Help is just a search and a click away

I've written before (see Does online help need an overall structure? and What online help needs is really good search results) that I think the best way to present online help is with a simple page with a big search box at the top, above a selection of links likely to be useful to users needing help. Do away with the book metaphor used in many help systems: the table of contents and the index. Just make sure the search gives really spot-on results.

So I happened to be resurrecting an old Yahoo email account this evening and I couldn't resist clicking the Help link to see how Yahoo do their online help. And, lo and behold: a big search box at the top with a well-chosen selection of links below.

It's an email system, so I tried searching for "spam" and I got a very decent set of results:

And clicking on a link took me to a nicely pitched little tutorial topic on avoiding spam:

So the result is that from the help page I just have to do a search and click a link to get straight to some useful help. That's how it should be to get help with something on a computer. Anything more complicated than that has a problem.