Yahoo! redesigns its search experience

Saturday 26 September 2009 | By Heidi Scott, Gosh! Media Copywriter

Yahoo! Inc launched its new Yahoo! Search earlier this week. The company, based in Sunnyvale CA, trailed its revision on the Yahoo! Search Blog as "an all-new Yahoo! Search experience that makes search more personally relevant".

Available initially in the US, UK, France, Spain, Mexico and India, Yahoo! tested its changes with some of its users during August. The company claims that the new design helps users to find and explore easily the things that matter most to them. The page design features three columns, with the left hand column allowing users to filter results by SearchMonkey content providers or refine them by related concepts, the middle column showing organic results and sponsored results appearing on the right.

Yahoo! Search Results Page

The move from Yahoo! comes in the wake of Microsoft's launch of Visual Search for its Bing search engine earlier this month, and Google's introduction of Search Options – enabling users to 'slice and dice' their results – back in May. It seems that search is the arena in which the fight for market share is taking place.

The Yahoo! search changes are described by the team behind them as "an amazing user experience" but industry commentators are not so gushing. Greg Sterling, Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land, says, "There's nothing radical or 'game changing'. However, there are some nice upgrades and improvements."

Yahoo! recently launched a number of changes to its core products, including a new Yahoo! homepage, improved Yahoo! Mail, high-quality video calling in Yahoo! Messenger and a suite of new Yahoo! Mobile services. The new Yahoo! Search page design, the company claims, aligns the experience between its new homepage, mail and search results pages to deliver a "dynamic, compelling, and integrated experience". Gosh! Media reserves judgement on that one, but admits that the new look is rather pretty!

The Yahoo! Search Blog goes on to say that the new page framework has been designed so that Yahoo! can introduce and experiment with new search applications and features faster than before. The company then lists the key highlights of the new-look search facility:

• Intelligent search results – Allowing users to explore results from key sites and narrow results using different types of SearchMonkey structured data.

• Feature-rich experience – providing quick access to search features that make people's on-line lives safer and easier, including Search Scan/SafeSearch (which helps protect users from viruses, spyware and spam while searching) and Search Pad.

• Search Assist expansion – query assistance is still available directly below the search box, but Yahoo! has also incorporated it into the left-hand column for quick access lower on the page, even when the Search Assist layer is hidden.

Yahoo! claims that the new-look search facility has been totally rebuilt for optimum performance. In his blog of 22 September, Vice President of Consumer Products for Yahoo! Search, Larry Cornett, explains:

"Now, here's the best part: rather than building this new experience on top of our existing front-end technology, our talented engineering and design teams rebuilt much of the foundational markup/CSS/JavaScript for the SRP design and core functionality completely from scratch. This allowed us to get rid of old cruft and take advantage of quite a few new techniques and best practices, reducing core page weight and render complexity in the process."

The results, he claims, are improved total page load time, despite additional assistance features and graphical assets; improved perceived load time, due to sending the page in three chunks (first the search box and page header, then the rest of the visible content and finally JavaScript); and inline data URI images, used to generate subtle repeating gradients and which improve perceived and real performance dramatically.

Ironically, the new look and feel of Yahoo! Search moves closer to Bing's search engine. Of course, it won't be long before the results on Bing and Yahoo! will be exactly the same, assuming the 'Microhoo' deal gets regulatory stamp of approval, so Yahoo! will need to keep up the interface improvements to enhance user experience and hold onto its market share.

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