Yahoo Search Just Got Smarter
Erick Schonfeld
61 comments »
Yahoo is adding some major features to its search engine today. For instance, images from Flickr and playable videos are now embedded in the main results page. A search for a major rock band like U2 brings up information from the artist’s Website, along with a list of songs that can be played as 30-second audio streams (courtesy of Yahoo Music).
Do a search for a restaurant or hotel, and results from Yahoo Local come out on top, with links to maps, ratings, and reviews. Type in “bourne ultimatum,” and the top result is a widget from Yahoo Movies with a trailer you can click on, audience reviews, and show times nearest you. Search for “Vancouver,” and the top result is a widget from Yahoo Travel, with links to a guide, hotels, restaurants, flights, and maps. Type in “digital camera,” and you get shortcut results from Yahoo Shopping.
Customized results also come up for searches dealing with health, sports, and events—all without you having to specify what type of search you are trying to do. Instead, Yahoo attempts to figure out your intent based on the search terms and the topics associated with them (Google espouses a similar Universal Search approach, as does Microsoft).
But the most important feature is an Ajax assistant pane that drops down when it detects you hesitating while typing in a search term. It gives you suggestions to complete the keywords, as well as related concepts that you might want to try. So if you type in “energy savings,” it suggests click-able links to related terms such as “energy star,” energy efficiency,” and “thermostats.” And this one is close to home for me. Type in “office sublets” and it suggests “small office sublets in new york city,” since Yahoo knows my zip code.
Yahoo has really nailed guided search with this release—as long as what you are looking for can be found somewhere else within Yahoo. That’s my one pet peeve about Yahoo’s new search upgrade. All of these shortcuts are helpful, but they are not all objective. Most of them (the search widgets, not the keyword assistant) point back to Yahoo.
Note that the guided search does not point you to queries which trigger these shortcuts. I think your conclusion implies that, and that is a bit misleading.
WoW! That is cool. Now Google would probably will add some Ajax features to its search results as well.
Awesome. Chalk one up for Yahoo. Google’s resting on its laurels…
Search Assist links go out to the general web — not back to Yahoo.
As long as I still have the #1 & #2 results…I like it.
I’m fairly sure this was a product of a Yahoo! Hack Day. Nice job by everyone involved.
Great job Yahoo!
The travel related queries are especially helpful.
I think these are good enhancements and I may now have to use Yahoo once in a while.
It is really great to see Yahoo adding new features to their Search.
Well done Yahoo:)
Good stuff. Yahoo! and Google are my favorite Internet portals.
Earlier this year - they has tested Search Suggestions - this update just has a fancier AJAX design
I like Yahoo, their traffic converts much better than Google traffic. Yahoo users are more willing to part with their hard earned money more easily on retail products.
Good job Yahoo! Love it!
Forgot to mention the integration of Flickr thumbs into Web search results. Also, video thumbs and on-the-page video playback - in some instances in a cool video pop-up. What a solid launch!
Google toolbar already does search suggestions for me, when I type in partial search queries :p
Zergrinch,
There’s more to the Search Assist feature than that. Why don’t you give it a try and compare to the Google Toolbar?
Quite often the results of a Google search are a link back to a Yahoo property. And it’s ok, some may even say: brilliant!, that Google gives you the links to Yahoo that have what you are looking for when you search, but not if Y! does it, then it just seems vain and even kind of limiting. I don’t want to be stuck in Yahooland, that’s not what the internet is about. Thank god for Google, where I search free and end up at Yahoo without having to use Yahoo to find my way there.
Wow, and here I thought Yahoo had given up on innovation. This is a good step in changing the perception that Yahoo isn’t as relevant.
so cool! I love it…maybe I’ll start using yahoo more now…
Finally Yahoo comes up with something versus everything.
Are they trying to compete with Ask or Google? This release makes it look like they are competing for #4.
I am amazed by how many TC readers need to be told what they should be searching for. Does yahoo’s new search assistant come with a helmet?
I have been using Y! search, almost exclusively for the past year and a half. Its just mind-boggling how rather stupid things like “Universal search” from Google gets so much publicity which Yahoo and even, gasp, Live have had for QUITE some time!
