Good Morning Silicon Valley

“One thing we’ve learned since launching our own algorithmic search engine back in 2004,” writes Tim Mayer of Yahoo Search, “is that at the end of the day, people really don’t want to search; they want to get things done.” This is a truism (and just as true in the early part of the day). The tricky part for a search engine is deciphering just what it is these people really want to do. To that end, Google, Microsoft and Ask.com have all taken steps recently to boost relevance, offer selections from across multiple categories, and supplement results with multimedia and user-created content (see “We find better results for ‘needle’ when we start with one big haystack“).

Today, Yahoo Search rolled out its effort at smoothing the path between query and answer, and it touched all the bases. Boost relevance? Upgrades to the index and the algorithms. Selections from multiple categories? More shortcuts to structured content. Multimedia and user-created content? Now included in the results. But the big selling point is Search Assist, a slick, drop-down panel of suggestions for refined searches and related subject matter that appears on request or if you hesitate long enough to indicate uncertainty. The feature works along the lines of other services’ search suggestions, but appears to be smarter about the connections it makes and the variations it offers.

All of it looks to be good stuff, and regular Yahoo users should be pleased. The question is whether any of it is enough to make a dent in Google’s market share or mind share, and the answer is probably not. Rob Hof sums it up well at BusinessWeek: “I don’t think these useful but incremental improvements from any of Google’s rivals are really going to change the game, especially since Google itself isn’t standing still. On the other hand, if you don’t care about the industry horse race and don’t mind trying something besides Google once in a while, you may be pleasantly surprised at what you find.”