Yahoo! Search Bulks Up

October 3, 2007
by Latitude

Yahoo! launched on Monday the latest features of its Yahoo! Search service (only on www.yahoo.com for now), receiving mostly enthusiastic comments from the search community. As described by the Search Engine Journal, these improvements “change the way search results are served to the user, but also the way the user searches”.

The most noticeable added feature, Search Assist, makes real-time keywords suggestions as the user is typing (something Google, Microsoft Live Search and Ask had already been doing), and at the same time brings up related topics to help the user refine their query and give them ideas of concepts to better “zero in” on what the user is looking for. Identifying when users need search help, “by measuring user typing speed and hesitations” (the Search Engine Journal), this intuitive feature is definitely an upgrade big enough to give Yahoo! a strong competitive advantage – provided the quality of the suggestions are up to expectations.

Two other changes are the integration of Flickr and Yahoo! images as thumbnails in the search engine results pages, and the insertion of videos playable directly on the results page. Although here Yahoo! has mainly played catch up with the other big search engines, we can only applaud its continued efforts to further integrate all relevant Yahoo! assets (Music, Travel, Flickr, Answers, Upcoming…) into Yahoo! Search, finally creating synergies between the various acquisitions made over the last few years. The next valuable move would be for them to be able to index a much larger range of multi-media sources, in order to remain what a search engine is initially meant to be – a tool scouting the web, not a self-serving service.