Sunnyvale, California — Relentlessly striving to keep pace with its competitors, and as the holiday season is just round the corner, internet pioneer Yahoo is tweaking its search experience today, has revealed some new vertical search features creating a new ribbon near the top of results with photos and interactive elements for queries about recipes, shopping and entertainment searches.
Now, when you search Yahoo for a recipe or gift this holiday season, you might be surprised by what you see. If someone enter a search term for “turkey recipe,” for example, they will be greeted with a selection of recipes and product searchers with interactive, image-based windows atop the search results that they can scroll through above the more traditional links, which will continue to show up to save them time on their internet quests.
With Yahoo taking control of its stock, the new search application functions like an instruction-books for recipe and product queries, letting you segregate and compare results, and they even let you log in to Facebook from the search page and share your favorite findings with friends.
Yahoo believes that when users search for recipes, their intent is pretty clear. So it wants to present them with information they can use more quickly.
“We are focused on giving our users answers, not links,” said Caroline Tsay, senior director of search management at Yahoo.
The new look at Yahoo for results from a “Turkey Recipe” search. (Credit: Yahoo)
From those recipe results, users can then sort by ingredients. They can also go to a new recipe search page, which enables them to separate their query even more, selecting a specific type of diet, for example, such as vegetarian or diabetic. Also, the shopping vertical utilizes a similar approach, with the window and the tab.
The search revisions are especially interesting because of how much they are customized to the searcher’s intent, with an altogether different presentation from the usual list of search results. There is also a lot of social media sharing and discovery baked into each new experience. Recipe and product results encourage the searcher to engage his or her Facebook friends, and entertainment results leverage Yahoo’s partnership with Twitter to create a real-time environment that Google can not replicate.
“Yahoo has amazing content in almost every major category like sports, finance, local, celebrities, movies, television, music, shopping etc. In the past we have used this content for properties like Yahoo Sports, but never really used it for Search,” Shashi Seth, Yahoo SVP of Search and Marketplaces, said in a statement. “Now we have started building a parallel index called the content index, which provides every bit of information about entities. We are using this content index to build these amazing experiences.”
Moreover, “The new entertainment results on Yahoo! Search present you with immediate answers about your favorite movies, music artists, celebrities and news stories,” the company says. “To read latest news, watch a popular video, or even see what people are saying in the Twittersphere, find it all in one convenient place within Yahoo Search.”
When asked if Bing’s search index plays a role in the results for these verticals, Tsay, mentioned, “Bing does not play any role in these new experiences. We use our own technology to find the content — from across the web and from our partners — users are looking for, and assemble them into these new user experiences.”
“We may reveal more vertical search tabs for specialized content, depending on what our users are looking for,” she says. “Any new vertical search tabs will automatically appear based on the user’s search term and the search results content.”
In addition, a similar looking ribbon appears when users type in queries related to product searches. Type in “digital camera,” for example, and the ribbon displays a variety of cameras available from online retailers. Users can filter those results, from inside the ribbon, limiting to, say, point-and-shoot cameras.
The new search features are only available in the United States for now, though Yahoo plans to roll out the capabilities more broadly over time.
However, this updates also come at an important time. Holiday recipe and product queries will be on rise and Yahoo’s functionality could help it attract valuable online shoppers away from Google.