May 28, 2009

Yahoo! Search Adds Sports Shortcuts

Earlier this week, we looked at the Instant Answers that Live Search provides for sports teams and players. Now, Yahoo! is rolling out search shortcuts for sports as well.

Simply type in a team or sporting event and get immediate stats. The shortcut works for NFL, MLB, NHL, and NBA, and college sports leagues including the NCAAF and NCAAB.

Here are some examples:

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 3:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 27, 2008

SEW Experts: The TV Writers -- And the Buzz -- Are Back

Learning to use the tools we have before us is an integral part of online marketing success. In today's Searching for Meaning column, "The TV Writers – And the Buzz – Are Back," Kevin Ryan shows how the end of the TV writers' strike holds some meaningful lessons for search marketers.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

August 29, 2007

New Yahoo! Shortcuts Announced

Yahoo! announced the addition of 3 new enhanced shortcuts designed to aid the consumer search experience. These enable users to refine their searches more rapidly, as the shortcuts help them understand the most common options used by others. The shortcuts announced by Yahoo! are focused on NFL players, consumer electronics, and medical conditions and medications. Here are some sample searches:

This is extremely similar to what we saw from Google when they launched the "Topics" functionality and the Google Coop program. Here are some sample searches for how this works with Google:

As you can see, the structure is very similar. Google has not placed that much emphasis on the Google Topics program, but they have continued to show the Topics links for medical searches, so presumably they have gotten good user feedback on the functionality.

Overall, it's a nice enhancement by Yahoo!

Posted by at 8:24 AM | Permalink

November 20, 2006

Yahoo Integrates Answers Into Search Results

Yahoo has finally officially integrated Yahoo Answers into the Yahoo Search results, according to an email we received from the company. We reported back a month and a half ago that Yahoo Tests Enhanced Yahoo Answers Integration In Search Results but now everyone can see it for themselves by conducting a search for vacation ideas.

If you do not see it, I have posted a screen capture below of the before and after.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:15 AM | Permalink

November 8, 2006

In The Election Results Race, Yahoo's The Winner

Like many Americans, I wanted to know what was up with the vote in the US midterm elections this morning. As a search analyst, I then wanted to know how the search engines performed in helping me find out. The results are in! Yahoo's the winner by far, but I'd still take the New York Times over it. Come along for an illustrated tour.

Google told us last month that Google Earth was all geared up to be an election guide. That's great if you've downloaded Google Earth and wanted to learn more before the election. But how about a quick, fast summary of what happened yesterday? What's Google got for us?

The Google home page is as minimal as always, no help there -- not even a special logo as in the 2004 race.

How about a search for "election results," which I think is a fair query to try. After all, using Google Trends, I can see a huge spike for that term after the last elections in the US:

I also checked the volume for just "results," and that was even higher whereas "elections" was much lower (see them all compared here). So my two queries for this test were "election results" and "results." On Google, both disappointed.

Here are election results on Google:

CNN's top with 2004 results! I know -- web search is always behind the times. That's why Google inserts that big news results OneBox unit above the regular results. Let's click on the main news link there, which takes us to news results:

Pretty bad. News about the dollar, stock prices -- but who won?!!! I've got to really work to figure this out, especially compared to the New York Times, as I'll show at the end of this story.

Maybe I head to the actual Google News home page:

Nope. I get some headlines telling me about the Democratic house victory, but it could be much better.

FYI, checking on a search for just results, I don't even get the news headlines inserted. Overall, I found Google to be a pretty poor resource.

How about Yahoo? The home page there immediately gives you some news:

If I actually gravitate to the picture and resist the pull of the search box, the "Full elections coverage" link takes me to a Full Coverage page with lots of info, including an interactive results page (my link takes that out of the normal pop-up box, but it still works great):

This is very, very nice. I can see at a glance who is ahead in the race for control of the US House Of Representatives, plus with a click I can check out the Senate or governor races. Selecting any state also gives me the information about races with that state.

I love this. It very similar to what impressed me at the New York Times. I hope Yahoo searchers found it. However, I suspect many bypassed it. To understand why, let's do that search for election results:

Similar to Google, Yahoo inserts a big "News Results" shortcut unit above the regular results, to help detour searchers into the freshest results. Of course, searcers might bypass that. If so, unlike Google, Yahoo has managed to get the CNN 2006 results page up rather than the CNN 2004 page. Nice. After that, there's Fox News 2006. But c'mon -- Yahoo's own special election results are third. This is one case where I'd totally applaud a little hand manipulation to get that to the top, especially to highlight that interactive results summary page.

