Here’s a cool new feature that Yahoo has come up with. Yahoo has created a new Instant Search feature. By typing in part of a popular word or all of a word, Instant Search shows you a possible answers based on popular queries in a “speech bubble” directly below the search box.
I tried entering “dictionary” and before completing the word fully, it displayed the site www.wdgco.com/dic which is the result for a Persian Online Dictionary. Next, I tried entering “laptop” and while I needed to type the whole word, the result was CNET’s review site on Notebooks, reviews.cnet.com/2001-3121_7-0.html?legacy=cnet.
It’s similar to the feature “I’m Feeling Kind Of Lucky” on Google’s homepage that takes you to the first search result that will come up on Google, if had you gone to the search results page. Yahoo’s Instant Search, on the other hand, gives you a preview of where you’ll go. So you can decide if you’re really “feeling lucky” before trusting it.
Some cool features include the ability to return shortcuts to the answers you seek. You can enter popular the ticker symbol for a stock and get the price of that stock with links to quotes, charts, news, and more. Entering a phone area code will return you the exact location of call origination. Local search shortcuts include gas prices, maps, traffic reports, local listings of businesses, weather and zip codes. The news and information shortcut includes movie showtimes, news, sports scores, stock quotes, images, and videos. The travel shortcuts give you direct access to airport information, exchange rates, flight tracker, and hotel finder. The reference shortcuts display information on aircraft registration, book price finder, dictionary definitions, encyclopedia lookup, package tracker, synonym finder, UPC codes, US patents, and vehicle history. The calendar shortcuts offers a calculator, time zones, and weights and measurements converter. The list is available here.
Yahoo says the functionality only works for the most popular queries only. It is also not currently available in its popular toolbar.