The news search engine features that we wrote about at Yahoo! in early August are now live on their site. The enhancements include Yahoo!'s Search Assist, which is an improved version of their search suggestion feature, and a number of new Yahoo! Shortcuts. Shortcuts are self contained information widgets that appear at the top of results for certain searches and draw content from other Yahoo! properties.
In addition to the Shortcuts we talked about in August for music, movies, travel, and images, Yahoo! has rolled out a handful of additional Shortcuts for topics like sports, business, health and events. The sports Shortcut, like the one seen below, is especially useful to a fantasy sports addict like myself. Unfortunately, it isn't triggered for all players. For example, a search for New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter brings up a Shortcut about him, but a search for teammate Robinson Cano does not. My guess is the decision whether to launch a Shortcut is based on search popularity rather than player stats (so some good, but less popular players are passed over).
Yahoo! has also announced deeper integration with images, video, and audio. Audio and images seems to be generally handled by Shortcuts -- such as the Yahoo! music and Flickr widgets I discussed in August, though sometimes Flickr results will also now be integrated further down into searches. The video search integration, however, is far more intriguing.
Yahoo! is now including videos in main page search results and letting them be played directly on the search page. Google has done this for a few months with YouTube, but Yahoo! is taking it a step further and allowing video to be played from a variety of video sharing sites.
Yahoo! says the reason for the new search features is to get users the results they're after in a single search. According to a study done by Harris Interactive for Yahoo!, 99% of adults use search engines to find information and content on the web, but only 15% of those searches are successful on the first try. The rest require 3 or 4 additional searches to find the information they're looking for. This "search fatigue" is frustrating for people, and Yahoo! hopes that by improving their search engine and hopefully finding information for searchers on the first pass, it will result in more return users.
"We know that consumers want a complete answer, not a bunch of links," said Vish Makhijani, general manager and senior vice president of Yahoo! Search in a press release, "and the changes we’ve made are focused on getting people to the best answer -- whether it be a Web link, photo, video or music clip -- in one search."
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Good for Yahoo, I personally like the new functionalities. But I liked more the study showing that only 15% of the searches are successful on the first try, the rest require 3 or 4 additional searches to find the information they're looking for...
Thus, it makes sense to use Intelways.com as an alternative to using Google/Yahoo/Microsoft Live alone.
Juan C. Sosa
CEO
Intelways.com
Posted by: Juan C. Sosa | October 2, 2007 8:33 AM
I noticed yahoo is catching up after bought flickr. I feel the new search is much better than before. However, there are way too many websites out there containing inaccurate or misleading information, or ads, spam. I have collected ca 150 trusted websites. A search engine was created based on these websites. Please have a try on my search and see how do you think. I believe the combination of the search with the full version google search will provide more value and efficency.
http://familyresource4u.wordpress.com/comprehensive-and-search-engines/
Posted by: Norman | October 2, 2007 12:01 PM
This is excellent news from Yahoo! and shows that they are getting back on track with their strategic operations. I was very impressed with the several searches that I conducted on their engine this morning...especially the video playback in page and shortcuts.
I was also really impressed with Ask.com last week. I hadn't been to their search in a while and happened there last week. Wow! What a difference..they've really invested in their user interface and their search functionalities are expanding rapidly.
Google seems to be losing ground on their core product offering as it focuses on diversification. I can't find anything compelling in using Google over Yahoo! anymore so I'm going to give Yahoo a chance as my primary search for a bit and see how it goes for the long-term. And frankly, I think Yahoo does an amazingly better job with UI which makes discoverability and usability so much better.
Bravo!, Yahoo!
Posted by: webonics | October 2, 2007 12:34 PM
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://blog.compete.com/2007/09/26/search-queries-results-yahoo-google-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.
Posted by: Jeremy Crane | October 3, 2007 8:08 AM
The idea of allowing video to be played from a variety of sites is an intelligent one.
Google's idea of integrating YouTube videos into the SERPs was innovative. It would be interesting to discover whether they even approached the other video sharing sites or what Yahoo had to accomplish to get them to agree to participate.
Presumably, if users are staying on Yahoo to see the videos, they are less likely to visit those video sites and explore them, thus not seeing any advertising.
Posted by: Hollywood | October 5, 2007 12:44 AM