Yes, believe it or not, Yahoo did indeed score higher than its competitors in the Search Assist & Suggestions rankings gathered during November of last year.  And this represents a marked improvement over its May position in the same category.

But Michael Kronthal, who reported these standings in a post titled "It’s About the Customers" on the Yahoo Search Blog, dutifully linked to his source, and that’s where we saw some problems.  The Keynote Systems report states, "In the December 2007 Keynote study, Google makes a clean sweep of first place in all four key index rankings: Overall Customer Experience, Brand Impact, Future Usage Impact, and Customer Satisfaction."

As for a certain acquisition target, "Yahoo! takes second place in every category, and Ask.com, MSN, and AOL follow in order."

So maybe our imaginary kid got "C"s, or even "B"s, instead of "D"s.  That’s not bad.  But it’s what got Yahoo threatened by Microsoft, so while the company deserves to be pleased with Search Assist’s performance, no one should think it aced every test.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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:

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