The Most Interesting Company in Search

Everybody (including me!) likes to lavish attention on Google, but the most inventive company in Web searching at the moment may be the the granddaddy of all Web-indexing enterprises--a little site called Yahoo. And if you haven't checked out its Yahoo Next page of experimental services and technologies lately, it's well worth a visit.

Its newest addition, which debuted last week, is Yahoo Instant Search. At first blush, Instant Search looks like a garden-variety search engine. But unlike any other search engine I've seen, it watches as you type; if you're searching for a reasonably common phrase--say, "new york hotels"--it will pop up a results box before you've even pressed the Return key. In some cases, it'll even display the information you were looking for right there--here's what you get if you type "red sox."



Instant Search may save you a second or two, it's a very cool effect, and it's one of a growing number of Web tools that uses AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) technologies to eradicate even a hint of Webby sluggishness from its interface.

Also at Yahoo Next are My Web 2.0, a service for saving, tagging, and sharing Web pages; Search Subscriptions, which lets subscribers to gated sites like Consumer Reports search them from Yahoo; Yahoo Mindset, which lets you tweak results based on whether you're in a buying or researching frame of mind; and other works in progress.

All of these add up to a strikingly different approach to search than that practiced by Google--which, as it adds new services, usually tries to give them that same spare, Googly user interface that's barely changed over the years. (Consider, for instance, its just-launched Google Blog Search.) Not that there's anything wrong with that, since the Google interface is the best, most-copied one in the history of search.

But some of the tools at Yahoo Next show that search can sport a variety of user interfaces, each of them distinctly different from Yahoo in its current form. None of them are revolutionary in and of themselves, and some (such as Mindset) feel more like intriguing ideas than anything else. But it's good to see that Yahoo--which until fairly recently simply outsourced its search to Google--isn't taking anything for granted about how search should look and work.

The thing about these disparate new Yahoo tools is that they're...disparate. If any of them have traction, you'd probably want them to get rolled into Yahoo's standard search engine, rather than remain separate, alternate paths to the Web. It may be a challenge to do that without winding up with an unwieldy interface. (If there's one eternal verity about search, it's this: It needs to be simple.)

Maybe Yahoo already has some answers here that they haven't shared yet. In any event, these tools (and others at Yahoo Next) add up to a fascinating peek at several possible futures of search...