WebProNews » Assist

Yahoo Search Assists With Satisfaction

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 23:29:34 +0000

The latest Keynote Customer Experience study on search engines showed Yahoo edging out Google for top marks in search assistance & suggestions.

Visitors to Yahoo who turn to the search box to find what they need have the added benefit of Search Assist. The technology suggests likely choices to auto-complete the search box as the searcher types.

The feature may be doing for Yahoo what its management has yet to achieve: inroads against Google and its search industry dominance. The Yahoo Search blog touted findings by The Keynote Benchmark, indicating Search Assist helped Yahoo edge Google in one study category.

Though it’s a small step in one category, it could mean more in the long run. Keynote put forth the suggestion that Google may not be invincible after all:

With nearly three times the market share of its nearest competitor, Google is seemingly invincible. But companies that overbearingly dominate their category, particularly when it

Gordon Brown Asks Google, Others To Assist Poor

Doug Caverly — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 21:37:23 +0000

All things being equal, who would you ask for money: the insanely rich or the average citizen? Most people would go to the first group, and in doing so, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has knocked at Google’s door.

Figuratively speaking, anyway – Brown’s still in the UK, as far as we know. Also, Google wasn’t the sole recipient of his request; Vodafone, Wal-Mart, Goldman Sachs, and about 15 other companies were named, as well, according to Larry Elliott and Sarah Boseley.

With those details out of the way, we can move on to one last clarification: Brown was asking for aid on behalf of the world’s poor, not himself or his government. In 2000, the U.N. set seven development goals that it intended to have met by 2015, and things aren’t going too well.

If anything could repair the timeline, it’s probably that group of major corporations. Still, Google has always had rather strict rules about unsolicited proposals, and shareholders everywhere would probably get upset if too much money got diverted from for-profit purposes.

On the other hand, it would be interesting to see Google add the British Prime Minister to its list of allies. With a hat tip to Sean P. Aune, we’ll be sure to watch for future developments.

Yahoo Search’s Puzzling Post

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 23:48:57 +0000

The Yahoo Search team has embraced the joys of cruciverbalism and combined the wisdom of crossword master Will Shortz with the new Yahoo feature, Search Assist.

Their connection only yielded one fun puzzle to complete, but the Yahoo Search folks found a way to make it even more interesting.

“We thought it might be fun to connect one of Will’s infamous puzzles to hints from the recently re-launched Yahoo! Search,” Chris Thun wrote at the Yahoo Search blog.

“If you complete it by October 26th, you’ll be in the running to win one of five trips to Hawaii,” he said.

Unlike the brutal Sunday puzzles Shortz and company wield like instruments of torment against crossword fans, this one has helpful links to “Search for Hint” under each clue.

Click the hint, and Yahoo Search Assist brings up suggestions below the puzzle. Solvers who can’t name Hawaii’s state bird off the top of their heads can click the hint, scroll through the search results, and find the answer.

The puzzle and its hints demonstrate just how far Yahoo has come in search. They have to make gains against the search engine leader, six letter word, starts with G, next.

Make Your Query Smarter On Yahoo!

Navneet Kaushal — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 16:48:39 +0000

Talking about their successful Yahoo! Search Assist, Yahoo! now discusses ‘The Other Half of the Search Equation’.

“Recent research conducted by Harris Interactive* indicates that consumers are suffering from "Web Search fatigue." The study revealed that while the vast majority of the population uses a search engine to find information on the Internet, only 15 percent of people find what they’re looking for with their first search. Typically, people need to conduct three to four searches to find the right result.

While search engines can and will continue to improve, we think making queries smarter is also part of the solution. While there are a handful of seasoned users and professional searchers out there who employ Boolean operators, site restrict and other advanced techniques, no one (ourselves included) wants to have to think hard about which search terms to use. Our vision was to build a system that helps users confidently construct more sophisticated and targeted queries without slowing them down.

In this first release, we’ve broken the problem into two parts. Part One provides assistance as you type. This has massively reduced the number of misspelled queries being submitted and saves typing time for slower typists. It can also link you deeper into the results space, saving you a step on those quick in-and-out sessions.

Part Two helps you move your searches forward, backward or sideways so you get the results you actually want more quickly. So if you started with a query for ‘Thom Yorke,’ you might get a forward (refining) suggestion for ‘Eraser,’ his most recent album, or a backward (expanding) suggestion for ‘Radiohead,’ the band he’s a

member of. You could also get a sideways (or related) suggestion such as ‘solo albums‘ which, when clicking on the term in the left-hand column of Search Assist, will lead you to other lead singers with solo albums like Gwen Stefani or Eddie Vedder.”