Still, the web search results for this particular day at Yahoo far outshine Google. That's almost certainly due to some human editing, which is fine. Along with the sites I've mentioned, you get the New York Times politics page, USA Today's politics page, C-SPAN's 2006 results page, the ABC News politics page, CBS News's 2006 page, politics from the LA Times, then the Washington Post's 2006 results page. All of these are excellent choices. If Yahoo did human intervention to make this happen, kudos to them. You can check out a snapshot of the entire page here.

Over at Google, nothing is either timely or general enough. The Virginia state election board, California election info, assorted things dating from 2004 -- then oddly Virginia and California get another bump for their 2006 pages. Ugh. See the entire list in the snapshot here.

What happens if we detour into the news area that Yahoo promotes at the top of the page? Disappointment:

Yes, relevant news stories. And the image results to the side are kind of fun. But some hand help could have made a difference. How about a promo for that awesome election map of Yahoo's?

Let's go over to Ask, where I had high hopes. Ask has made a big deal of its special Smart Answers for the election, and they are cool. But will I see them? Yes, if I search for election:

I'd also get to this box if I went to the Ask home page and clicked on the Election Day link there:

But for election results (what I believe to be the more popular query), all I get is a small news unit:

The news unit will take me over to some news results, but like Yahoo's, these aren't thrilling. It's pick and choose through what you want, rather than any type of easy overview. As for a search on just results, that doesn't even bring back the news unit at all.

The overall web search results, similar to Google, are underwhelming. Nothing really helpful for the 2006 results pops up (see the full results in the snapshot here).

Even the special Smart Answers box, had it shown up, isn't that helpful for what I want now -- RESULTS! None of the featured links with it takes me to results.

Microsoft, what have you got for me at Windows Live Search? On the home page, nothing. For search on election results, it's disappointing old or non-targeted results (screenshot here). Unlike the others, there are no news results inserted above these. A search for just results is no better. If I specifically try a news search for election results, as with the others, there's no attempt to get me a comprehensive overview. It's up to me to review each story and hope for a good match.

Ironically, at the largely overshadowed MSN site, similar to Yahoo, I get a big election photo on the home page along with links, including one called "state-by-state results" that leads to MSNBC here. And over there is a pretty neat "Democracy Dashboard" giving me that type of overview I wanted:

It's a pity Windows Live didn't reach out to either MSN or MSNBC and do something special to point to this or somehow integrate it into the results.

What about AOL? From the home page, it's pretty easy to spot a link to a AOL election page with results for the House, Senate and more:

Searching for election results brings back disappointing Google listings in the main results. However, the new FullView column does a good job of dividing news into elections overall, US Senate coverage, US House coverage and more. And clicking on any of the "View all" links brings up the special AOL election page (see the full page here).

Now to the New York Times. I headed over there pretty much by chance. There are any number of newspapers I might of thought of off the top of my head, and usually its my original home town paper of the Los Angeles Times. But I hit the NY Times today, and boy was I glad.

Right on the home page, above the "fold" is an easy-to-spot election map. In seconds, it organized the most important information I was looking for into a way for me to know what was going on:

Drilling into the full map was even better. There, I could click on any state -- in particular the undecided ones -- and see the current situation:

Just when I was thinking "what if," I saw the "Create Outcomes" tab where I could click on a state and flip it to the Democrats or the Republicans to see how it might go with the Senate. Outstanding!

Other newspapers or web sites might have done as well with similar displays. If so, my apologies that this wasn't a review of the best election results sites. Instead, it was really meant to see how well the search engines held up as information resources for this particular news event.

Overall, I've written many times before that there's a role humans can play in search results. Today -- this was a perfect example of that. Yahoo almost certainly put some human effort into crafting results, and it was the clear victor in terms of quality of what was coming up in web search listings. AOL comes in second, again where human effort has helped its FullView listings help make up for the poor crawler-based results from Google.

In third, I put Google and Ask. Google's results were poor, but at least it floated some news results that may have helped. Ask, I was rooting for. But that Smart Answers box simply wasn't showing up for the queries I thought people were doing. Even if people were getting it for "election," it wasn't helpful to get election results. I really appreciate the effort, and if this had been for something other than actual results, Ask would have been great. In last place -- Windows Live.

