New and Improved Mail Search
- Posted August 29th, 2005 at 8:30 pm by Yahoo! Search
- Categories: Search
I’m an email pack rat ‘ and I’m not alone. As our mailboxes have grown, so has our need to quickly find the information stored in them. That’s why Yahoo! Mail is launching all new search features that will make mail management more efficient, and hopefully, a little more fun. The new mail search will be available to some users on August 30th and will gradually roll out to all Yahoo! Mail users over the coming months. Here are some of the key features:
Attachment Search
Our users wanted easier ways to find the important information in their mailboxes, including information sent as attachments. In addition to quickly searching the entire message and providing snippets and highlighting of the search terms, we’ve taken it a lot further. To begin with, we perform prefix matching by default ‘ very useful when searching for people with complicated, long names. For example, searching on ‘chris’ will return matches for the last name Christopoulos (a name I can never spell right’) We also search the content of most file attachments, since an email message is often just metadata around an attached document, which might be the heart of the content.
Search Refinements
We’re making power searching easy with dynamic search refinement options that help you narrow down results. Results get broken down into five categories: Senders, Folders, Attachments, Message Status, and Date. You’ll see links for all of the unique values that exist for each category (e.g., all of the senders of messages in the current results set). With a few simple clicks, you can see the messages that a friend has sent you, that contain photo attachments, and that were sent in the last month.
Photo View and Attachment Views
Many people search mail specifically trying to find photos or attachments. To make this easier, we have created two new search ‘views’. After running a search, you can click on the Photo View to view thumbnails of all of the photos attached to your results set. From the Photo View, you can view the higher-res photo or save photos to your computer.
The Attachment View is similar, displaying thumbnails for many common file types. And we present the Attachment View in a column layout, making it easy to sort. From the Attachment View, you can select one or multiple files and save them to your computer (of course, after a quick virus scan).
Did I mention the search refinement options also work with the Photo View and Attachment Views?
So when are these features coming to a mailbox near you? We are rolling out these features gradually to give us time to thumbnail the millions of photos and attachments and index the billions of messages Yahoo! Mail users around the world have accumulated (we’re talking about petabytes of data). The new system is designed to be a global solution and requires deployment in all of our data centers worldwide. We’re working as fast as we can, but please be patient if you don’t see the features right away.
Happy searching!
Drew Garcia
Sr. Product Manager, Yahoo! Mail
- 39 Comments
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This is great. I’ve always got faith in the Yahoo Team.
Must come up with more innovations
KEEP IT UP
So you finally decided to wake up? Awesome!
great features. I hope that will change J. Zawodny’s mind and bring him back to y!mail ;)
I hope we’ll now be able to search the bulk folder.
WOW! Really cool. Always good to see Yahoo working hard!
I’ll be in heaven if Yahoo is fully compatible with Firefox
Well, “dynamic refinement” is not a Yahoo innovation! It’s been available for quite some time on the Exalead Desktop product (now in beta) and on Exalead’s Web site http://www.exalead.com/
Is this an indication of the type features and interface improvements we can expect in new version of Y! Mail which was announced a few months back?
Can you also make it faster, while you are at it? Except for Technorati, Yahoo mail search is the slowest search ever :-)
Adding a (outlook – like ) Preview was a very important feature – it will be time saving
It would also be an asset to have a READING PANE similar to outlook – and an “open in new window” feature (check box) for those who want to leave the main window open and not have to press BACK constantly
Also including an RSS reader to catch up on newsgroups near the “In the News: Top Stories”
section
ALSO
the different Levels of Spam filtering that HOTMAIL provides could be incorporated
The Bulk Mail does a Good job – but it could be tweaked
THANK YOU FOR YEARS OF EXCELLENT SERVICE :-)
When are you going to add threaded views of emails? The division of mail threads between “Sent” and “Inbox” is quite tedious….
Please add back Bulk Mail search capability…
Mr. Garcia -
While this is a step in the right direction, Yahoo took a step in the wrong direction when they removed the capability to search the Bulk Mail folder for a couple of reasons:
1) New releases should be backward compatible so as to not break things that used to work, and used by users in the past.
2) Since your Bulk Mail algorithm is far from perfect, I now have no easy way to search for possible good email messages in my Bulk Mail folder, and this is a major headache.
I hope Yahoo plans on fixing this mistake soon. Other than that, you are doing a decent job.
Regards,
Drew
Great news. I have been using Yahoo mail since 1995 and the system needed a major improvement. Thanks for the advancement.
Finally you are guys are learning from Google!!!!
