Yahoo Instant Search

So today I heard about Yahoo! Instant Search. Naturally, the first thing I thought was, that sounds like exactly what a lot of blogs are using for their search forms. You type your search, and the form aggregates results while you are typing, to (possibly) show you what you are looking for before you even finish typing. Apparently this is supposed to save time, but I’ve always seen it as an unnecessary novelty. Still, I was interested in seeing Yahoo’s implementation of this, so I checked it out.

Needless to say, I wasn’t impressed. Let’s take an example search recommended on the Yahoo! Instant Search page, “wikipedia.” Let’s type:

W… nothing… I… pop-up result: Wi-Fi Alliance. What? I’m not looking for that. Besides, that pop up is really painful on the eyes, kind of like an epilepsy inducing flash. I keep typing… K… back to no results, another painful flash… I… Wiki. Not wikipedia. Wiki, an entry in Wikipedia about Wiki. Well, a result about wikipedia, but not what I’m looking for. I keep typing… P… another flash back to no results… E, D, I… still nothing… A. I’ve typed the entire name and now I get Wikipedia. Wait, didn’t I type the entire name just to get the result I wanted? Isn’t live search supposed to save me time by returning what I want before I finish entering it? Am I missing something here?

Don’t think this was fast, either. There’s a half second pause before a live result pops up, and waiting for it to show up actually makes you stop typing. If you type as fast as you would in a normal search engine, you won’t see a single live result until you’ve allready entered the whole query, and if you decide to slow down enough to read the results, you’ll probably decide to type faster because they aren’t really valuable.

Bottom line: not useful. Plus, it’s not like the technology being used is really anything new, so I don’t know what Yahoo has on their hands here. It might be flashy to anyone who has never used a live search form before, but in the long run, I don’t see it changing the face of search.

Nice try Yahoo! Maybe next time.