Yahoo's New Instant Search

Yahoo's testing a new instant search feature that'll give instant information without having to load a results page. It's quick data with a couple of surprising omissions; you can try it out for yourself at http://instant.search.yahoo.com/ .

Yahoo says the kind of data you can get here includes the regular shortcut information -- gas prices, currency conversion, area codes, and so on. Here's who it works: just start typing your query. Yahoo will pop up with a window as you type giving you additional information. It'll also do quick searching, too, which appears to find the first result for a query. For example, typing "square" gave me a pointer to Square Enix. On the other hand, it didn't always work. Typing "Resourceshelf" didn't pop up any search results, which I thought odd, while a much more common word -- "lucky" -- did. If you enter an address Yahoo will pop up a little map!

As far as the shortcut information was concerned, apparently some of it needed more context than I supplied. If I typed in 408, Instant search popped up a box with information about that area code. Entering a zip code with no context, however -- 10017 -- provided no information even though that's a Yahoo Shortcut. And while entering an address popped up a map, entering a phone number didn't.

I like the idea. When it worked it was really cool. But I was kind of surprised about what didn't work.

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