Sunnyvale, California — The pioneering web portal Yahoo Inc., which recently signed a spectacular multi-year, multi-billion-dollar search and advertising deal to outsource its search engine to Microsoft, kicked off the week with full determination to continue developing search technology updates to several of its products like Yahoo Search, Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger with redesigned interfaces and an array of social networking features including enhanced search capabilities, a beta of Yahoo Messenger 10, and a revamped Yahoo Mail.
According to the long awaited deal signed last month with much fanfare, states that the Redmond, Wash., software titan’s Bing technology would serve as the sole search tool on Yahoo sites. But at a Monday news conference at the Sunnyvale company’s headquarters, Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president of labs, stressed that the agreement only encompasses back-end search technology.
“It is our belief that the battle has moved beyond the back end,” he said. “What we do with it, how we paint it, how we render it, that is entirely up to us.”
In fact, Raghavan emphasized that Yahoo intends to incorporate the improvements to compete vigorously with Microsoft in the search area. The updates are also clearly aimed at seizing market share from the undisputed search king, Google Inc. of Mountain View, as was the partnership with Microsoft.
“The development you see today reflects our focus on enabling people to connect with what matters to them most,” said Ari Balogh, Yahoo executive vice president of products and CTO, in a statement. The company’s energized focus on creating a more streamlined and efficient interface was kicked off with its recent Yahoo home page relaunch, and is subsequently being extended to Mail, Messenger and Search, Balogh said.
During a media briefing here at the company’s headquarters today, Yahoo executives gave an optimistic outlook for efforts to make its some of its key properties better linked to popular social networking services and simpler to use — ensuring that the pioneering Web portal stakes out turf in the white-hot social networking space.
Addressing the audience here, Raghavan, aimed to clarify many of those concerns to rest, mapping out a scenario by which Yahoo will still have plenty of room in which to enhance search — even though the deal with Microsoft, which is pending regulatory approval, calls for it to hand over much of search’s behind-the-scenes operations.
“We believe the battle has moved on from the back end, and our colleagues at Microsoft will be there,” Raghavan said. “We are free to innovate on top of the layer. Our front end experience will advance differently than Bing. The back end is a megawatt war and that is what we are getting out of. We want to compete on the front end, and what the user is trying to get done.”
The new Yahoo Mail contains various novel social networking features, like allowing for status updates, and sharing of articles with your contacts.
The moment you sign in, the e-mail homepage will feature messages from people you have deemed the most important. It will also feature a Facebook-like news feed from your contacts. For example, it will inform you that your sister uploaded pictures to Flickr, your co-worker put a new video on YouTube, or your roommate wrote a restaurant review on Yelp.
Another most prominent enhancements to Yahoo Search includes a new component called Search Assist — the site’s realtime query suggestion engine — to the search box on every Yahoo page in the U.S. That enhancement is linked to a new universal header that incorporates design and navigation elements with links to Yahoo destinations such as MyYahoo, Finance, News, Sports, Mail and the Yahoo home page.
Mail will now have a new dimension with multi-select and drag-and-drop functionality that makes it easier to attach photos, view thumbnail previews, and rotate images before you send them. New mail features include: integrated applications including Yahoo Calendar, PayPal and Xoopit; improved photo sharing tools; expanded attachment limits (from 10 MB to 25 MB); and social-networking tools like status updates.
The company also promises to introduce a new Evite app, set to launch next month, that will allow users to send Evite invitations, check on event status and add them to their Yahoo Calendars through their inboxes. Other apps, all scheduled to be available worldwide in months to come, include Flickr, PayPal, Picnik, Xoopit and ZumoDrive.
Larry Cornett, Yahoo’s vice-president of search, said search is “vital to people lives” and that Yahoo has been working on improvements to give users more relevant results.
“We have invested in a lot of fantastic search technology, but people are not aware of all of it,” he said.
Several weeks after the release of Yahoo Messenger 9.0, Yahoo released a beta version of Yahoo Messenger 10. The most striking improvement includes the ability to make video calls as well as browse recent updates from friends. Click the “video calling” button on the IM window, and Yahoo Messenger will connect you to your friend, provided they also have beta 10. You can change the size of the video window, put you and your friend side by side, or delete the image of yourself entirely.
You can also mute your microphone, shift yourself on speaker, or put the call on hold. While you are chatting, you can use other services like file transfer, photo sharing, and games.
In addition, Messenger is boosted with an improved iPhone App, as well as an enhanced language selector and a new update, Tap, that allows users to discover Twitter updates, Flickr uploads and Yahoo Buzz stories, among other things. Hover over an update and IM them directly about what they posted.
If you do not wish to share or see any updates, you can change what pops up in your preferences.
The beta is now available for download.