Sunnyvale, California — Yahoo on Thursday said that it is unfolding some new search improvements for Yahoo Sports and Yahoo News search topic pages, all designed to give the user what they are looking for, quickly and easily, on this April Fools Day, and Yahoo’s Tricia Stream quoted as saying to WebProNews that it is “no joke.”
The new focused search sections are part of what Yahoo represented at a February search event, which also usher in new search tweaks like “Sketch-A-Search,” a twist on location-based mobile searching.
The new capabilities will also include new filters and showed search topics. The attributes are configured to help users better target their searches through specifically targeted vertical search techniques.
When users start to enter a search term at either Yahoo Sports or Yahoo News, the users will instantly see a list of suggestions, which a user can click on or simply bypass.
In Yahoo News, they have bundled it with all kinds of new items to search results pages, including a filtering tool for specific news sources, time-based filtering, related news search suggestions, scrollable image results, and rich shortcuts for relevant, timely tweets and key news topics.
When a user inputs the search term in Yahoo News, a Microsoft Bing-like page will open, placing images at the top, suggested articles in the center well, and filtering options to the left. News, for example, allows users to filter by source, apparently listing the sources with the most entries first. Yahoo will also allow users to filter by time and by the type of news report, such as video.
For instance, in the Yahoo News search result page entering the query “obama,” you will see only results published within the last day. The document count next to the news sources on the left column will update to reflect the number of results published within the last day. Of course, our rich results for news images and news videos are also updated with the past day’s results.
Users of the special sports search service will be able to search not only specific terms, but also fine-tune the terms as to only search for image files or video clips. Additionally, the sports search will automatically suggest related searches to the user query, such as specific players or news about rival clubs.
For instance, entering a term, such as “Tim Lincecum,” in Yahoo’s Sports Search box generates a page that focuses on the player: a portrait appears next to the player’s current (or in this case, 2009) statistics, and the page lists the player’s ranking in any relevant fantasy leagues. Some elements are shared between individual players as well as teams, such as scheduling information.
Stream said the improvements are evidence of the company’s “continued innovation in search and the benefits of weaving compelling search experiences throughout the Yahoo! Network.”
“Our new layout and useful features help people quickly find what they are looking for and easily explore related topics that matter to them,” says Stream.
The company said that the new search tools would be released in a limited international rollout. Among the 12 countries participating will be the US, UK, India, Australia, Korea and Hong Kong.
The latest enhancements comes as Yahoo is exploiting to fend off the growing threat of Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Lately, Bing has steadily been gaining market share from Yahoo since its release last summer.