This campaign of sorts is also one of those classic "what if" races. With just a little more effort, Yahoo would have had a landslide victory by getting people to its great overview page. The same is true for AOL. Ask, with just a bit more thought, could have had that box coming up for "election results" rather than just "elections" and added some links to get people to actual results. Windows Live, if it had remembered its MSN origins, might not be in last. And Google? A company that's all about organizing information might not have put in such a poor performance if it used some human power in the way the New York Times did.

Postscript: See also Case Study: Digg Versus Google News Traffic from me on my personal blog that covers how this article ultimately brought in lots of traffic from Google News from those unable to find election results there, along with lots of other data and a comparison to traffic from a top story at Digg on the same day.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:17 AM | Permalink

November 1, 2006

Quick Access to Cool Yahoo Features

Today's SearchDay article, A Closer Look at Yahoo Shortcuts, is the third in our series looking at the special features search engines have implemented to speed up access to the information you care most about. The first two were A Closer Look at Ask's Smart Answers and A Closer Look At Microsoft's Instant Answers.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 3:45 AM | Permalink

September 1, 2006

Yahoo Tests Enhanced Yahoo Answers Integration In Search Results

Threadwatch discovered Yahoo testing a new way of displaying Yahoo Answer results within the Yahoo Search results interface. The new interface is larger and more pronounced, but in the same location (under the main organic results) as before. Threadwatch posted a screen capture of this here. I have posted a comparison of the current integration of Yahoo Answers and the test integration of Yahoo Answers at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:15 AM | Permalink

August 29, 2006

Update On Coupon Shortcut, Yahoo Adds Cheap Shortcut

Last week I told you about Yahoo's new Coupon Shortcut. In that post, I said that the comments on Adam Viener's Revenews post seem to suggest that Coupon Cabin is providing the coupon codes, but Chris Saito of Yahoo! Shopping told me that Yahoo! “aggregates coupons/rebates from multiple sources but hasn't released specific partners.”

When I talked to Chris, he also alerted me to the new 'cheap' shortcut which highlights products which have been marked down in Yahoo! Shopping/Yahoo! Product Submit. Just search for 'cheap [insert product]'. Here are some examples: cheap plasma tv, cheap shirts, cheap jeans.

The cheap shortcut is the latest example of vertical results (shopping) creeping (as Danny would say) into regular search results. If you're a merchant, it's more and more important to market through the shopping comparison engines. If you're not using Yahoo! Product Submit/Yahoo! Shopping, you're missing out on potentially valuable traffic from regular Yahoo! searches. If you're not using Google Base, you're missing out on potentially valuable traffic from regular Google searches. Everyone should be working on search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click (PPC), but don't forget to test out the vertical search engines.

Posted by Brian Smith at 1:33 PM | Permalink

August 24, 2006

Yahoo Search Integrates Flickr Images In Search Shortcuts

The Yahoo Search Blog announced that they have integrated Flickr images into their search results. So a search on funny photos or travel photography would pull images from Flickr and then take you to a tag search at Flickr, if you so request. But what about Yahoo Images? Well, they still come up for some searches, I happen to be looking for an Windows XP logo today, and I searched on xp logo at Yahoo and got Yahoo Image results at the top, some may not be that appropriate. Also, typically a search on photos at [keyword here] would bring back Yahoo Photo results.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 2:42 PM | Permalink

August 23, 2006

Yahoo Adds Coupon Shortcut, Making Finding Coupons Easy

Adam Viener of ReveNews.com discovered a Yahoo! Shortcut which gives searchers quick and easy access to coupon codes.

Adam highlighted a search for kodak gallery coupon codes. Here are some other examples: circuit city coupon, vistaprint coupon, netflix coupon code, and dell coupon code.

This is a great service for consumers who are spared the trouble of weeding through creatively written sponsored listings and pages of organic listings claiming to have the best coupons and then returning out of date deals. This is also a potential win for Yahoo! as affiliate revenue can add up pretty quickly.

The comments on Adam's post seem to indicate that the coupons are sourced through a third party called Coupon Cabin, but there's no confirmation of that. Last year Yahoo! tested out a different partner for coupons on Yahoo! Shopping.