For the record, I do _not_ actually like this suggestions pane — I prefer clean design without AJAX and love the way Yahoo search works.
Can’t live without Google my ass! Just too much hype, ludicrous fanboyism and stinking koolaid for Google.
For some reason that search bar makes me feel like having a smoke
Yes, this is very cool. BUT, there is a “flaw”…
My brother alerted me to this issue. After typing in his company name to do a natural search, Yahoo serves up his company name as a relative term (in the blue box) - as discussed here in this new release. But, if you click on the company name then it takes you to the results which include his PPC campaign. This is the problem. A customer who knows the name of the company and does a natural search will be presented PPC links costing the business owner money. AND yes, none of his campaigns include his business name as a keyword. Yahoo seems to be pulling the PPC ads using the url of the PPC campaign. Needless, to say my brother is pist off and will be calling Yahoo tomorrow.
http://www.yahoo.com has been down for me for the last hour or so. After loading for a long time it says ‘connection has timed out’. I’m in the Netherlands.
It’s more cool than before!
There are some companies which do a good job at what Yahoo is discovering now. One of them - http://searchradar.webaroo.com/ has a nice FF plugin which serves results when you do a google query
There is a company who lets you add their search asist for your blog
or website, pretty cool.
http://www.predictad.com
Notice the brief delay as the suggestion area “slides” down. Cheap trick to buy a few hundred milliseconds while the area becomes populated.
Interesting placement of the up and down arrows - someone at Yahoo understands a thing or two about usability.
The way the items are colorized to draw your eye to the most significant parts - really well done.
Overall I am impressed. The results page for a band looks great too with the video thumbnails.
With Yahoo and Ask.com pushing usability enhancements, Google won’t be able to stick with their supremely underdesigned UI forever.
I believe that this has been around for a while on Opera, but none of the other browsers. I remember seeing this quite some time ago.
I am using Firefox browser and for the past 24 hours I have trouble seeing Yahoo’s search box. Does anyone know anything about this?
It’s only when using “Adblock Plus” add-on for Firefox that the search box disappear!
Samrter? Really? I love Yahoo…but you have a ways to go in terms of accuracy of results for a common user like myself…I searched for “sprint store near glendale arizona” — looking for s Sprint store address…check out the results below from Google & Yahoo and determine for yourself which search engine I will be using next time.
http://www.google.com/search?h.....gle+Search
Yahoo–
http://search.yahoo.com/search.....mp;rd=pref
I LOVE the Yahoo Search Assist feature — what a great demonstration of human understanding paired with powerful technology!
Yahoo search is getting smarter. My search engine has advantage too. Over the years, i collected ca 150 well trusted websites such as comsumerreports.org, MDweb for health, cnet for technology, yahoo finance for stock, morning star for mutual funds, dpreview and phot.net for photography, flickr and smugmug for photo sharing etc and put all the trusted sites into my own search engine to form the familyresource4u search. Check http://www.google.com/custom?h.....vpu-zjxjlo
My web has all the websites too, check http://topwebsitesGuide.com
I think search is going the way of everything else on the web - dynamic detection using ajax and similar technologies, when yahoo detects hesitation it offers more search suggestions, that is incredibly cool; often the problem I suffer from is not knowing what other searches I could try to find what I want… the age old old question… how do they talk about what I am looking for out there; often the industry jargon required escapes me.
that’s awesome….google hasn’t provided anything unique since 2005
The other day this self-important toothpaste salesman journalist showhost eyebrow raiser interviewed me and some guy from Crisco Systems together, boy, was he annoying!
I’m pretty good at being evasive but this guy kept on point no matter what I said, ARGH! He just kept on asking:
“Soooo are you guys ganna’ buy Yahoo?”
“Are you guys in talks with Yahoo?”
“Well-ah what about Yahoo?”
After Ali-class ducking and weaving, rope-a-doping, thrill’n ‘n Manill’n …. I finally lost it and just yelled:
“If I were, I wouldn’t say anything, and if I weren’t, I wouldn’t say anything!”
To which he replied:
“Soooo, waddayah trying to say?”
At that point I just stopped speaking at all and just gave him the ‘ol Ballmer-blank-stare …..
