Sunnyvale, California — While search engine behemoth Google may be concentrating on offering us all real-time search capabilities with the introduction of Google Instant, but Yahoo Search has unfolded a rather useful feature for its Chinese speaking Yahooers in Hong Kong and Taiwan: Yahoo! is adding handwriting technology to its search engine empowering users to hand write complex characters and then have Yahoo recognize the best match for them.
This latest release should significantly make searching using Chinese characters simpler since users do not have to memorize all the key combinations for the many characters.
“Yahoo! Search continues to unfurl innovative features to make entering queries easier, and we have just included a new feature for the Yahoo! Taiwan (Yahoo! Kimo) and Yahoo! Hong Kong search box,” James Ying, Product Manager for Yahoo Search, wrote.
The newest is handwritten query support for English and Chinese-speaking users, enabling you to write rather than type what you want to search for. This may sound like a step backwards when most of us have a keyboard to type on, but there are some use cases where it may be preferable. Maybe your Internet-surfing device does not have a keyboard, for example. Or you do not like using an on-screen keyboard.
This new feature is going to be of most use to Chinese-speaking nations, though. According to Yahoo!: “Typing search queries in Chinese can be a demanding task especially for new computer users because it requires memorizing Chinese character mapping rules,” writes Ying. “Even experienced computer users do not remember the mapping for all Chinese characters. The handwriting feature lowers the hurdle for people searching on Yahoo! Taiwan and Yahoo! Hong Kong.”
To use the feature, on both Yahoo homepages there is now a small pencil button, to the left of the search bar. Clicking on it will bring up a small box in which you can write the character. Since you are doing this with a mouse, or, even worse, with a trackpad, it is not going to be very accurate, but Yahoo presents six possibilities to choose the character you wanted.
The moment you start entering characters the search box tries to prophecies the query being typed, meaning in a lot of cases you would not even need to write the whole word to find the right search term. Even so, it can be time consuming to write a long query. Thankfully, as you start writing, you will get 10 suggestions, which are refined as you continue, to help you find what you are looking for before you have finished writing.
Currently the hand-written query tool supports Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, English, and number entry. Both Yahoo! Taiwan and Yahoo! Hong Kong search pages already have it as an option. While, Yahoo is not announcing anything, it could extend the feature to other languages featuring complex characters or ones not normally present on an English keyboard.