Posted by Brian Smith at 2:44 AM | Permalink

August 4, 2006

Searching For Other Search Engines At Search Engines

Yesterday, I thought I discovered Yahoo stealing searching from Google, but I did not, Rand discovered it. Basically, if you do a search on Yahoo for google, Yahoo puts up a Yahoo Shortcut asking you "Want to search the Web?" with Yahoo? Is this fair? Is this respectable? Who cares... But is this relevant?

Navigational searches are important. Does Google throw up a OneBox result doing the same? No, they do not. Yahoo doesn't do it for MSN or Ask.com, only for Google. When I asked GoodROI to ask Tim Converse of Yahoo on his WebmasterRadio show last night, Tim replied that he was unaware of that result but it is possible that it may be a joke. Meaning, sometimes the search engines play jokes with each other.

When I went over to Ask.com to do a search on Google, I got this Smart Answer that is incredibly useful and relevant (IMO) to this search.

When I went over to MSN yesterday I did not get anything special. But today, it seems MSN is playing the joke on Google & Yahoo but not on Ask. They ask "Want to search the Web? Try MSN Search" with the search box to MSN.

So now we have Yahoo and MSN both playing this game. Google doesn't do anything much special for these navigation searches. And Ask.com shows a detailed Smart Answer with details of each search company.

Why does Yahoo and MSN do this? Well, as I said it is most likely because Yahoo and MSN are portals. They attract less web savvy individuals and when they search at Yahoo or MSN, they may not understand that they are actually searching. Sounds kind stupid, but this is the case.

Matt Cutts of Google commented in the SEOMoz post saying;

Yahoo: "Want to search the Web?" User: "Yes, but not with you." Too funny. I wish I had a T-shirt with that on it. :)

So Chris Boggs decided to play artist and make a Did you mean? result in Google for good search engine, it does not really work, but he wanted to have fun.

I doubt this is just a joke between search engines. For a high volume keyword, trust me, it is high volume, like "Google," search engines typically play jokes with each other.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:51 AM | Permalink

June 9, 2006

World Cup: Google Does The Logo Thing; Yahoo & Ask Have Smart Shortcuts

Google's sporting a special World Cup-version of its logo in honor of the start of the World Cup today, while Yahoo and Ask are offering special results that come up after World Cup-related searches. A round-up of what's going on, below.

Over at Google, there's new World Cup module that you can add to your personalized home page to keep up on matches and standings. The company is also promoting the new module on its regular home page to encourage take-up. ZDNet has a screenshot of that. Here's what I see from the UK:

The Official Google Blog is also pushing other ways to tap into World Cup info via Google, though most of these things are pretty generic.

Gary Price has done a recap of other things in the search world touching on the World Cup, focusing on ways to get mobile alerts in the US and in Europe and the fast facts that FIFA is offering.

Gary also spots a World Cup Yahoo Shortcut you can see here (but no Yahoo logo change, not even on Yahoo Germany). Ask is offering a similar Smart Answer service as you'll see here. Ask also didn't change its logo, but the home page shows flags for each team in the World Cup:

Click on the flag, and you'll get a Smart Answer with related info like you'll see for the US here.

Over at MSN Search, no custom answers and no logo changes that I can see (nor at Windows Live Search, either). But back to Google, they are doing some OneBox answers, like you'll see here or here.

Over at Technorati, there's nothing on the home page indicating anything special for the World Cup for those who want to track it in the blogosphere. Clearly if Niall Kennedy hadn't left, the World Cup would be all over Technorati. Niall declares his love of soccer here today (so Niall, get on your MSN Windows Live colleagues to do something).

OK, OK, the MSN portal home page is at least pointing to a two minute guide to the World Cup done in conjunction with Fox Sports. Of course, this is the same partnership whose official store can't send US football kit for kids when promise, so phooey on them. More on that, plus my own thoughts on the World Cup madness that's starting on my personal blog in In The Middle Of World Cup Mad England, I Root For The US.

Don't forget, yesterday's post US, UK Searchers & The World Cup covered some of the top searches involving footballers in the UK and the US.

Am I missing something? Comment!!! It's easy -- just head to World Cup, Search & Stuff at our Search Engine Watch Forums.

