I have written recently about Yahoo!’s extremely shady business practices (working with the Chinese government to help jail journalists, building spyware into their IM client, and funding spyware developers) but today they launched an innovative search recently called Yahoo! Instant Search which appears to be quite good!

Built with AJAX – the search box attempts to give you a single answer to your query in a “speech bubble” before you even press enter!

Stephen Hood, Product Manager for Instant Search, gives some other examples to try:

• south beach diet (this one gives you three interesting results as you type)
• 701 1st ave sunnyvale (Yahoo!’s address; try your own address too!)
• san francisco giants scores (should be interesting to watch now that Barry’s back)
• time in copenhagen (in case you’re planning a trip)
• katrina (Yahoo! News results are appearing because the hurricane is a top story right now)
• ninjas (do you want real ultimate power? I’m not sure I do…)
• convert 100 dollars to euros

Personally I am rarely looking for a single answer to a search query – generally I am researching a topic and I want many opinions/options as opposed to one but I can see situations where this would speed up some serch queries and, in any case, if you want more answers, just click the “search the web” button!

Loath though I am to admit it because of Yahoo!’s lack of corporate ethics, I like this innovation.