Search — Tag

With Yahoo! being forgotten with all these new “universal” search engines like Google and Ask.com, it relaunched with a new, slicker, search engine. And it’s fantastic.

You do a search and you get the results. Bland. But then you try and refine your search, this is where one of the bigger changes is made. You click on the little down arrow or start typing some more and suggestions will appear,

There are two things here. Search suggestions, and search “concepts.” The suggestions work as any other search engine these days, you click and it searches. Concepts append the words to the end of the current search term. Cool thing about the concepts is that the page doesn’t reload, it replaces the previous search results.

It has other tricks up it sleeve, which I think beats Google’s “Universal” search. Say you stumble across a YouTube video. Google will show you a thumbnail, but Yahoo! will show you a thumbnail that will make the video appear below the search result.

If you search for a music artist, it will give you a box at the top, with a link to the official website and if available some music previews, which once again play right there.

Sometimes it will integrate with Flickr, but that seems to be a bit hit-and-miss as usual. It has all the neat little Google tricks, like currency conversion and (what I just found out) time telling.

I’ll keep this as my default for now.

Update The link works now. Check it out.

To me, it seems Yahoo! is getting the whole internet at this point. They have released some rather snappy “technologies” recently that showed how much they “get it.” Look at the new home page for instance, they get it, you want simple. But take into account a new idea Yahoo! have just come out with - alpha.

• alpha

You go to the homepage and notice just a search box. If you are signed in, it gives you a warm greeting. So far so good. You start typing… but you notice it not giving any suggestions as you type. Weird, I was hoping for AJAX-ness. So, you hit the Search button, and hello! Suddenly, you notice all the AJAX-ness, and the fact that this is a Web 2.0 search engine. Why? It links to social websites!

You get your main search results to the left, and several boxes to the right. You must click on these to expand them and browse through the results. Better yet, it links to things not owned by Yahoo!. It searches YouTube and Wikipedia as well. Cool thing is, you can expand the search results box even more and make a certain box the prominent one on the left. Searching for Flickr photos? Then expand the Flickr section and hit “More Results.” Simple.

Perhaps the coolest thing I found was that you don’t have to be tethered just these searches. Click the “Customize this page” text in the upper right, and you can drag and drop the search spaces, and better yet, specify a custom information source. It is a bit tricky at the moment as the search results need to be in RSS form. I’m sure Yahoo! will come up with something where you can see other information sources that people have made (you can make certain ones public, but I haven’t seen any way to access the public ones).

Hopefully alpha will grow into something big as this is what the web needs. We have specific search engines for specific things, but these days the internet is all about making websites modular to the point where people can take the main part of several sites and mash them together to form some kind of new website, for example, Twittervision, a convergence of Google Maps and Twitter. This is happening all over the place, and this search engine shows Yahoo! “getting it.”

Microsoft was the first that came to the scene with “integrated” search. Involving a massive search index to make finding stuff a lot faster. It was touted as being a WinFS feature, and of course we all know how WinFS is these days. Soon after the announcement (a couple of years back now), Google released Google Desktop Search, and Apple did a similar thing in the next version of OS X. Suddenly, everyone was on the indexed search bandwagon.

Funny thing is, Windows XP always had search indexing, it just wasn’t very good. If you go to Start > Search, and look through the options, you’ll find the option of searching through the index. For some reason, it was terrible though and hardly worked. Microsoft tidied it up for Vista though, and put it everywhere. In fact, why have a search box on your taskbar, since it is embedded in almost every app that comes with Vista?

You’ll find a search box in the Start menu, Windows Explorer, Mail, Internet Explorer, Calendar, Windows Media Player, Photo Gallery and countless other places. But would you use it?

Well, maybe, yes. Of all the features in Vista, when I boot into XP I miss this one. And GDS and Live Desktop Search all suck. You are kind of forced into it with the Start menu, as they have modified the way the All Programs menu works - it is no longer a menu. It is a series of point and click operations, which can be tedious, that it is easier to type a couple of characters. The benefit of the Start menu search is that not only does it search the Start menu (that is its priority), but it also doubles as a command line, so you can launch anything from anywhere, including your e-mail.

Windows Explorer search is much improved too. At any time, you can start typing a few letters in the search box and it will instantly filter the file list. It even looks through program and file metadata so that if you come across a whole barrage of setup programs, typing in the program that you want will most likely yield your result.

Case in point. I use the Firefox extension Scrapbook to keep together some of the more amusing internet pages at my disposal. I even keep some important ones in there, like my timetable. One day I had to find my timetable, but I didn’t know where it was because I hadn’t installed Firefox at the time. I looked through the Scrapbook folder. Each scrap is kept in a dated folder.

In XP, it would have been a pretty daunting task to find my timetable, looking through each folder. In Vista however, a couple of key presses and I’ve narrowed my search.

They aren’t even named “timetable.”

Despite the demise of WinFS, I think Microsoft were quick in providing almost all the features that it was going to provide. As said before, it is one of those features that I miss, and it is really helpful. No more trawling through folders, spending minutes at a time looking for the program to open some conspicuous file needs.