Looks Good Works Well looks at the implementation of live search in Google Suggest, Yahoo! Instant Search, Kayak, Yahoo! Mail and Amazon Zuggest from a usability and usefulness point of view.

My thoughts:

Google Suggest:

• Pointless. Distracting.
• Interferes with browser’s autocomplete mechanism
• It’s annoying and frustrating to use
• As ‘Looks Good Works Well’ says, if I can type it the chances are I already know how to spell it. If I can’t spell it, the chances are it’s a really obscure word.

Yahoo! Instant Search:

• Previously blogged.
• Slow response.
• Slows the user down by waiting to see if anything comes up. No indication if request is still being processed or no results returned.
• You have to type in a very specific request. It is hard to tell whether the request is specific enough.

Kayak:

• More useful than the others.
• Results aren’t always good – for example if I type in "london h", Heathrow doesn’t appear. Neither does "hea".

Yahoo! Mail Beta:

• Wouldn’t mind an invite Unfortunately not living in the US of A.