Yahoo Suggest vs Google Suggest

As I mentioned over on Searchlight, Yahoo Suggest is a quick-n-dirty, free keyword research tool that can serve as a nice alternative to Google Suggest. Google Suggest has Yahoo Suggest beat for convenience if you have the Google Toolbar installed, since you just start typing keystrokes into the toolbar's search field and it displays a dropdown list of suggestions (think: auto-complete). The suggestions are listed in order of popularity. This was how my daughter Chloe identified her top search term, "neopets cheats" for naming her site ("The Ultimate Neopets Cheats Site") - Google Suggest showed that "neopets cheats" was the second most popular search term after "neopets". But with Google Suggest, you can only compare search terms that start with the same keystrokes. You can't compare, say, "new cars" with "used cars". In that regard, Yahoo Suggest has a leg up on Google Suggest, since it returns search terms where your keystrokes may be in the middle or end. Try it out: go to Yahoo's home page or the Yahoo Search page and start typing in the search box.

I demoed this tool at my presentation at the Web 2.0 Expo yesterday, but the demo didn't quite work as expected. I typed in "cars", and as you can see below in the screenshot, the results were pretty bad. In particular, it was with suggestion #3 - "toyota car malaysia new car cars" - that I lost faith in this tool's data for keyword research.