Google has been taking market share from Yahoo!, the second most popular search engine according to Nielsen NetRatings (PDF format), so Yahoo! has fired their first salvo at Google. This week, Yahoo! introduced a new search utility, called the Search Assistant, to help guide visitors through a search (see image below). In essence, the Search Assistant is a drop-down menu that appears below the search bar on the Yahoo! home page whenever a user types in search terms (aka search query). The purpose of this utility is to improve the search results by either:

• Adding words to the search query. This functionality narrows the search results into a more targeted set.

• Suggesting alternate search terms. This functionality shifts the search results to related terms that may be lesser known, yet more relevant to the search query.

This tool could potentially have a significant impact on the search engine world. Why?

1. The Search Assistant will increase searches to well targeted sites. Most search queries are composed of only two to three terms. By adding terms to the existing query, the results will shift to sites that match more terms and are more focused.

2. The Search Assistant will improve the quality of search results. Since search engines are often used as the starting point to conduct online research on a specific topic, users may not be aware of industry-related terms. By introducing the user to related terms, the utility improves the quality of the results.

3. The Search Assistant will “level” the search engine marketing field. Webmasters are often focused on improving results for terms that receive significant traffic. By displaying results for lesser known terms, the search engine traffic will “shift” to lesser known sites, and in turn it will force webmasters of sites that have more generic terms to also optimize for more targeted terms.

4. The Search Assistant will eventually attract more visitors. Google beat out Yahoo! because of their clean search results page AND more relevant search results. Since search results pages virtually follow the same design, the improved search results will renew interest in Yahoo!.

Conclusion

According to internal tests, Yahoo! has discovered that 61% of users were more successful in their search when they used the Search Assistant. While that’s impressive by any measure, Yahoo! still lags in developing a competitive search engine spider (or, program that the search engine sends to collect information about each website). Google has one of the best spiders around, so if Yahoo! wants to regain market share it will have to focus their developers on that effort next.