Yahoo Announces Livesearch on AlltheWeb

Yahoo has announced on its blog that it's added a new technology, Livesearch, to its AlltheWeb property. Unfortunately, it doesn't support Opera, but you can launch Firefox and try it at http://livesearch.alltheweb.com/.

"Search Smarter. Find Faster." Pretty generic but it beats the heck out of Search is Beautiful. Anyway, the idea behind Livesearch is that as you type your search, not only do you get suggestions to refine your search but you also get updated search results in real time.

I decided to start with the word cow. Even after I typed in c I started getting suggestions -- the first one, after the letter c, was Craigslist! This was interesting so I wasted some time just doing one-letter searches to see what comes up. (Is suggestionsurfing going to be a new timewaster? Hey! You can get results for special characters like . and @!) After I got that out of my system I went back, typed in cow, and waited.

For about a tenth of a second. Then the page refreshed with a bunch of suggestions (Dallas Cowboys) and search results for Dallas Cowboys. Does Livesearch automatically jump to the first search suggestion? What I actually typed was above Dallas Cowboys, and a tap on the keyboard got me to that and the search results for it.

I then started running through variants, including cowboy, cowboys, cowboy bebop, and cowboy bebop stuff. Each time Livesearch quickly refreshed with a list of suggestions, though sometimes it seemed to get obsessive about one concept (ala Dallas Cowboys). I thought I could get rid of that theme by changing my search, but unfortunately the query cowboys -dallas STILL presented me with a list of Dallas Cowboys-oriented suggestions! ARGH!

Introducing any level of special syntax seems to choke off the suggestions fairly quickly; searching for cowboys site:edu immediately brought no suggestions. On the other hand, using the Refine Search at the bottom of the left nav and narrowing by domain that way did leave the suggestions intact, but unfortunately did not seem to give them any kind of academic slant.

While I like the idea of search results refreshing so quickly, I'm dismayed at how inflexible the search suggestions seem to be. This would be a great place for some of those sliders that Gary Price likes so much -- some way to move between academic, cultural, and perhaps shopping orientations so that the suggestions don't seem so "stuck" sometimes.

Posted to Search Engines-Yahoo