Yahoo jazzes up its search

Yahoo on Thursday rolled out a revamped search to users across the US

The new search comes on the heels of Google launching its Instant interface last month, through which the web search market leader aims to herald a new methodolgy for searching. Google Instant gives predictive results on the fly as the user keeps entering the search string, which Google says gives better and faster results.

Yahoo's new offerings are nothing breakthrough on the technolgical front to compete with Instant but have got together links and shortcuts, some of which were already available on the website, in a comprehensive package, getting together all the relevant data spanning the entertainment and news spheres in an easily accessible box right below the search.

The Search now features quick-flip shortcuts for movies, musical artists, celebrities and news topics, organised in a vertical box comprehensively showcasing important details such as images, articles, videos, tweets, event listings, and ratings.

So whilst looking for 'michael jackson', for example, you get four vertical tabs – 'overview', which provides recent news about the singer; 'albums', listing the albums by the singer; 'videos', showcasing the videos and 'twitter updates' column on the twitter tab, which instantly load relevant data when clicked while the earlier tab flips to the left.

An image search on Yahoo! now displays slideshows with photos from Flickr and Yahoo!'s content sites, as well as public Facebook albums from friends after signing in and connecting their Yahoo! accounts to Facebook.

With the revamp, the California-based company aims to differentiate its search from Microsoft Bing, which powers Yahoo Search ever since the two companies signed a deal in July last year to take on search giant Google. (See: Microsoft, Yahoo! agree on joint search)

The differentition is important to Yahoo as it only gets a share of ad revenue for searches on its site and nothing for direct searches on Microsoft's Bing website for which Microsoft takes the entire revenue.

Other additions include a new web app for Netflix users to queue and watch movies right on the search page, displaying image slideshows above standard results, and buying movie / concert tickets on the search page.

"Our goal is to understand what people care about and to make it fun for them to explore the most personally relevant, interesting, and informative content so that they can get things done faster and stay in the know," said Shashi Seth, senior vice president, Yahoo! Search and Marketplaces in a statement.

Yahoo is also offering enhanced search results to Android and iPhone users after embracing the HTML5 technology.

The company said that the new search features will be launched for additional global markets in 2011.