“Why feel lucky when you can be right?” Yahoo! really knows how to insult a competitor.

The line introduces the new Yahoo! Instant Search feature. With Instant Search, results instantly appear for common searches. Well, at least that is what Yahoo! says.

We have tried in both Explorer and Firefox for Windows and find it a bit hard to get it to work properly. Search results definitely appear as you write (in special text “bubbles”), but they seem to come and go on a random basis.

Moreover, Yahoo! only gives you one result at a time, which definitely requires more than a little luck from Yahoo’s side.

The provided examples – like “boston weather” and “wikipedia”– work, because they are relatively unambiguous.

A search for – let’s say — “search engine marketing” is different. The word “search” does not bring up any results at all. Fair enough. Any response to a general term like that may be meaningless.

As soon as we have finished writing the word “search engine”, the search result CNET Search.com appears. Which is interesting, as it must mean that anyone looking for a search engine, would prefer CNET’s metasearch engine to Yahoo’s own facility.

Anyone looking for information about search engines is given no alternatives. Moreover, the complete phrase “search engine marketing” gives no response.

The reason for this is probably that Yahoo! Instant Search does not really try to generate immediate search results on the basis of any text entered. Instead Yahoo looks for phrases found in the excellent Yahoo! Shortcuts feature and a list of the most popular Web searches. If it cannot find the phrase there, it waits for you to click on the “Search” button.

As regards our feeling of randomness it is probably caused by the algorithm that Yahoo! uses to decide when to present a result. As they say in the FAQ:

“We look at things like your typing speed and spaces between search words to help us figure out when to ask Yahoo! Search for a result. After a lot of behind-the-scenes processing, we then provide you with the most relevant result based on what you have typed.”

Unfortunately, it does not really work as well as planned.

Now, you may of course hit the “Search the Web” button to get a regular search engine result page, but you do not need Instant Search to do that.

We find Yahoo! to be one of the most innovative search engine companies on the planet, and they have given significant contributions to the improvement of searchers’ quality of life, but we are not convinced of the usefulness of this invention.

Hence we are not going to make use of the link that automatically adds Instant Search to our Yahoo! search page. Sorry, Yahoo!

Instant Search FAQ
See also: John Battelle