More info on Yahoo! Search blog.

Comments

Tag:

Are You Fatigued By Search?

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 13:26:48 +0000

Yahoo cited a study that found only 15 percent of searchers find what they want with the first search they perform.

Are You Fatigued By Search?

The situation forms part of what motivated Yahoo’s search team to launch Search Assist, a new feature for Yahoo Search, earlier this month.

Larry Cornett and Tom Chi said at the Yahoo Search blog they wanted to improve not just the search, but the query as well, by making it smarter. This would help people who customarily need three or four searches to find what they need.

The release of Search Assist breaks the problem of searching into two parts, they said. Part one is the autocomplete function of Search Assist. It speeds up typing the query and helps the poor spellers out there find what they want.

They also cited part two of the solution, where Search Assist helps people move sideways, backward or forward with a query:

So if you started with a query for ‘Thom Yorke,’ you might get a forward (refining) suggestion for ‘Eraser,’ his most recent album, or a backward (expanding) suggestion for ‘Radiohead,’ the band he’s a member of. You could also get a sideways (or related) suggestion such as ‘solo albums’ which, when clicking on the term in the left-hand column of Search Assist, will lead you to other lead singers with solo albums like Gwen Stefani or Eddie Vedder.

Search Assist is a friendly, powerful tool for searching. As search industry observers, we like seeing technology that makes it easier for people to accomplish their searches, along with spurring competition to raise the bar even further in the field.

How Yahoo Search Assistant Changes SEO

Steven Bradley — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 20:51:06 +0000

On Tuesday Yahoo became the last of the four major search engines to offer blended search. Last, but definitely not least as Yahoo’s Search Assist may just be the killer app to get some switching back from Google. Search Assist also has the potential for changing a few things when it comes to optimizing for Yahoo as people begin to unknowingly build more advanced queries.

Yahoo’s been rolling out some of the changes recently, but on Tuesday they all came together. There’s already been a lot of coverage and instead of trying to repeat what’s been said I’ll leave you with the links towards the bottom of this post. However the best way to see the changes is by going to Yahoo and searching.

SEO Related Observations About Search Assist

In using search assist the last couple of days a couple of things have become clear to me. The first is that whether they realize it or not people will be performing more long tail searches. The second is that when search assist is open one less organic search result is visible above the fold.

In the above image you can see search assist in action for the single word ‘cavern.’ The phrases on the left are search suggestions and one of the nice features is that cavern doesn’t need to be at the beginning of the suggested phrases. The two columns of phrases to the right are concepts around the word cavern you can explore.

As an aside you might notice the Beatles as one of the concepts and it might seem strange for it to be there, but the Beatles got their start playing at The Cavern club in Liverpool. Just a little trivia for you non Beatles folks.

Getting back to the cavern search I selected Howe Caverns from the suggestions on the left and then selected ‘adventure tour’ in the concepts that showed up.

You can see that Yahoo is now showing results containing adventure tour. While it doesn’t show in the search box the actual search now being performed is

howe caverns + “adventure tour”

Notice that adventure tour is being searched in quotes as an exact match while the howe caverns part of the search isn’t. The query above is somewhat more complex than a user will typically type on their own. It’s not overly complicated, but now thanks to search assist we’ll be seeing more advanced searches that will go deeper into the search tail.

Combined with the observation that one less result will be in front of people (at 1024 x 768 resolution one organic result is visible) I think it becomes more important to optimize for long tail queries for Yahoo traffic. It may not be enough to simply have all the words on the page either as the second half of the query is an exact match.

As you start to use search assist more your attentions naturally ends up more focused more at the top of the page on search assist itself. If you don’t see a good result quickly you may decide to further refine the search as opposed to digging deeper into the results and clicking beyond the first page. It wouldn’t surprise me to see less results being clicked, but more clicks leading to good results. That would likely lead to more satisfied Yahoo users.

Long tail optimization has been good advice for awhile now. Search Assist makes the advice better and should also require more focused long tail optimization. Additionally with one less organic result showing the paid listings take on a greater percentage of the space. It’s very possible Yahoo will start seeing more clicks on their ads.

