From “To Do” to “Done” in One Search
That sums up Yahoo! Search in a nutshell; the whole point is we want to get you from “to do” to “done.” Whatever it is you want to do: research a topic, find a website, plan a vacation, research a medical condition, view a funny video, or any of the other billions of queries we get from users — their intents expressed via a few keywords in a search box.
One thing we’ve learned since launching our own algorithmic search engine back in 2004 is that at the end of the day, people really don’t want to search; they want to get things done. Today, we’re launching an all new Yahoo! Search experience that gets users the answers they’re looking for quickly and easily, and often in one search.
So what’s new? Well the feature we believe that improves the search experience most is Yahoo! Search Assist. Most of you have already seen the real-time query suggestions we launched on Yahoo.com in July. Yahoo! Search Assist kicks it up a notch, bringing those suggestions to the search results page, along with related concepts that give users a point-and-click query refinement capability that enables them to explore a subject area they may be unfamiliar with.
Search ‘united nations,’ for example, and the new Search Assist knows that the following concepts are related to your query: general assembly, 1945, league of nations, secretary general, etc. Want to refine your query to explore ‘united nations’ + ‘general assembly’? Just click on the ‘general assembly’ suggestion. You now get a new set of results and new concepts related to ‘united nations general assembly.’ Exploring further is now simply a matter of clicking on new concepts.
One thing you’ll find when you use our new search experience is that Search Assist “automagically” drops down from the search box on the results page when it senses that you’re having difficulty formulating a query. But it only shows up when you need it or ask for it. It then offers real-time suggestions and concepts to explore, just like on Yahoo.com. We did this to avoid a common complaint about assistance technologies offered by other search engines — the “persistent assistance” that puts suggestions on the page regardless of whether a user wants or needs them.
We’ve been testing Search Assist over the past few months and have seen significant improvements in user satisfaction from those tests. One metric we found was a 61% increase in successful task completion when users had Search Assist as part of their search experience.
In addition to Search Assist, you may have also noticed our new header and footer. While our users think it looks better (we do too), it’s also focused on helping users get things done. We moved the search box to the left to align with the results so that we make it easier for you to scan the results and find what you’re looking for.
We’ve also spent some time focused on how we could improve our algorithmic results to deliver a better multi-media search experience. When your search results include links to videos from YouTube, Metacafe or Yahoo! Video, in addition to the link you get an inline video player so you can watch those videos immediately. A couple of my favorites include: Ready-Set-Bumbo and Otters holding hands. And a small power-user tip: using site restriction, you can get a video results page on your favorite topic. Here’s an example: ‘otters site:youtube.com.’
Our multi-media improvements include inline Flickr photos too. When a Flickr photo or tag shows up in your results, you get to see those great photos in addition to getting a link. You can see it in action here: ‘sunflowers photos.’
And we know most of you have enjoyed the recent enhanced shortcuts that give you answers on the results page in categories like music artists, movies, travel destinations, etc.
Give the new Yahoo! Search a spin and let us know what you think.
Tim Mayer
Yahoo! Search
Great, now it looks like Google with their Universal Search feature.
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?hl=en&q=sprint+store+near+glendale+arizona&btnG=Google+Search
Yahoo–
http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0geu6pCRQJHFv0A31hXNyoA?p=sprint+store+near+glendale+arizona&y=Search&fr=aaplw&rd=pref
I admit to jumping the gun on the article and going to Search.Yahoo.Com to see the new assistant. Its not there. Why? I prefer the far less noisy search.yahoo.com to the standard yahoo.com page.
Ack! I had No-Script running, its there on search.yahoo.com, sorry for the false alarm. I think its a great feature! Way to go guys!
Great work. This is the best thing Yahoo have done for quite a while. I have heard too many negative news about Yahoo. But this new improvement on Yahoo Search is very good.
Congratulation!
– Yihong
Nice work, guys. I’m loving the new design, especially like the way you’ve tossed the related concepts in with the autocomplete terms.
Great to see this coming out of Yahoo, based on the user experience alone, this is probably the best update I’ve seen to search in a long awhile.
