Sunnyvale, California — Struggling internet pioneer Yahoo continues to give tough time to its arch rivals with some pretty innovative features that its main competitor does not have. Just last week Yahoo introduced a novel feature for its image search, which it calls as travel image refiner, that lets users refine searches based on specific locations.
Now, if you search for a place, the Yahoo Travel Image Refiner enables users to explore various points of interest related to specific travel areas including related information about these destinations, with the menu displayed on the left-hand side of the screen that points you to images of different points of interest from that location.
It is in fact a pretty simple search filter enhancement. For example, if you search for "Rome," you will get a menu linking to images for the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain, Circus Maximus, etc.
Now, if a user clicks on one of the points of interest, you will see an overlay of the images over your original search results with results from that particular topic, but this can easily be closed while your original results remain there.
"With the new travel image refiner, we are continuing our focus on satisfying user intent through a deeper understanding the Web and presenting related objects from the real world," the company says. Yahoo says that by offering these suggestions, tapping into what the company calls a "Web of Objects," allowing the user to take a virtual tour of a city without having to input many different sites or places. Basically, Yahoo Image does all the work for you.
This certainly is a very useful feature, especially considering that most of the research on travel sites is now carried out mainly online by consumers. With this sort of feature only improves the travel planning process on the web. Yahoo says the Image Search Refiner is presently available for location-specific searches, but is planning to expand this functionality to other types of image searches in the future.
Of course, while Yahoo continues adding these neat features to its search capabilities, at the same time it is also facing challenges from Microsoft, with Bing picking at Yahoo’s search share. But with the growing pressure, Yahoo valiantly faces the challenge, and perhaps even livens up the fight between the two underdogs.