Suggestions For Search Assist

I’d like to see Yahoo display the actual search being performed when using search assistant. In the above howe caverns + “adventure tour” search why not show the entire search in the search box? Showing the actual search would help users better understand what is happening and it would educate them about advanced search operators. If Yahoo tested the idea and found users were more confused by seeing the search change I could understand, but otherwise I think it would be a nice touch.

Exploring concepts is a great addition and I wonder if it could be expanded one more level. Instead of only exploring concepts around the original search why not allow exploration around the more advanced modified search. It would add one more level of refinement and for Yahoo it would keep more people on Yahoo’s search results page

If possible I wouldn’t mind seeing more advanced search operators gain inclusion in search assist. Right now search assist will include an exact match phrase on top of your initial search. Perhaps they could add a way to exclude certain words or phrases as well.

Resources

These are some of the posts I had been collecting for tomorrow’s This Week In SEO post. If you haven’t yet spent any time with Yahoo’s search assist the posts below will fill you in more about how it works and the general changes Yahoo made. Eric Lander’s Search Optimization Guide will walk you through a variety of the changes and how they relate to seo.

Yahoo Search Launches Google Killer : Search Assist, Videos, Flickr Integration

Search Optimization Guide for The New Yahoo! Search

Yahoo Upgrades Search Experience, Launches ‘Search Assist’ & Multimedia Content In Results

Yahoo Search Launches Search Assist & Blended Search Results

Yahoo Search Gets Blended, Helpful

Yahoo Launches New Search Interface

Yahoo’s Showcased Homepage Content Driving Search Results

Yahoo’s Search Assist and tracking keywords

Yahoo! Leveraging “Content” for Queries

Blended Search, it’s everywhere I look

If you haven’t yet tried it, give Yahoo’s Search Assist a spin and let me know what you think. I’ve been a Google user primarily for years, but I’ve noticed over the last couple of days I’ve been using Yahoo a little more than I have been and I have a hunch that’s going to increase.

Comments

Yahoo Makes The Assist, Web 2.0-ifies Results

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 16:39:16 +0000

Just as the commotion died down over Microsoft’s Live Search update, Yahoo comes forward with some thunder of its own, unveiling its new Search Assist feature, an interface also focused more on user intent (the new buzz word in search, apparently), with a healthy dose of user-generated content thrown in for good measure.

Yahoo Makes The Assist, Web 2.0-ifies Results

Like with Live Search and Google’s Universal Search, Yahoo’s more robust approach to query refinement signals a new era in SEO/SEM; more options in the search results means more opportunities to be discovered.

The Assist

The update integrates audio, video, photos, shortcuts, consumer reviews, and local information directly into the search results, with special emphasis on Yahoo properties of course, like Upcoming.org and Flickr, but also spreads the love to important video sites like YouTube (a rather graceful move, considering Google Video heavily prefers its own sources – or source – as though YouTube is all there is).

Yahoo calls the update its most comprehensive since dumping Google’s search technology in 2004, so Search Assist is a long time in the making. It begins simple and familiar enough: type a query into the search box and a dropdown menu appears, guessing what you might be looking for – not especially breathtaking considering Google’s Suggest feature has been doing this for some time now.

Click for full size

Nonetheless, type in "string," as though continuing on to learn more about String Theory, and the box suggests a varied list of possibilities, including "string bikini" and "string cheese incident." This is done "automagically," says Yahoo veep Tim Mayer; be sure set aside some time today to boo him for abusing his neologistic privileges.

Continue along your original intention, either by clicking the auto-completed "string theory" or by typing, and the SERP will offer more related queries that, when clicked, will offer more refined results.

Matching User Intent

This is just a small example of getting at the intent of the searcher, a goal Yahoo says spawns from research showing consumers are suffering from "Web search fatigue"; ninety-nine percent of online adults searching and only 15 percent finding what they want on the first go round.

"We know that consumers want a complete answer, not a bunch of links, and the changes we’ve made are focused on getting people to the best answer — whether it be a Web link, photo, video or music clip — in one search," said Vish Makhijani, general manager and senior vice president of Yahoo! Search.

In case you’re worried that the dropdown suggestions will match the annoyance level of Microsoft Word’s paper clip (it’s worse if you use the Japanese version, by the way, where it’s a squeaking dolphin instead), the box "only shows up when you need it or ask for it."

And with Search Assist available, says Yahoo, users saw a 61 percent increase in task completion.

User-Generated Assistance

Also like Live Search, images and videos are interwoven into the results, the videos playable from the results page.