-kyle
p.s. nice update to the design of this blog, too.
So nice and useful feature.
Wondering when is the tool rolloed out worldwidely?
I want to use it on Yahoo! Japan.
Thank you
–
rick said:
The best thing you could do for Yahoo search though is to make Yahoo.com look exactly like search.yahoo.com.
–
Hmm, I see where you’re coming from because a lot of users long for the clean-cut interface that search.yahoo.com offers, but don’t know it exists when they get bombarded by the portal page – they then opt for Google.
I showed my designer friend the new search.yahoo.com the other day, telling her how it’d just been updated and she said “I never knew Yahoo! had a page like this, I thought it was just a portal.”
However, on the other hand, Yahoo! still has lots of users that visit the portal page and I’m sure it generates a lot of cash in terms of advertising revenue – so it’s not something that would be beneficial to scrap (plus people actually like it as their homepage).
Back to the new updates; I really like the new updates but am frustrated at Yahoo!’s inability to “do things right”
Surely if you’re going to roll out a change like this to search.yahoo.com and the search results page, you’ve got to make the image search, etc in the same style. Instead the image search reverts you back to the ‘old’ look. What Yahoo! have essentially done is redesigned just one page in a whole website. Poor practise.
[/concern, because i want yahoo! to do well]
Thanks Matt for your comments. Agreed we need to refresh Image Search and our other verticals. We wanted to get this update out for Web Search as soon as possible given how many people use Yahoo! Search every day. We’re working on some other stuff for our verticals as well as more Web Search enhancements. Keep your eye on this blog for more to come.
Raj
this is a great stuff! My experiences on Yahoo has been pretty good so far and I was wondering why i have to do this on other site and not on Yahoo. Way to go Yahoo!
Sayali
Head
http://www.jober.in
This is awesome! It looks like I will start using Yahoo more and more with all the new search features.
This is awesome! It looks like I will start using Yahoo more and more with all the new search features.
So nice and useful feature.
Wondering when is the tool rolloed out worldwidely?
I want to use it on Yahoo! Japan.
Thank you
Believe, it was a long uneasy way to all this improvements…Thanks for good job and good luck!
Very nice and useful improvement. Thanks Yahoo!
Great job guys. Search Assist, Flickr and YouTube rocks.
It’s a nice addition, but the ’search in’ feature doesn’t work very well anymore. I find lots of results, except results from the country I’m looking for…
Thanks to Graham Mudd, Tom Chi, Christina Lee and everyone with Yahoo Search for making the Search Assistant an Opt In. It was extremely annoying and Yahoo was very close to losing me. Now under the page options tab on the right, there’s a toggle between Search Assistant being ON or OFF, and it doesn’t reset itself everytime I get onto Yahoo. This is much better, I am not stuck with the Search Assistant but can use it if I choose to do so.
Thanks Again.
hi this is a great stuff! My experiences on Yahoo has been pretty good so far and I was wondering why i have to do this on other site and not on Yahoo. Way to go Yahoo!
I’m not a big fan of the drop down search assist, because it rarely produces what I am looking to search for. Having said that, the result Yahoo gives me are good (better than another search engine that I won’t mention that begins with G).
This is awesome! It looks like I will start using Yahoo more and more with all the new search features.
It’s great when you can also see a thumbs images from a search.
I really like to see these types of improvements from Yahoo, but when you do the search for the Ready-Set-Bumbo video currently, the only video that will not play within the results is from Yahoo video. Very weird as I would think that would almost be the most important.
It’s a nice addition, but the ’search in’ feature doesn’t work very well anymore. I find lots of results, except results from the country I’m looking for
The improvements I would like to see are for yahoo to place more emphasis on content when doing searches.
How do I get rid of it all together?
I want search assistant history gone as well!
BobbyB
really like to see these types of improvements from Yahoo, but when you do the search for the Ready-Set-Bumbo video currently, the only video that will not play within the results is from Yahoo video. Very weird as I would think that would almost be the most important. thank you mf