Yahoo's New Look

[YahooMike]

We continue to work on new ways to make what you're looking for easier, and today we took another step in that direction, including making the search results quicker to scan and easier to read. Also, you'll notice the Search Views feature above the Search box, which should help folks focus their results from everything to image search to yellow pages.

We encourage the participants on this board to tell us what you think of our new look?

http://search.surveys.yahoo.com/searchfb

[flood6]

It looks good, Mike. Nice and simple. I hope the final version doesn't look too diffrent.

I noticed something (maybe you should post it in the site review forum, lol, I can see it now "Review Yahoo.com").

Anyway, the current design is a little broke in FireFox. Specifically where you ask users to "Test drive our beta design".

In IE6:


In FireFox 0.9:


You can barely see where the top of the link got cut off. It looks equally broke in Opera.

I have no idea if you'll ever see this, Mike, or if you could do anything about it anyway, I just thought I'd point it out.

edit: It looks fixed now.

[YahooMike]

Interesting, thanks flood6, we'll look into this.

[ronniethedodger]

Mike - the one link I like the most is the Shortcuts link. Nice touch. With all these new shortcuts coming out, making it handy is a time saver.

[YahooMike]

I’m curious to know what you folks think of the new “Also Try” feature, too. We’re finding that it’s really helping people refine their search queries. One example I’ve been using is doing a search for “Florence.” Simply type it in and automatically Also Try will suggest “Florence, Italy” then “Hotels in Florence, Italy.” Again, automatically, you’ll notice the Search Shortcut for hotels is triggered and right at the top of the results you’ll see the three most popular hotels in Florence, Italy with availability, pricing, etc.

The idea here is that by combining our Search Shortcuts with Also Try we’re helping users to explore – and more important, find -- exactly what they want faster. Anyway, check it out, I think you might find it helpful.

[lspence]

The “Also Try” feature only appears when making single word searches. Is that by design?

[YahooMike]

Ispence, your query will somewhat dictate your results, but this features is by no means limited to single words (e.g., Also Try works with searches like cell phone, movie times, summer Olympics, etc.).

[sudhani]

Originally Posted by YahooMike

I’m curious to know what you folks think of the new “Also Try” feature, too. We’re finding that it’s really helping people refine their search queries. One example I’ve been using is doing a search for “Florence.” Simply type it in and automatically Also Try will suggest “Florence, Italy” then “Hotels in Florence, Italy.” Again, automatically, you’ll notice the Search Shortcut for hotels is triggered and right at the top of the results you’ll see the three most popular hotels in Florence, Italy with availability, pricing, etc.

The idea here is that by combining our Search Shortcuts with Also Try we’re helping users to explore – and more important, find -- exactly what they want faster. Anyway, check it out, I think you might find it helpful.

First, thank you YahooMike for being a part of WPW community. And thanx to WPW Team too!!!

This is an excelent feature as far as the searcher's are concerned!!! Yahoo! reminds the right words to the searcher .... Another idea could be to give this "also try" option when the search results cross a certain number.

This new feature is going to give the webmasters a few sleepless nights definitely.

Here is my guess on how you are doing it:

1. You try to match the 'braod search' with most popular searches that includes that phrase
2. Another way of doing it is pick-up from the user behavior .. when someone searches for 'word1' and then goes on to search for 'word1+word2' include this in this 'also try' feature .... I doubt whether you are actually doing it. If not, think of adding another feature that says ... "people searching for word1 also search: ........"

Though its a bit of more work for webmasters, these two features will definitely help webmasters in identifying the most searched keywords and the variants ....

Shortcuts are interesting too!!! It might be a good idea to give a link to all the short-cuts (at least the most popular ones) at the top ...

When I am searching for area code ... I found something interesting as well Suggestion of "Related" searches.

http://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=sc...6p%3D408&p=408

Hope to see more interesting things from Yahoo in future!

[xmx]

I opened yahoo site after reading this post
and in my mozilla browser the image at the
top of the page is a broken image.

I tried also with konqueror and it works fine.

[leeds1]

Nice design

Just wish they didnt have all the sponsored links at the top !

On the right hand OK - top, no.

[ADAM Web Design]

I'm also going to make this comment via the form, but I want to make it here anyway, because it's something that's very slowly starting to bother me.

I've noticed that lately, Yahoo! and in their preview engine MSN have adopted the Google "look and feel" for their results, right down to the colours. While I do find the results on Yahoo! to be more relevant than that of Google's (the jury's still out on MSN since it's in beta), I do find it somewhat annoying that they "look" the same. Why not use some different colours (reds, lighter blues, oranges, anything as long as it's different). Personally, I've always been a big fan of the All the Web scheme. It's relatively non-standard, and it's still clean.

Perhaps you could also use the newer Verdana or Tahoma as the default font, degrading backwards accordingly? This would again serve to distinguish your look and feel without throwing off the whole concept of search too much.