As soon as you have full message formatting for Firefox like Gmail has, I’ll fully switch over. Having it only for IE just doesn’t cut it.
Full support for Firefox is a must for me. Glad to see some action, glad to see some movement. Keep going! Remember there’s google around. :-) Competition sure works wonders and brings out the best in people.
Wow – sounds fantastic and exactly what is needed. Once again Yahoo surpasses the competition. Well done, Yahoo!
I’d love to have this activated for my Yahoo Mail account. It isn’t at this moment.
yahoo is still the best. Since i started studying how to use the internet, i always use to yahoo for everything. So i cant wait to use a new yahoo.
Yahoo is great, when will the yahoo mail interface be changing.
Hey when are yall going to make the html composer for Yahoo mail for Firefox. I would love to compose mail in colors and different size fonts in Firefox. When can you make that happen. Soon I hope.
Attachment search functionality is not available in my account. Any idea why?
Please, please add back the search function for Bulk mail. It boggles my mind why that would be removed. Its very difficult to manually look through hundreds of “spam” emails for the non-spam.
Drew, can you please update your blog with a response to that? At least an acknowledgment?
Its like buying a TV, but being told that Sony decided to disable the channel up/down button, because its easier to type in the actual channel #.
Thanks, Mike
Have they actually released this to anyone yet? I have been a yahoo user since the early to mid ninties, and I haven’t heard a whiff of the new service yet. Anyone??? echo echo echo
Mike
I was previously using IE and have recently migrated to Firefox…
I have Link to my homepage in my signature which is not going as a link whenever i compose using a firefox…
Please do something about it soon….
i just got back from vacation & I can’t even get into my mail. going on two days now. whats up?
you need to improve this part of yahoo. very frustrating. thinking about moving along. sue
On December 9 my Yahoo! email search functionality stopped working properly. It now returns only emails from December 9 on. Yahoo! support has reproduced the issue and have been working on it for a week, but still no fix. Are other people having this problem? I can only imagine that is must be related to the “new” search functionality.
Has anyone found a way to search the bulk mail yet. It is so bad not to be able to do that. I have an email I need somewhere among the 2000 or so items in my bulk folder!
it’s amazing i want to know more about it,,,,,,,,,,,,
Thank you Yahoo for three years of excellent service. I’ve always preferred Yahoo over hotmail and this shows me why. Simple, clean, and easy to use, Yahoo always wins.
- Does anyone else think Gmail is horrificly ugly?
Great features but you can’t attract new members with that kind of ugliness.
Yahoo- keep the updates coming. Let’s out Microsoft out of business.. ( Ha ha, We all know that’ll never happen but we can all dream right?)
- iMacTiger
My yahoo mail search, photo search and attachment serach not working.
Kindly check.
If you want to search your bulk e-mail you can make a directory, move all the spam to that new directory, then search that directory. Still a pain in the ass but it works.
The new version of the Yahoomail search simply does not work–at least for me. Usually I search on part of a sender address. Recently, searches started returning only a single instance even if there were multiple e-mails from the same person in my Inbox. It isn’t always true–sometimes it will return all instances, but mostly it just returns one. As it stands, the search function is unusable. I assume they are having problems because when I click on Search Tips I get a Page Not Found error. I hope Yahoo fixes this problem very quickly because I depend on Search.
The new search feature is terrible. I can’t find anything anymore while the old search always produced the results I was looking for. Don’t know why but as a Mail Plus account holder I expect better value for my money. I’ve contacted Yahoo but nothing…
Yup, I’m having the same problem. I only get search results from the last day since they turned on the new search feature. It’s almost like the old mail hasn’t populated whatever the db the new search runs against yet. (WAG on my part here.) What kind of info would be useful to help fix this as soon as possible? I also REALLY depend on search feature!! :)
The indexes appear to be partially built. New emails for me are being returned but anything more than a few days old are not being returned by any searches. This has been the case for the past few days. I’ve sent numerous emails to yahoo support and have heard NOTHING. black hole.
It’s been a couple days and it still isn’t working. I’ve sent in a couple of trouble ticket forms. No response. Yea, I’d like to think they’re working on it too. Hmm…I wonder if you get bumped higher in the queue if you paid em the 20 bucks? :-)
“I notice that Yahoo is simply not talking about problems with their new e-mail search feature.”
Their search function is completely broken. It only works on the more recents posts — which is another way of saying it doesn’t work at all.
Yahoo Support has nothing on this.
Word about this failure needs to get out to as wild an audience as possible so that people can make informed decisions on whose email product to use.
the new email search is really good.please proveide me it.