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[nycphp-talk] AJAX functionality at instant.search.yahoo.com

Mikko Rantalainen mikko.rantalainen at peda.net
Fri Sep 16 04:07:36 EDT 2005


inforequest wrote:
> Matthew Terenzio matt-at-jobsforge.com |nyphp dev/internal group use| 
> wrote:
> 
> [...]
> service did launch as beta but it's here http://instant.search.yahoo.com/

Am I equally unimpressed as everybody else? I tried to type 10-20 
different things I would try to search for and there was no "instant 
results" for any of them. Even the most common ones like "linux" 
gave me nothing.

Now, compare this to Google suggest beta at 
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1 - granted, this doesn't 
provide the *result* but it does give me much more information 
otherwise. For example, if I input "linux" here, google suggest 
(almost instantly) provides a list that looks like this:

linux		222 000 000 results
linux commands	  5 240 000 results
linux download	 21 500 000 results
linux games	 14 900 000 results
...

So instead of not providing me anything, Google suggest tells me 
that "linux" isn't that good a search word because it matches 222 
million documents. However, it also suggests me a collection of 
additional keywords that I might be interested in.

The bottom line is, using AJAX isn't interesting itself, it's what 
kind of information you can provide with it. If yahoo's "first hit 
instantly" method gets popular, it takes about 5 minutes for google 
to implement the same thing. They already have google suggests so 
they just need to add a feature to display the first result in 
addition to list they provide and they have a better service.

-- 
Mikko



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