Yahoo! are testing Instant Search which presents as you type the most relevant search result in a popup window using Ajax.
I think this is a good idea (although I couldn’t test at the time of posting as the service didn’t seem to be working), as I still find it weird that search engines persist in presenting thousands of results when users tend to click on one of the top links anyway.
My ideal search engine would use Instant Search and if this didn’t provide a match, displayed the next 5-10 top results and if this didn’t work, presented me with options to refine my search to find exactly what I wanted. www.directhit.com used to kind of do this by automatically saying how many results it had for similar searches.
