Earlier this week, Yahoo! launched it’s new web search page, after conducting testing that started in August, with a selected number of users and it is now making the changes available to all users across the UK, US, France, Spain, Mexico and India.
The new search page has been designed to help users to find what they are searching for more easily and make exploring the web a quicker and more straight-forward process.
It has been designed to incorporate all of Yahoo!’s other new and improved features, such as the new homepage, Yahoo! mail, and search results pages, in order to give users a much more friendly, integrated product, which allows them to find what they are looking for as quickly and easily as possible.
Not only has Yahoo made it’s new web search more innovative and user friendly on the outside, it has also changed the framework of the product, which now allows Yahoo! to experiment and add new applications and features a lot faster than it could before.
The key changes and improvements that have been made to the surface of new web search product are as follows:
- Intelligent Search Results: The new search page allows users to access niche results more easily and also to explore key sites and narrow results using different types of SearchMonkey structured data.
- Feature-Rich Experience:Yahoo! has now introduced Search Pad, which allows users to make notes about searches they have performed, making it easier to revisit research pages they have already found. It has also made access to features such as Search Scan / SafeSearch easier, which are products that protect users machines against viruses, spyware and spam.
- Search Assist Expansion:The new design incorporates the Search Assist feature into the left hand column of the page, as well as being available directly under the search query box. This has been designed to provide easy access for users if they have scrolled down to nearer the bottom of the page.
Yahoo! have also spruced up it’s image and video search results by adding an extended version of it’s ‘travel refiner’ to the left hand column on the page. This feature provides filters for different attractions within a particular destination, for example, for a search for ‘Rome’, the categories would be Colosseum, Trevi Fountain and Pantheon etc.
It has now also added celebrity and entertainment categories as well, meaning that when a search is performed on a particular celebrity Yahoo! will provide a list of related celebrities, films and TV shows etc.
Yahoo! hasn’t just polished the exterior and added a few new features, but it has actually rebuilt much of the foundations of the product, and therefore the core functionally, from scratch.
This has allowed Yahoo! to use the freshest techniques and best practices, which has fundamentally improved performance of total page load time, perceived load time and inline data URI images, all adding to a better user experience.
Lots to be excited about and it is good to see new innovation, but will this be enough to help the struggling search engine against the mighty Google or even against Bing, the confident newcomer?