“Mistar Ballmer, Mistar Ballmer, **snap**snap are you there? Hellooooo, Helloooo ….”
After a minute or two he gave up, ignored me and just started to ask the Crisco guy:
“Soooo sir are you guys ganna buy Yahoo?”
I have to give it to the Crisco guy, he was pretty slippery …. all in all not that bad an interview.
Almost after two years, I did a search today on Yahoo to test this feature, and I am really surprised by the whole experience. I have been using google suggestions since existence but yahoo folks nailed it the best. Even the search results seem to be better.
I decided I will try yahoo search for few days. These days, I am not that much happy with Google results anyways. I sincerely hope yahoo does not disappoint me.
Am I missing something? Yahoo search page loads without any CSS. And no ajax search suggestions.
Abhishek — yes you are missing something.
Disclosure — I work for Yahoo Search.
Abhishek, where are you located? I’m not sure whether the new features are launched for all geographies at the same time.
I’m located in North India. The yahoo mainpage loads fine, search doesn’t
One of the major problems now and will be getting worse later is the flooding of inaccurate information, ads, or spams and promotions. All these make the search answers become larger and larger, harder and harder or even impossible to find the correct information. The combination of my search with google search, will search 150 sites first then go to google searh. Based on my experience in years, these sites will solve majority of my problems, if not all.
http://topwebsitesGuide.com
searching for the phrase ‘u2 lyrics’ gives three results that point back to yahoo’s lyrics site. however, two of the three end up on a generic page with no actual lyrics. trying to view lyrics from within yahoo music itself gives me a similar result. it seems the yahoo music site is full of broken links.
also:
- the lyrics are an image file so you cannot copy and paste them
- “explicit” words (even words like “tit”) are edited from the lyrics
i get a much better experience from any other random lyrics server.
as for integrated movie trailers, reviews and showtimes, it’s good to see yahoo catch up to where google was a year ago. linking to HD trailers is a welcome change from youtube’s quality. but showtimes are only useful if you live in the united states, and that’s where google comes out on top. it understands where “toronto, canada” and “london, uk” are.
Great additions Yahoo! Now if you could clean up your homepage already (maybe something between where you’re at and the simplicity of Google), you might borrow some traffic from other SE’s. I find it a waste of brainspace to see a Hannah Montana (who?) and a Buick ad (what?) on the homepage on top of the other 95% irrelevant content…surely I am not alone
@jeff,
for simple look like that of Google, see here.
http://search.yahoo.com/web
Has everyone completely overlooked the fact that this is all due to Yahoo’s purchase of Zimbra for $350M? Look at Zimbra, an enterprise grade highly flexible and out-right awesome messaging system, and you’ll start to see Yahoo adopting many of it’s cool features.
Yahoo’s new search looks slightly different with a little Yahoo flava, but it’s all still Zimbra. One of my favorite components of Zimbra has been its search capabilities and obviously Yahoo thought so too- since it took them less than two weeks from their purchase of Zimbra to incorporate this into their own email….
Oh… and since Yahoo blew most of it’s reserve cash on Zimbra ($350M), they must have some pretty big plans??? Yahoo getting into enterprise email??? Me thinks so…..
I’m happy to see Yahoo! getting back into the game. I think the search world could use some creativity. I was pleased to see Ask’s changes a few months ago, but a little disappointed they haven’t caught the public eye a little more. I’m curious whether any changes to web search at this point can have any impact on behavior. It’s funny a few days ago I posted on our blog about Yahoo! getting more click through on search results than Google.
http://blog.compete.com/http:/.....-msn-live/
There’s a lot of complicating factors to my very simply cut of the data but it’s still interesting to see things shifting around a bit.
Also interesting to Jobs speaking to Yahoo! execs … I always thought of Apple and Google being joined at the hip.
Sorry folks … bogus link above … here’s the correct one
http://blog.compete.com/2007/0.....-msn-live/
if you are interested
i am liking this update a lot. however, the “office sublets” example is, unfortunately, just lucky for you. i am in san francisco (and have my zip code set to sf w/in yahoo), and still all 5 top suggestions are about new york, nyc, or manhattan.