Sunnyvale, California — Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, fulfilling its promise to innovate in search, on Thursday began rolling out several major changes to its search engine that focus on more broader selection of results when queries are related to entertainment, news or sports. The new features aim to deliver news and entertainment content to searchers across multiple devices. Yahoo is calling the remake “immersive search.”
The internet pioneer Yahoo has unveiled a snazzy new search interface that allows users to flip between a stack of vertical tabs to view different types of results. The latest improvements, unleashed yesterday, are in line with the web portal’s focus on movies, celebrities and professionally created content. Yahoo’s leanings toward entertainment are how it hopes to differentiate itself from other search engines, particularly market leader Google.
Yahoo’s enhanced search engine lets you see and interact with all your results in one spot. (Credit: Yahoo)
Yahoo’s notion with the enhancements is evident in the addition of new “intelligent shortcuts” for movies, musical artists, celebrities and other topical items, and Yahoo will deliver the latest articles, photos, videos, event listings, and Twitter tweets on your chosen topic. The feature, located at the top of results, gives users the option of viewing results of specific categories, such as images, articles, videos, tweets, event listings and ratings. Yahoo also puts the purchase option front and center by providing links to purchase movie and concert tickets while searching.
“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,” Shashi Seth, senior vice president of Yahoo Search and Marketplaces, said in a statement. “Yahoo’s new immersive Search is a cornerstone of the overall Yahoo experience, creating more ways to connect people with whatever and whoever interests them.”
Among the other changes are a Netflix “quick app” that will empower subscribers to add titles to their queue from Yahoo Search and results will include user’s Facebook friends’ photo albums and individual pictures. Netflix members also can watch movies and TV shows from Netflix’s streaming video service.
When you visit Yahoo.com and enter a search query for “Lady Gaga” for example, displays a list of nearby concert appearances, the tracks of her recent few albums, and tweets from the lady herself. There will also be easy access for purchasing tickets to the next Lady Gaga concert through a Yahoo partner while searching.
“This looks different than the ‘universal search’ results that we have seen, whether it has been a smart box or an answer,” said Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. “Yahoo wants to bring transactions to that space as well, so if there is an event, theoretically you could buy tickets.”
The newly introduced search interface, which the tech community have nicknamed “the accordion”, represents Yahoo’s first big makeover of its search product since partnering with Microsoft.
Yahoo’s accordion also comes as search engine giant Google has refurbished its flagship search engine with Google Instant, which predicts a person’s search query as soon as they type a single letter in the search box, instantly returning the relevant results.
The new features have already started reaching people in the U.S., according to Yahoo, while those in other countries can expect to see them next year.
Perhaps the accordion will hit the first note in Yahoo’s comeback song… Yahoo’s video below offers a tour of its new search features.