live searches” seen on some sites. It gives you one single result and only when it decides to do so.

If you type in ‘Google’ it’ll give you a link to Google’s homepage. If you want a stock quote for Google, you could type in ‘Goog’. Sure enough, the stock quote appears as an instant result but you’ll be waiting about a second for the quick search result to even appear.

Yahoo’s Search Blog says, “For example, in the past I would typically hit Enter as soon as I finished typing in my search, but after using Instant Search I now find myself pausing to look for the ‘bubble’.” And I think it’s true - this slows down the user. The user is waiting there for a couple of seconds wondering whether there was no “instant search result”, or whether the request is still being processed. There is no visual feedback to what is happening.

It takes about the same amount of time to press return after typing the search query. And as a bonus, you get more than one result. Still, it’s a nice concept.