Yahoo offers a suggestion

Microsoft grabbed the search spotlight last week, adding new features to Live Search.

But this week the attention shifts to search.yahoo.com. The Yahoo crowd has added one slick feature that the other big search engines haven’t: a search-term suggestion box.

Try vanity-searching one’s own name with Yahoo search. As you enter a search term, a drop-down offers suggested optional phrases. (It will do this on conventional searches; very obscure or marginally useful phrases will not generate options.)

So I did that, using the name “Bert Caldwell.” When completing the two words, Yahoo offered five optional search phrases: plain “Bert Caldwell”; the same name with “Chattanooga tn”; “flowers bert caldwell”; “flowers by bert caldwell” and “spokesman review bert caldwell.”

That showed that in addition to business columnist Bert Caldwell, one had the option of finding the Tennessee Bert C, or possibly finding a florist’s business run by someone with that name.