Google may get three times more search traffic than Yahoo, but, SearchWiki aside, most of the innovation seems to be coming from Yahoo and Microsoft’s Live Search as they strive to gain a larger slice of the search market share.
Last year Yahoo introduced Search Assist, an advanced autocomplete feature that recommends related searches as you type your query into the search box. Autocomplete isn’t a new concept – Google has offered it for years through Firefox and its browser toolbar (and recently integrated it into its homepage). But Yahoo takes it a step further, going beyond just guessing what word you’re typing by suggesting possible related searches.
Today the site is introducing thumbnail previews for its image searches, allowing users to see how they should modify their queries to get the set of images they’re looking for. For example, typing “Obama” presents suggested searches for “Obama family”, “Barack Obama”, and “Michelle Obama”, each accompanied by a thumbnail indicative of what the query will yield. After trying a few searches of my own it’s easy to see how this could come in handy, especially when it comes to searching for queries with multiple, very different meanings (like “Sierra Nevada”, the beer or the mountain range). That said, the feature is a little quirky – oftentimes I had to refresh the page if I wanted any suggestions to appear.
Meanwhile, earlier this week Microsoft’s Live Search introduced the ability to use an image itself to search for similar images.
i bet by jan google will have it
Not so fast. Yahoo has Flickr !
Google has the most comprehensive image search on the web! Their recently added LIFE photo archive is amazing to behold! http://images.g...l=en&tab=wi
yahoo has flickr? what does that mean? The bought flickr…didn’t develop it….so you can count that as one of yahoo’s products
Manish, so what is keywhole for Google Earth, what is Analytics, what is Youtube then. Google develop it? AOL develop Bebo?
google has youtube
not picture service, they have video service? =)
Nice innovation from Yahoo!
doesn’t work for me: Suggestions for Images search will be available soon.
until the safe search filter messes up and suddenly porn appears on the homepage as a suggestion via image
For some of us, that’s a must-have feature.
At least for me, the suggested search feature of Yahoo is of limited usefulness. When you submit a search it will return related items anyway.
Auto-completion is a very useful feature though, which both Yahoo and Google have.
Sweet.
Still using google.
hollow effect
doesn’t work for me either.
safari 3 and IE 7
The Yahoo PR team is working overtime to save their jobs.
Not working for me either. Maybe they should coordinate their press releases with product releases!
yahoo really started to gain traction lately. indeed, very good feature.
I use yahoo as a secondary search engine sometimes (particularly for images). Whilst live search, in my opinion complete sucks, yahoo search is pretty decent. Quite usable and worthwhile.
Now that yahoo is the underdog they have started to make better and better things. I’ve always specifically avoided yahoo ANYTHING because they force so much content down your throat at once, but as A. Faith points out, they are gaining traction.
How many users are really interested into this and does it really matter for all type of searches. Again a gizmo that is probably not really worthwhile.
Excellent tool. Yahoo! is still the best content aggregator IMO. Nice to hear TC say something positive about Yahoo! for a change.
Image search has along way to go. This is a step in the right direction.
~~yawn~~ all I want from search are the most relevant results at the top of the page.
yahoo! FTW!
Just keep chugging along!
This doesn’t work if you do image search on the http://www.yahoo.com. integration problem?
I think yahoo does a great job with their search, granted, I still use Google for everything, but I think Yahoo! has come a long way and is moving in the right direction. In fact, I think the only thing that will derail the Yahoo! innovation train is if Microsoft buys their search devision and screws it up, like they do everything else they touch lately.
I really want some good competition for Google. I think the market needs it. But I do not think Microsoft has the ability to be the competitor the world needs.
The HUGEST photo index collection ever. SO SO MANY! http://images.g...l=en&tab=wi
Actually, I don’t like that the search results from Google are always stuffed with links to blogs. I have no idea why they think those are more relevant than normal pages.
So sometimes I move to yahoo or ask.com when I’m not happy with Google’s results.
That’s because of PageRank, which is getting irrelevant due to the proliferation of blogging. Bloggers tend to link to each other’s articles.
Google will be irrelevant in the near future.
i thought yahoo was a chocolate drink
Is yahoo down??
Why is yahoo down and has been for past 20-30 mins. I thought you would have a post up by now, ha.
ı wonder what will the yahoo value one year later?
http://www.iamlittle.net
This little tool works for me but is extremely annoying. I used to disable the search completion feature until I realized that it is pretty useful. The only thing I don’t like is that the images take too long to load (not really but it is more time). I wish you could disable the image display…
Regards!
>>most of the innovation seems to be coming from Yahoo and Microsoft’s Live Search
I dunno… UI gimmicks are more noticeable innovations, perhaps. But quality results, less spam, useful ads and fast performance require ongoing innovation too. Everyone continues to chase Google in those departments. If little widgety tools made a difference, Ask.com would have stormed the market a long time ago.
yahoo was down due to an ISP DNS issue. Not yahoo’s fault
Say what you will about Yahoo’s share price, they are still doing very innovative things. Take BOSS for example.
Why can’t they fix their Search Engine first??
“Google may get three times more search traffic than Yahoo, but, SearchWiki aside, most of the innovation seems to be coming from Yahoo and Microsoft’s Live Search as they strive to gain a larger slice of the search market share.”
It’s precisely because Google has 3 times more traffic that most innovations are coming from other players. Yahoo/ MS has little to lose from these innovations , and a lot to gain. Whereas it would be a huge risk for Google to make any substantial changes in their search engine.
Oh! We’ve the image listed:
http://search.y...es&y=Search
http://images.s...;sigb=12nj2lbha
Good to see Yahoo being innovative and focusing their new features on the generation that Google would just tie up if other companies were not trying.
Yes there are not many Facebook Friend Connect sites going yet, the reason being that Facebook made it complicated to integrate for an average blog user, someone like me, or a developer, ot an advanced blogger can get it up, but the average Joe will eventually throw up his hands and use Google Friend Connect. Facebook take note: simplicity will win in the Social World.
FYI- another down point for Facebook connect, this comment was posted to the Facebook connect article, but is showing up on a Yahoo article in TechCrunch- the submit button glitched while I was logged in.
i want to add my web albums in google n yahoo search results ( when searched by my name )”anoop kumar singh”. how can it possible
http://picasawe...ams/AnoopSingh#
http://flickr.c...hotos/liveanoop