Prior to tonight’s new display, a search for “apple recipes” would include the standard algorithmic results (i.e., 10 blue links) along with a small shortcut at the top of the search results pointing searchers to recipes on shine.yahoo.com, Yahoo’s lifestyle content site for women.

Now, the Yahoo.com search results offer a much richer experience.

The new content includes (1) a slider with top-rated recipes from AllRecipes.com and other sources; (2) a Filter by Ingredient option; (3) the obligatory Facebook sharing tool; (4) new tabs to filter search results based on their calorie count and preparation time; (5) a new “Recipes” tab under the search box that leads to the new Yahoo Recipe Search interface, which offers additional search and filtering options like “meal type,” “occasion” and “rating.” (There’s also a new, dedicated URL for Yahoo Recipe Search at recipes.search.yahoo.com.)

Yahoo has made similar changes for shopping-related searches. There’s already been a dedicated “Shopping” tab at the top of the search results, but the shopping experience is richer and similar to what’s being offered for recipes. Rather than just showing five or 10 products and a link into Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo shows a slider and new “Deals” and “Buying Guide” tabs.

There’s a comparison tool that lets searchers check out up to five items from within the search results page, and filtering options as shown above in the screenshot.

Lastly, and not holiday-related — Yahoo has also tweaked its search results for entertainment queries. Tabs for “Videos” and “Tweets” are still available, but the interface has been changed and looks more like the tabs seen above on recipe and shopping searches.

The new Yahoo search experiences should be available now on Yahoo.com.

This is interesting on many levels. It could signal the arrival of a “vertical outsourcing” strategy that moves to other verticals: autos, real estate, travel, local . . . It also seems to represent something a loss for Microsoft. While PriceGrabber has a larger product database than Microsoft there’s probably more than that in Yahoo’s decision not to simply work with Microsoft here, which would seemingly make sense given the search relationship.

Perhaps Yahoo doesn’t want to be too dependent on Microsoft across too many fronts. However, Bing sponsored search ads will be the ones that appear at the top of search results in Yahoo shopping (once the regulators sign off on the deal).

Let’s look at a page. The following represents my speculation about who will provide what going forward:

We’ve reached out to Yahoo for clarification and will update the post once we receive any. However my belief is that Yahoo will retain control over the user experience, search ads will come from Bing (in the future) and the merchant listings (the body of the page) will come from PriceGrabber.

There are also graphical/display ads in shopping. While PriceGrabber has a display ad program I would imagine that Yahoo will retain control over that business, as it has more broadly.

As I said we could be seeing the emergence of a kind of “formula” here for Yahoo in which it outsources data functions to high quality third party specialists and it retains control over display ad sales and look and feel.

This is a huge win for PriceGrabber; Yahoo Shopping is one of the most visited shopping engines online:

Brian Smith has more thoughts and more on what it means for merchants.

Postscript: Yahoo provided the following statement:

At all levels of the company, Yahoo! is constantly exploring ways to improve the consumer and advertiser experience, including aligning products and services against the company’s vision to be the center of people’s online lives. We have decided to enter into a strategic partnership with PriceGrabber to power the Product Submit functionality of Yahoo! Shopping. The partnership will provide users, merchants and advertisers with increased service and support. This partnership will combine the Yahoo! Shopping and PriceGrabber marketplaces allowing merchants and advertisers to gain access to a larger shopper base and users to gain access to even more products. All parties will continue to be a part of the overall Yahoo! experience and now will benefit from increased innovation thanks to the scale and resources this partnership provides. Yahoo! will continue to monetize the site through ad sales and a revenue share with PriceGrabber.

Postscript, January 15: In a post today on the Yahoo Developer Network Blog, Neal Sample, Yahoo’s VP of Open Strategy, says this decision does not reflect any lack of development commitment on Yahoo’s part:

I’ve read the commentary here on the blog and out in the blogosphere. I’ve also read some of the speculation about what this means — and it’s dead wrong. Yahoo!’s commitment to developers and to open platforms is not going away. Not at all.

You’ll find Shop By Color at Yahoo Shopping. Do a search, such as for ties, then use the new color box in the left-hand column to a particular color. Here, now you’ve got orange ties. Excuse me, "coral" ties. Interesting feature, though Yahoo’s not the pioneer here. ShopWiki rolled out shop by color back in June 2006.

Yahoo MapMixer allows you to blend your own custom layers or layers made by others onto Yahoo Maps. People have long made these types of mashups in particular for Google Maps, so MapMixer should help encourage the same for Yahoo. Of course, back in July, Google got behind mashups by allowing "Mapplet" integration. You can find a list of Google mashups here, similar to how Yahoo now has its own gallery.

Techmeme has a nice roundup of various people kicking the tires on both tools more.