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]