Postscript: Google Blogoscoped notes there are different country-specific logos at Google using the team colors of those countries

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:23 AM | Permalink

December 20, 2005

Yahoo Launches Open Shortcuts, Allows Creation Of Custom Search Commands

The new Yahoo Open Shortcuts service lets anyone create their own custom search commands for use on Yahoo. Want to navigate to a particular site quickly or have Yahoo remember a particular search string? The new service lets you do this.

This help page provides full details on how the system works, and this page helps walk you through the creation process. Time Saving Search Shortcuts on the Yahoo Search Blog also has more info.

To add a few examples, let's say you want to reach the Search Engine Watch Blog quickly. Using the shortcuts creation page, you give the shortcut a name that you'll enter (let's say "sewb") and the URL (http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog). Once you've set this up, you can then do this into the Yahoo search box:

!sewb

And that is supposed to take you to the Search Engine Watch Blog home page. You can make any number of commands to navigate wherever you like, and you can recall the entire list you've created through this command:

!list

How about saving searches? Sure. Say you always use Yahoo to search against our site to find stories about Yahoo. That would look like this:

site:blog.searchenginewatch.com yahoo

After doing that search, look in the address bar of your browser, and you'll see a URL similar to this:

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site%3Ablog.searchenginewatch.com%20yahoo

Now using the creation page, you'd enter a search command/shortcut you want to save the URL to be associated with (let's say sew-yahoo). Then anytime you did this:

!sew-yahoo

that long URL you copy and pasted would automatically be sent to Yahoo, causing it to rerun your search.

I tested the service before it went public and also 15 minutes after that, and I found the shortcuts I'd made and saved weren't working. Even Yahoo's own shortcuts like !my weren't working. If you find the same, keep trying. I suspect they'll begin operating shortly.

Don't want to use the creation page? Power folks can make any shortcut on the fly right within the search box. The magic weapon is the !set command. Use that followed by the name of your shortcut and the URL to save, and you'll make a shortcut on the fly. For example:

!set sewf http://forums.searchenginewatch.com

would instantly create a shortcut for you called "sewf" that takes you to the Search Engine Watch Forums.

Yahoo's created a number of shortcuts that anyone can use to reach or search popular sites, such as Amazon, My Yahoo and Flickr. Unfortunately, the shortcuts you create can't be shared with others.

In contrast, YubNub that I wrote about earlier this year lets you not only create any number of powerful shortcuts, but once created, everyone else can use them.

For more about that an and a similar service called Ambedo, see these past posts:

Postscript from Gary: Along with other services that blogged about above like YubNub (mobile version also available) and Ambedo, even more other tools offer similar search shortcut services and tools. Here's a quick look at a few, what my best be described as "related services" that I've used over the years.

Browsers Many browsers offer pre-built search shortcut features.

+ For example, some shortcuts are built into Opera. For example, entering a "g" in the address box and then your search terms will run a Google search, entering an "z" plus search terms runs an Amazon.com search, a "z" plus search terms runs an eBay search. Documentation about all of this is available here.

Worth mentioning that states that these options can't be customized BUT this page says they can. It will take a little hacking but it's easy enough for a non-geek to do it. The problems is I'm not sure it works. Details about what I'm talking about here in a knowledge base entry.

+ Other browsers also offer search shortcuts that can be created with little effort. One of many examples is, Netcaptor. This browser calls search shortcuts "Quick Search" and they can be set-up in seconds. The documentation is clear and is found in the Help section. The section on "Aliases" might also be worth taking a look at.

Toolbars Three toolbars allow you to customize and add search capabilities direct from any search box. I've mentioned all of them on the blog or in SearchDay during the past few years.

The A9 Toolbar The link above takes you to a blog post from August that explains how you can add a search shortcut to the A9 toolbar with just two clicks. It also explains how to (without an URL "hacking") to create advanced searches directly from the toolbar. The A9 toolbar is available for Firefox and IE.
This post describes NeedleSearch, a toolbar for only available for Firefox. Like A9, this software allows you to add the power of any search engine to the toolbar with a click or two.
The Copernic Meta Toolbar (IE only) also offers this feature.

Btw, these services as well as many others allow advanced users ca "hack the urls" and bring very advanced searches directly to the toolbar. Trust me, it's easy and fun. The possibilities are endless.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:15 AM | Permalink

November 27, 2005

New Search Shortcuts from Yahoo

The Yahoo Search Blog points out that they've added a couple of new search shortcuts (They have about thirty now). What's new?

