Yahoo Search Assist

Martin Brinkmann
Oct 28, 2007
Updated • Dec 10, 2012
Internet, Search
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1

Even if you do use Yahoo search regularly you might have missed the Yahoo Search Assist feature. To be honest, i had no desire to use Yahoo as a search engine until the recent actions of Google made me change my mind. Ankit, who recently commented on my blog wrote an interesting article about Yahoo Search Assist and I decided to give it a go.

But first, where is it and who does one enable it. Yahoo Search Assist is available after searching for a search term at Yahoo Search. A small down arrow icon is shown beneath your search term on the search results page. If you click that arrow the Yahoo Search Assist box will be shown.

The box has two parts. The left part displays related search terms and the right part, entitled Explore Concepts, which combines related search terms and displays new search results when clicked.

The Explore Concepts suggestions are therefor there to narrow down the search results. This works only once. If you click on any of the suggestions the search results will be updated but the initial search term will still be what you have entered in the search box. Another click on any of the suggested terms will change the search results again, this time with a combined search of the term that you typed into the search box and the second suggestion that you clicked on.

This is an interesting concept which does need some tweaking however. What I personally would prefer to see would be a way to customize those 'Explore Concept' items or add another part that offers some search terms that are usually connected.

As an example, if someone would enter Microsoft Windows XP that third box would display information such as 'purchase', 'troubleshoot', 'install' and 'activate' for instance. For Britney Spears it would be 'songs', 'albums', 'lyrics' and 'gossip' among others.

This would help a lot of users who have troubles narrowing down their searches.

My conclusion would be that Yahoo Search Assist offers some interesting new ideas that are more likely to help inexperienced users than experienced ones. I like the fact that you can narrow down the search results without tampering with the initial search term.

Another nice feature would be to be able to save those results, use different suggestions, compare the results and filter dupes and stuff like that. I would not go as far and say that Search goes Intelligent as Ankit suggested with his articles topic but it is definitely a step in the right direction.

Users want more options and that is what Yahoo finally discovered.

Read More:

Yahoo Search
Yahoo Search Assist, Search goes intelligent

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Comments

  1. ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
    Reply

    Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on August 4, 2012 at 7:57 pm
      Reply

      Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.

    2. Leonidas Burton said on September 4, 2023 at 4:51 am
      Reply

      I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
      http://www.google.com/saved

  2. VioletMoon said on August 16, 2023 at 5:26 pm
    Reply

    @Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!

  3. Karl said on August 17, 2023 at 10:36 pm
    Reply

    @Martin

    The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
    https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/

    Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.

  4. Anonymous said on August 25, 2023 at 11:44 am
    Reply

    Omg a badge!!!
    Some tangible reward lmao.

    It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.

  5. Scroogled said on August 25, 2023 at 10:57 pm
    Reply

    With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.

    1. lollmaoeven said on August 27, 2023 at 6:24 am
      Reply

      This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)

  6. El Duderino said on August 25, 2023 at 11:14 pm
    Reply

    Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.

    And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.

  7. John G. said on August 26, 2023 at 1:29 am
    Reply

    First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm

    For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[

  8. Kalmly said on August 26, 2023 at 4:42 pm
    Reply

    Yes. Please. Fix the comments.

  9. Kim Schmidt said on September 3, 2023 at 3:42 pm
    Reply

    With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.

    Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.

    The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.

    If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.

    And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.

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