You know how Google will start scouring for your search as you type it? It’s cool! Well, now Yahoo is doing it – calling it “Direct Search” – and it’s… not quite as good.
Direct Search apes Google speedily and sturdily enough, but forcing results into a little box is annoying and unnecessary. Packing so many links into a small box makes it easy to stumble while quickly browsing. And why do I care about what queries are trending? I go to a search engine to find what I want to find, not what everyone else is looking for. Autocomplete searching is a great concept, but really Yahoo, if you’re going to rip a good idea off, don’t have any shame about it – just make it a faithful copy. [Yahoo]