+ Movie Trailers Add the term "trailer" to your movie title query. Here's an example. If available, links to trailers appear near the top of the page

+ Movie Showtimes and Maps Just search a title and a location by entering a title and location or the trigger word "showtimes" and a location. Actually, I blogged about a Yahoo movie showtime shortcut over a year ago. However, the links to ratings and maps are new.

Btw, Ask Jeeves has offered a movie "Smart Search" on web results pages since May of 2004. The Smart Answer box often contains an image of the movie poster and links to trailers, the official site, and reviews (via Rotten Tomatoes). These Smart Answers are available for both new films as well as many cinema classics.

Google also offers links to movie info on web results pages.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:02 PM | Permalink

November 4, 2005

Changes to Yahoo Video Search Page; Image Search Adds Results Page Refinements

Yahoo Video Search made a change last week that allows you to view your results in either a "grid" view or a "list" view which also offers some additional description/transcript info if available.

I've also started to notice that Yahoo is placing links to Yahoo Shortcuts on non-web search results pages. Here's an example of a video search for: "baseball" and on an image search results page for the search: Chicago. Finally, image search results pages now allow the searcher to refine their search after clicking the search button. Look for various refinements at the top of the page below the blue line. For example, by just clicking you can only show only small, black and white images. Since February, Yahoo Images has also allowed the searcher to create "transformed" image queries using natural language.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:34 PM | Permalink

October 4, 2005

More On Query Refinement, The Human Scale Problem & Creating The Search Dialog

Yesterday, I wrote of how search engines could do a better job of query refinement and indeed did so in the past, especially because there was more human involvement in the search process. That drew out Jim Lanzone, senior vice president of search properties at Ask Jeeves, who sent me an email raising a good point that humans haven't gone away just because of the expense. Humans also have a "scale" problem. More comments from Jim on that are below, along with a further look at the scale issue and the need for the Google Generation to rediscover query refinement.

I agree with both Jim and Christopher Coulter, who commented on Robert Scoble's reference to my blog post:

Yeah well the Yahoo Human-Edited model couldn't scale, so you get Google Pagerank automational noised chaos. It's back to 1996 all over again. And the best 'search' is with a database

Indeed, humans haven't scaled well in terms of helping us gather content from across the web. Crawlers do a great job of that. I used a library metaphor on my ODP Founder Comments & Moving Past Directories post earlier this year to explain why directories, after some promise, went away in the face of crawlers.

In short, imagine you go into a library and can use one of two card catalogs to find books on a topic you are interested in:

The human-compiled card catalog looks only at book titles and short human-written descriptions of the books, maybe 25-75 words in all.
The crawler-compiled card catalog will let you scan every word on every page of every book in the library.

The crawler-built catalog is far more comprehensive. It's also far more up-to-date. Remember, in the library of the web, the books often rewrite themselves or add pages in the way books in a physical library do not. Humans simply can't keep up with that activity.

The key, of course, is that the crawler service isn't just comprehensive but relevant. It will find not just all the matching pages but often rank them so you are getting the very best ones.

While humans don't scale well in the info gathering and retrieval side, they can play a role. More on that in a moment, but first, here's what Jim said in response to my post:

To say that the problem with human editors was due to it being "expensive" is true, but I don?t think it goes far enough to explain the problem.

Sure, Ask had great relevancy, but only for a single-digit percentage of the overall query stream. That is not how people search, and neither you or I or any number of Web Search Universities is going to change that for the vast majority of searchers.

Algorithmic search was the only solution to that problem because only an index of billions of pages could meet the user need that exists across the long tail of rare queries.

At its peak, the Ask Jeeves "knowledgebase," as it was known internally, matched on about 85% of searches. That was a lot. However, it was only picked 20-25 percent of the time, despite having premium placement at the top of the page.

Sure, some searches resulted in far higher pick rates than this. But the vast majority did not. Therein lay the problem. And due to the exquisite overpromise made by the premise of question-answering and the butler, this had consequences for the Ask Jeeves brand.

The brand was lucky, on the other hand, to gain a foothold in the market early on, and to hold on to millions of users because of it. But at the end of the day, people use a search engine to find what they need - quickly. That foothold would have become more tenuous had we not bolstered our ability to answer searches (questions or keywords) more accurately, more quickly, and more easily, than the original Ask product could deliver.

