Yahoo debuts beta of Instant Search

Yahoo on Thursday unveiled a beta version of a search tool that pops up results before a user is finished typing.

Instant Search is now available at Yahoo's Web site. While a word is being typed into its search box, it checks if a single, relevant answer is available. Common results are displayed just below the search box, in the form of a "speech bubble."

For example, typing in "bos" pops up a link to current conditions at Boston's Logan Airport (which has a BOS code). "Boston" pops up a link to Boston.com, while "Boston weather" produces a forecast in a bubble. If the bubble's contents contain the right result, a user does not need to hit the "Search the Web" button or the Enter key, or scroll through pages of results to find the right one on which to click.

The new offering uses AJAX Web technology, which reduces the need for Web clients to reconnect to a Web server every time information is downloaded. Yahoo's Instant Search tool is under development, so more features are likely to be added in the near future, Yahoo said.

The competition among search companies such as Google, MSN and Yahoo is heating up, and all of them are engaged in adding new features and tools to their offerings.

Apple Spotlight does this in OSX, it was called Clairvoyance

I recall that Filemaker Pro and other databse apps had Auto-
Complete and a feature touted as Clairvoyance, the effect of
which was to assist you in typing and predicting what you were
loooking for.


I see that Apple has adopted that feature in many parts of OS X
but it is readily apparent in Tiger's Spotlight which tries to pre-
sort results and narrows down as you type more in

Good to see Yahoo is making AJAX strides to improve search
speed and efficiency.

[indrakanti]

Dude, this is is different

This is instant web search. Spotlight searches only locally on the
hard drive.

Why do you guys start singining "Apple Tunes" even without
knowing what the article is actually about

[czambran]

Correction

[quote] The new offering uses AJAX Web technology, which reduces the need for Web clients to reconnect to a Web server every time information is downloaded.[/quote]
I believe the statement above is misleading. With or without AJAX if u want to get information from the server u will have to reconnect, but AJAX hides this fact from the user because it happens on the background.

Wow! but is it useful?

so what is the use of this thing except to create a wow factor? When I type in 'new', it shows gives me some link to christianity site. For most of the keywords, it does the favor or adding www before and .com after the word if the site exists!

snap.com

has been doing the same for a while...

Yahoo Instant Search

The service may be a snap but Yahoo is still skittish, if not squirmish, about certain keywords like babe, sex, dick (dic is fine) and so on.

[farker1]

Index severely limited

my searches on "baseball," "rome," and "computer" found nothing.

right now, this is useless. how long will it take to develop a worthwhile index?