Yahoo! has introduced automatic search query suggestions on its home page.

Quite a few search tools have tried to guess what you are searching for while you are writing. Write “search” and the search tool will give you “people search”, “search engine marketing” or whatever the tool thinks is the most relevant or popular search phrase right now. Hit enter and you are done.

We have found such “help” to be very confusing at best, as we get distracted by the many irrelevant suggestions given by the tools.

We do see the point, though. If the search tool manages to encourage you to use more a more targeted search query, the results will be more relevant. More relevant results mean a happy searchers, and happy searchers are more likely to come back for more.

Yahoo! has now introduced search a feature on the yahoo.com home page. And this is a version of the technology we actually like.

As Kevin Lee of Yahoo! Search says over at the Yahoo! Search Blog:

The nice thing about the suggestions is that they’re not obtrusive, so if you already know what you’re searching for, you can overlook the suggestions without them getting in your way.

The suggestions appear in a drop down menu under the search field, and you can safely ignore it if you don’t like it. You can also disable the service by clicking on the relevant link in the menu.

Here is a tip for search engine marketers: You can use this as a quick and dirty tool to get access to alternative search phrases for the topic of your page. The data has to be based on Yahoo’s database over the most popular search phrases related to the word(s) you start out with.

A search for “search”, for instance, brings up:

people search
google search
yahoo people search
yahoo people directory search
search engines

And yes, that’s “google” ahead of “yahoo”. Yahoo is definitely an honest search engine!