Today, with a combination of algo search, structured data search (Smart Answers), and unique tools that help people find things faster (Zoom, Binoculars), we are delivering against user needs exponentially more than we did before.

At the end of the day, this is about playing defense, not offense, against that wide and vast stream of searches. Most people are going to do what they want with that little white box, and will not have the patience of learning how to "search better" or set up a bunch of parameters ahead of time. The minute we understood this and started intuitively responding to their searches with better results and options, the more loyal those users became to our search engine.

Again, I agree with much of what Jim says. Historically, we know that searchers don't read help documentation, don't make use of options, don't do anything much beyond put a word or two in that black hole of a search box and get sucked in to click on whatever seems like the first "normal" result that comes up. Put a bunch of refinement links/suggested searches in front of them, and they're likely to just ignore those as being "weird" and move down toward the real results.

Solutions? First and foremost, do break the habit! I've taught search classes for many years, and people are amazed that when they look a bit past the standard 10 listings, there are options and suggestions that are useful.

In fact, we'll be doing a "Pimp Your Search Engine" or "Bling Your Search Engine" series shortly via SearchDay to try and help many readers understand some of the many features that are offered to you on your own favorite search engines that habit just may have blinded you to. Get 100 results at a time! Pop open new windows from search results! Discover easy ways to refine your queries!

Beyond that, let's see the search engines do more to make use of both humans and automation. I do want a human-created knowledgebase at Ask Jeeves and elsewhere to return.

Maybe it has to be much smaller and serve only the very most popular queries. But why not make it that if I type in hotels on Ask Jeeves, the automatically-generated "Narrow Your Search" options off to the right-hand side might be determined to make more sense to show up in the main part of the results, to better help people narrow in.

Moreover, look at what I get now at Ask Jeeves in that Narrow Your Search section:

Why not step beyond the automation and for this type of broad, common search, come up with some human-generated suggestions, such as:

Find a hotel by price, location or other options Find the official site of a hotel chain
Find reviews of particular hotels

Those aren't perfect solutions/options, but I think they make the point. There ought to be more the search engine can do to have an actual dialog with people in the right cases.

I know, the risk is the less Google-like the results are, the more likely people are to feel uneasy or unsure about using a search engine. Well, the Google Generation needs to be smacked upside the face.

Honestly. Google has been an absolute, horrible failure in helping people refine their queries. It's no wonder people today may not even realize there are query refinement options out there beyond Google and before it existed, given that the major leader in the space hasn't made use of these. Let's see all the search engines dare to experiment more with these features and applaud them with they do.

By the way, speaking of applause, notice this over at Yahoo for hotels:

Make Hotel Reservations - Research Hotels - Special Deals Yahoo! Shortcut - About

That's listed right above the first search result. I checked it out AFTER making my suggestions above, and you can see Yahoo's hit two of the three things I thought made sense. Great work, Yahoo! OK, cynics will say these links just help push people into Yahoo's own travel search areas. Yes, but they are good areas. People should be checking them out!

Why might you miss these links? Because they still don't look like the "regular" results that are numbered. So maybe they need to change. Maybe instead of being like this:

Make Hotel Reservations - Research Hotels - Special Deals Yahoo! Shortcut - About

Hotels.com - Your One-Stop Shop for Hotel Pricing, Amenities and Availability Find your hotel at Hotels.com. Get huge discounts on rooms at over 16,000 hotels and 800 cities. Rates for special events and sold out dates. Book online or call. Category: Lodging Reservation Services www.hotels.com - More from this site - Save - Block

It needs to be more like this:

Make Hotel Reservations - Research Hotels - Special Deals The Yahoo Shortcut links above will take you to our special travel search areas designed to let you scan the web for hotel prices and information. You can sort by price, location, amenities and more.
Hotels.com - Your One-Stop Shop for Hotel Pricing, Amenities and Availability Find your hotel at Hotels.com. Get huge discounts on rooms at over 16,000 hotels and 800 cities. Rates for special events and sold out dates. Book online or call. Category: Lodging Reservation Services www.hotels.com - More from this site - Save - Block

Again, top of my head stuff. But I think it makes the point of the "dialog" being presented in a more listings-style format. Maybe, maybe, that might help users see stuff they're missing.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:50 AM | Permalink

September 15, 2005

New Yahoo Instant Search Gives Answers Directly -- No Results Page Required

A weird one for you, but sounds pretty cool. Yahoo's given the heads-up that a new Instant Search feature is to be offered by the time this story goes live. Type in a word, and Instant Search will show you an answer for popular queries in a "speech bubble" directly below the search box.

