Late last night Yahoo announced that their “New Yahoo! Search” has launched. This new search was the result of time spent researching, designing, and engineering, to provide a better search for Yahoo users. Over the last several years, Yahoo has lost some of their users to Google’s search, so a change in their search was necessary. The biggest change to the search is the addition of search suggestions and related concepts in a drop down box that uses Ajax.
Search suggestions aren’t entirely new to Yahoo. You may recall back in July when Yahoo initially introduced the search suggest feature. The change between July and now is that it’s more advanced and has an updated look. It’s also easier to disable the search suggestions which are enabled by default. If you don’t want the search suggestions, all you have to do is click “off” in the upper right corner of the box.
Yahoo pointed out that users aren’t always looking for a link to text which is true. We search for all kinds of things these days including multimedia like videos and photos. Yahoo has now integrated multimedia content when it’s available. Images are incorporated form Flickr, and playable videos are embedded into the search results page. For example, searching for “evolution of dance” displays results including the embedded YouTube video which can be played right from the search results.
For those of you who use Yahoo as your primary search engine, you’ve probably noticed Yahoo Shortcuts at the top of some of your searches. These shortcuts automatically appear when it is relevant to your search and contains all kinds of helpful information. Those shortcuts are still included with the results in the new Yahoo search, but now there are more shortcuts that Yahoo is offering like area codes and phone numbers, and Artist and Song lyrics. These are in addition to some of the current offerings like stock quotes, flight comparisons, dictionary definitions, U.S. Patents, and more.
Overall I’d say that all of these changes will be beneficial to many of their users. And if by chance there are users that don’t particularly care for search suggestions or other concepts to explore, no problem – it can be disabled. It’s nice to see Yahoo making some changes to their search so that they can offer a better product.
That is pretty cool, nice and slick. Nice way to use AJAX.
It actually is very slick. I’ve used it several times since it was introduced, especially for homework. There have been several times where i’m unsure of how to word a search for technical items such as ‘SQL nested update query examples’ or whatever and it helps out a lot.
Google labs is testing out a similar feature, [google.com] , but it isn’t nearly as nice as yahoo’s. One nice thing about ‘google suggest’ is that it tells you how many results are in a query before even running it.
On another side note, it’s a lot slower then it was about a week ago before it was fully implemented. Now that that it’s fully implemented in AJAX I can complete typing my search query before the suggestion even loads which is actually a huge drawback. That’s definitely an advantage that google suggest will have over yahoo.
I personally like the idea and didnt exactly notice any speed problems.
The suggestions were quick to pop up and were really useful. But somehow that black background irked me a little.
I never really noticed any speed problems today while I was using it, but you’re right… that could give Google an advantage over Yahoo. Overall though, I’d say it’s a really nice improvement.
Yeah, go Yahoo!
I give this two thumbs up. I made a point to use Yahoo! for some of my searches today to see how well it performs, and it was actually quite amazing. I like it better than what Google offers, and think the team that came up with the implementation deserves a good pat on the back.
Hey, there’s now a great no-nonsense URL to go straight to a slim Yahoo! Search page.
ysearch.com
That’s awesome, I’m glad they decided to do something simple like that. Typing in search.yahoo.com always seemed tedious to me. You know, I actually wish they would just let me set the Yahoo! homepage to be that.
Check it out. I found a couple more cool things Yahoo! search can do.
[labnol.org]
I like the feature where you can specify the order of the search keywords.