Yahoo! Adds Search Suggest

Last month Yahoo added another feature, Search Suggest to Yahoo! Search. Its a bit old news but just thought it would be interesting to many people who haven’t heard of this yet.

When you are doing a search on Yahoo! , as and when you are typing, you will be automatically given some suggestions based on what you have typed till now. It not only saves you from typing, but also your time by the suggestions to get what you are looking for quickly and when you dont know the exact spelling or full name of a person/company etc it comes to your rescue.

Let’s say I’m trying to keep up with our illustrious “governator” here in California. I type “arnold s” in the search box and the suggestions pop up Arnold Schwarzenegger, which saves me from trying to spell out his last name. Or, I’m watching TV and wonder what song is in the background of a commercial that just came on. Problem is that I only remember part of the company name, “journey diamond”. I type it into our new search box, and “journey diamond jewelry commercial song” is suggested right away – problem solved. Of course, the assistance it provides when I attempt to find some new bicycle tires, “mavic ksyrium” just after the first few letters, “mavic k” is much appreciated. Not only does the feature eliminate my embarrassment of misspellings, it makes for a much more efficient search experience.

Search Suggest isn’t new, just new to Yahoo.com. Yahoo! launched this feature in the Yahoo! Toolbar in Firefox a while back and you can get it directly from the Firefox 2 search box when you select Yahoo! as your search engine.

Google launched this feature Search Suggest more than two years back, but not on the default search page, it is available as a separate page called Google Labs Suggest.

Do you think of this search suggest helps Yahoo! gaining popularity in search engine wars? Let us know!