In other words, say you wanted to search for wikipedia. Type that in, and Yahoo says it will recognize that's a popular query, where the first listing on its results page is often chosen. So, it will suggest that for you. Click in the speech bubble, and you can go right to the page, without having to generate search results.

In a way, it's a "I'm Feeling Kind Of Lucky" feature for Yahoo. Google's trademark I'm Feeling Lucky button on its home page that takes you to the first search result that would have come up on Google, had you gone to the search results page and clicked there. But if you're feeling lucky, you can trust Google, use the button, and it will take you there directly.

Yahoo's Instant Search does a similar thing, only it gives you a preview of where you'll go. So you can decide a bit more if you're feeling lucky before trusting it.

In some cases, Yahoo will take you to a shortcut result or answer. For instance, weather san francisco on Yahoo gives you a Yahoo Shortcuts result first, where the weather forecast is shown right within the results. With Instant Search, the forecast should appear just below the search box, no need even to click to reach it.

Additionally, if you type in a URL, Instant Search is supposed to turn that into a link to take you to the page entered. Misspell a word? A correction should appear, with a link to get results for the corrected word.

Not every query will have Instant Search functionality. Yahoo says it works for the most popular queries only. Behind the scenes, it depends on Ajax to make the magic happen quickly.

But if searchers don't get results, then they don't see ads -- so won't this possibly hurt Yahoo? Yahoo didn't really answer my question on that directly, saying more that they think it will be a cool new feature to enhance the search experience and stickiness of use at Yahoo. How exactly it will evolve will depend on how it gets used.

My interpretation? For some queries, Yahoo doesn't mind if you don't see ads. For many other queries, you'll still need to hit the results page. If this helps many searchers find Yahoo more useful, then it may keep them with the service and generate more queries and ad views, rather than hurt that.

Want to try the feature? OK, you're supposed to find information at Yahoo Next, the Yahoo debut area for funky experimental things like this. You're also supposed to be able to find it from the new Instant Search area. In either place, once you do a search and see the Instant Search speech bubble show up, you're supposed to get an option to make this work on Yahoo's pure search page, if you want it. That's at search.yahoo.com. It's not being offered for the main Yahoo.com page.

How about getting it into the Yahoo Toolbar? Not yet, but Yahoo said it's something they'd look to see if possible.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:01 AM | Permalink

July 7, 2005

Google Joins Jeeves and Yahoo in Providing Currency Conversions

Via Google Blogoscoped, word that Google has joined Ask Jeeves and Yahoo in offering online currency conversion rates posted directly onto web results page.

For example: 1 Australian Dollar in British Pounds. More examples here.

Ask Jeeves has offered a currency converter as part of their Smart Search program for over a year. The same thing is true at Yahoo.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:54 PM | Permalink

April 4, 2005

Google Joins Yahoo & Ask With Direct Display Of Stock Market Data In Results

Google has joined Yahoo and Ask Jeeves and is now placing a current stock chart and other info directly into search results pages. Previously, you had to click a second time to get to this info.

For example: if you enter the ticker symbol GOOG, you'll see the current stock price plus today's chart.

Actually clicking on the GOOG link takes you to a set of financial info "tabs" with info from a variety of sources. Google has offered this information for several years. In fact, use the search syntax stocks:symbol (such as stocks:goog), and you skip web search results and instead go right to the financial info tabs.

Yahoo has already had direct display of stock charts in results, as you can see in this example.

Yahoo offers bit less financial info in the direct display, but they do include a couple of news headlines. If you begin your research at Yahoo Finance and enter a ticker symbol you'll find even more info. In fact, this is one of the resources that Google ironically draw upon for its Google's "financial info tabs".

Ask Jeeves offers Smart Search results box with a current stock chart, most of the same current financial data Google offers, and direct links for news and detailed company info via Marketwatch.com

This Google Blog posting has more including info about how to access stock quotes via SMS. 4INFO.net and Synfonic are two other services that offer stock quotes via SMS.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:01 PM | Permalink

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