The integration of user-generated content in the results is an impressive and useful update that includes restaurant and hotel shortcuts, pulling in user reviews from Yahoo Network’s Local Search.

Click for full size

A search for "gino’s east pizza chicago," (and if you haven’t had pizza from there, in its artery-seizing glory, you really have missed out on something beautiful) for example, brings up not only the restaurant’s five star reviews, but also a phone number, address, and map link.

Or, if you had to be in Louisville, Kentucky this weekend, a query for "louisville events" pulls from Yahoo-owned Upcoming.org to categorize according to type of event, popularity of events, or timing of your trip. Click on the This Weekend link and you’ll discover there’s not much going on this time of year – try back the first weekend in May.

What It Means To You

That makes the third of the Big Three engines to update and fully incorporate Web 2.0 into the search results, indicating that user-generated content is now a permanent feature of Internet search. And that means also a new element to SEM: your brand, business, or message needs to appear in as many formats and as many places as possible, especially as search expands to a more holistic experience.

Yahoo Gives An Assist To Search

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 11:03:55 +0000

Yahoo Search Assist expands on a person’s query to suggest additional relevant searches and concepts for the searches they perform.

Yahoo Gives An Assist To Search

The search box on Yahoo has been offering search suggestions for the queries people make. Type a few letters and a box of suggestions appears, with clickable links to results for each suggestion.

Tim Mayer announced on the Yahoo Search blog how they have expanded on these suggestions with Search Assist:

Yahoo! Search Assist kicks it up a notch, bringing those suggestions to the search results page, along with related concepts that give users a point-and-click query refinement capability that enables them to explore a subject area they may be unfamiliar with.

Search ‘united nations,’ for example, and the new Search Assist knows that the following concepts are related to your query: general assembly, 1945, league of nations, secretary general, etc.

The popularity of online video has been acknowledged in this update to Yahoo Search. Mayer said search results that include links to videos provides an inline video player, so the viewer can go ahead and watch the video right away.

Search Assist complements Yahoo’s search results well. The ability to refine a query quickly with Search Assist is an improvement over paging through search results to find the one that fits best.

Yahoo’s Search Assist is There When you Need It

Andy Beal — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 16:58:43 +0000

Search Engine Land takes a close look at Yahoo’s new Yahoo Search Assist tool. Unlike normal search suggestion tools, Search Assist predicts when you might need a little help with your search and then shows up.

As Danny Sullivan explains…

Ever had one of those moments when you start to type in a query, enter a word and then pause because you’re not quite sure what other words to add to it? Search Assist senses this. It notes that you’ve paused, takes that as a sign you need help and magically makes suggestions appear below the search box. Cool!

In addition, you don’t just get suggestions that contain some of the letters you initially type. Search Assist goes beyond the original word to suggest related topics.

Yahoo Search Assist will be deployed gradually – so don’t expect to see it right away. For those of you interested in how it will look, here’s a screenshot:

Comments

IBM To Assist With Cell Integration

WebProNews — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 17:43:57 +0000

IBM announced yesterday they would be assisting others with integration of Cell microprocessing technology. In order to accomplish this, IBM is developing new services designed to help others with the forthcoming upgrade.

IBM offers a description of the upcoming Cell technology in a release, which says:

The Cell processor, developed by IBM, Toshiba and Sony Group, is a breakthrough architectural design featuring eight synergistic processors plus a Power Architecture-based core, which provide unmatched performance levels in many computational-starved applications. It has top clock speeds of greater than 4 GHz, as measured during initial hardware testing.

“IBM’s new design services could have significant impact on expanding the number of applications that leverage Cell’s unique capabilities,” said Pat Toole, general manager, IBM Engineering & Technology Services (E&TS). “This is an example of IBM offering innovation on demand — helping manufacturers in a variety of industries solve their most challenging technical problems and create entirely new products.”

Custom design services for Cell from IBM will encompass:

system architecture and design;

chip, module and board development;

expanded blade design;

power, mechanical, electrical, thermal, industrial design;

firmware and Linux driver development;

worldwide regulatory and agency industry standards testing;

interoperability and compatibility testing;

and manufacturability, reliability and serviceability.

More than likely, one of the first consumer devices to make use of Cell technology will be the Playstation 3, which is expected around the end of this year or early 2006, just in time to compete with the new Xbox.

WebProNews | Breaking eBusiness News
Your source for investigative ebusiness reporting and breaking news.