Here's something else from us Great White Northerners up in Canada:


http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=Tor...t&cop=mss&tab= <--- Yahoo.com search.

http://ca.search.yahoo.com/search/ca...nto+web+design <--- Yahoo.ca search.

Not only is the look and feel different (in IE6 anyway), but the results are as well (the jrgraphix.net one disappears for some reason in the .ca). I'm not sure if the latter is caused by them not having a listing somewhere in a Canadian section of the Yahoo! directory or not, however, so I'm not necessarily pointing out the latter as a flaw; it's just something I observed, and I really am trying to be constructive (I just don't do a very good job of it.)

As far as the shortcuts go: while they're nice, a lot of them are US-only, and it would be nice to see some of them (patent search, for example) extended to Canada at the very least. I'd suggest any of the other G7 countries would be good to put in as well.

[cooper]

Hi Mike,
My first impression is YaGoogle! Right down to the preferences page and image search. I thought Yahoo purchased Inktomi and was going to use the Inktomi results to feed the Yahoo! search results? Is this happening?

I find the one-upsmanship between Google and Yahoo! very interesting and so far it seems to be best for the users. And I like that.

Other things I like about the Yahoo! search:

• A link directly to my Yahoo! Mail.
  Numbered results
  a link to actually "Help us improve your search experience."

Who knows, I may even start to use it as much as I use Google. At least for now, it is a supplement to Google.

Keep up the great work!

[synergytheory]

Originally Posted by flood6

It looks good, Mike. Nice and simple. I hope the final version doesn't look too diffrent.

I noticed something (maybe you should post it in the site review forum, lol, I can see it now "Review Yahoo.com").

Anyway, the current design is a little broke in FireFox. Specifically where you ask users to "Test drive our beta design".

In IE6:


In FireFox 0.9:


You can barely see where the top of the link got cut off. It looks equally broke in Opera.

I have no idea if you'll ever see this, Mike, or if you could do anything about it anyway, I just thought I'd point it out.

edit: It looks fixed now.

Ah, I was wondering what was changed, I couldn't see it in FF 0.9 either and I still can't so it's not fixed.

It looks pretty messed up in FireFox...alignment probs.

But overall looks a little cleaner, it is very ala google.

[themidnightwill]

Originally Posted by synergytheory

Ah, I was wondering what was changed, I couldn't see it in FF 0.9 either and I still can't so it's not fixed.

It looks pretty messed up in FireFox...alignment probs.

But overall looks a little cleaner, it is very ala google.

Same problem in Safari 1.2.2 (v125.8).

-Will

[synergytheory]

In FireFox if you search for "media training" you won't see "Test drive our beta design" but if you search for "guitar" you will see it.

The problem is the "related:" feature is bumping the alignment down enough to see the "Test drive our beta design".

[flood6]

Originally Posted by synergytheory

Ah, I was wondering what was changed, I couldn't see it in FF 0.9 either and I still can't so it's not fixed.

It looks pretty messed up in FireFox...alignment probs.

Yeah, I thought that specific problem had been fixed, but I just looked at it a while ago and it was broke again.

Maybe the fix was all in my head...

[Peter Holland]

I think it looks good, and I like the bleu color

[jlknauff]

Your search results seem to fluctuate quite often. Why is that?

[rocos]

Does Y! index our pages first?

[amateurseoguy]

I have a question actually, If I may.

I notice that Yahoo comes and visits a lot of the websites I've worked on but the results take forever and a day to show up. One of our sites has had updates made to it for the last month or so and the results right down to the title and the description are old from before it was updated. I was just curious why the lag in the updates.

By the way, otherwise I do like the new look. I think the results are very relevant to the searches, though it does have the same feel as Google. I agree about MSN, since it is in beta, I'd like to give it some more time before I say they've improved, though I do like what I've seen there too (not to get off topic here). Anyway, it's a nice change.

Can we also comment on the site match here?

[vwlpaige]

Hi,

The yahoo page only partially displays the SPONSORED RESULTS words when viewed in IE6. See a grab of that part of the screen at
http://www.silversweetheart.com/images/yahoograb.gif

I like the clean look and the fast presentation!

Regards,
VA[/url]

[deadBird]

I have always liked the similar search terms display:

http://www.alltheweb.com/search?cat=...&_sb_lang=pref

I'm quite surprised that neither Yahoo or Google have implemented it. I find it extremely useful for finding more junk :)

[hommealone]

Nice but:

The Also Trys are not up to the quality of the Teoma Refine your choices feature. Most searches I tried didn't even give me any Also Trys.

I'd love to see a search engine that let the user tweak the algorithms themselves for each search.
For example: give more (or less) priority to commercial sites; non-commercial sites; recent sites; sites that have high incidence/prominent placement of the search terms; site popularity; etc.

Anyway, keep up the good work. I've been using Yahoo as my default search engine over Google lately.