On the heels of a study which proclaims Yahoo’s Search to be the most efficient and “relevant” of the big three, Yahoo announces a plethora of improvements to its search engine. Yahoo is neither down nor out in Silicon Valley.

The real question is whether Yahoo’s features and algorithm can really be good enough to compete and dethrone Google. It is a nice “looking” new engine with some new user friendly features. Unfortunately Google’s empire has been built on a no-frills, just relevant results platform.

The nice looking new AJAX interface is a nice use of technology, but is it enough to help Yahoo take some of Google’s market share? A top web analysis firm, Compete, has done some research and published some data which seems to indicate that Yahoo could in fact be positioning itself to give Google a run for it’s money in the search engine market. According to the study,

Yahoo appears to trounce Google when it comes to search fulfillment. That is, more Yahoo queries result in a successful clickthrough to on of the results - 75 percent of searches, in the month of August, compared to Google’s 65 percent and Live Search’s 59 percent.

Perhaps the biggest change in the Yahoo engine is the addition of Search Assist, which tries to predict what the user is looking for. For the programmer’s out there it is sort of an “intelli-sense” for search engine users.

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