The TV shortcut shows the title and a short synopsis of the next episode, along with video clips and links to see photos, the show’s schedule, and an episodes list. All of this content comes from Yahoo TV.

Although my LOST example above doesn’t show it, Yahoo will occasionally show links in the left column for related actors, shows, or movies. I’m guessing the query [lost] was a little too generic to prompt that.

There’s also a new celebrity shortcut that focuses on well-known actors and actresses. It’s fairly similar to Yahoo’s recently announced news shortcut in that it offers tabs to see news, photos, video, and Twitter updates about the celebrity.

If the celebrity has a Twitter account, that third tab will change from “Twitter” to “Official Tweets” and will display his/her Twitter stream.

Attempting to generate enthusiasm, he pressed on without slides: despite the popular misconception, Yahoo is not out of search, echoing statements made by CEO Carol Bartz and others on past company earnings calls. He would not have come to Yahoo six weeks ago if the company wasn’t committed to search and there wasn’t a great team there, and so on.

The power came back on and Seth was able to show his slides. There’s lots of innovation on the front end and with the user experience still to be done. The purple boxes below indicate Yahoo’s “contribution” to search after the Microsoft deal closes.

Seth then spoke at some length about Yahoo’s leadership in Asia and its mobile OEM and operator relationships in mobile around the globe.

Prabhakar Raghavan, SVP, Yahoo Labs/Search Strategy came next to again express the concept of the “web of things” vs. the “old” idea of the “web of objects” (documents). People don’t care about the index size anymore; they care about the right information or “answer.” He made the remark that 99 percent of search queries on Yahoo “have a noun” in them. This indicates that people are looking for information about the real world. The era of 10 blue links is dead, and so on.

Raghavan went on to detail Yahoo’s formidable academic and research successes: the top three texts about search are all by Yahoo scientists; the top prizes (papers) at all the 2009 and now 2010 (so far) data mining conferences have been won by Yahoo.

Larry Cornett, VP Consumer Products took the stage and reviewed many of the search innovations and rollouts of the past six months: Search Assist, Search Pad, breaking news/Twitter, richer Shortcuts, contextually relevant filters and refinements, multimedia search, etc. Cornett also previewed some future innovations and tools coming.

Cornett showed “search a sketch,” a novel mobile search tool enabling users to draw custom area on a smartphone map and search within that area. Similar to Yahoo Local’s radius search online, it was an impressive. He explained philosophically that Yahoo would take a very different approach in mobile vs its competitors who are largely reproducing the PC experience on smartphones.

David Pann, Search Advertising VP ended the formal part of the meeting with discussion of some improvements on that side of the house, including a Google campaign import tool.

At the end of the presentations, I had the feeling that “we’ve heard much of this before” and got the sense that much of the audience remained unconvinced that Yahoo would continue to be competitive in search. However the Q&A portion of the discussion and the informal lunch discussions thereafter were both useful and more convincing.

Candidly Seth acknowledged the search share losses that comScore and Hitwise have reported. He attributed some of those losses to toolbar and default search deals that Yahoo no longer had or that others had aggressively grabbed away. Overall I was impressed with the candor and frankness of Yahoo’s discussion in response to question after question that in one way or another was highly skeptical of Yahoo’s prospects — including mine.

I said: “many in this audience want Yahoo to be competitive and succeed but remain skeptical that you can.” Larry Cornett responded that he was at Apple during the “dark time” before the return of Steve Jobs, when critics were calling for the company to shut down. He likened the media perceptions of Yahoo Search now to that period in Apple’s history and promised that Yahoo Search would “be back.” He added that many of Yahoo’s innovations were being freely copied by its competitors but in more superficial ways.

At the end of Q&A other Yahoo research scientists were introduced:

• Yoelle Maarek, Senior Director at Yahoo Research in Israel
• Ricardo Baeza-Yates, VP of Research for Europe and Latin America
• Preston McAfee, VP and Research Fellow at Yahoo Research in Burbank, CA

I spoke at some length with Maarek, who was previously at Google. She contrasted the environments and spoke about why she left Google and came to Yahoo. She spoke about greater openness and “humility” at Yahoo and of the opportunity to work with the Yahoo Research team, which she greatly respected. I also spoke a bit with Tim Mayer, who remains at Yahoo and expressed confidence in the product and the team.

I came away from the Q&A and these more informal discussions much more “convinced” than during the formal presentations that Yahoo would in fact continue to innovate and would retain and perhaps gain new search talent. The challenge is resources and mindshare, given how Google dominates the news with each (almost daily) product announcement.

But it would appear that Yahoo will continue to do interesting and innovative things in search — and the industry wants and needs them to.

Google

Yahoo

Bing

No doubt each search engine will keep those updated all weekend long, and will show the game score as it happens on Sunday.

Bing and Yahoo also shared some info about what fans have been searching for this week in the lead up to Sunday’s game. Bing says that the Dallas Cowboys were the most searched-for team during the season, but searches for both the Colts and Saints skyrocketed more recently:

Although not the most searched throughout the year, after the Indianapolis win against the Jets, all eyes were on Peyton and his team with searches for the Colts increasing by more than 350 percent whereas searches for the New Orleans Saints increased by slightly less at 257 percent.

Yahoo shares a list of Super Bowl-related search trends, including:

• Users are searching for the Saints 53 percent more often than the Colts on the Wednesday before the big game.
• Almost 92 percent of song searches were for the Who Dat song.
• The Saints are ahead with queries for wallpapers, but more users overall are looking for Colts logos. Interestingly, people are interested in the logos of the opposing team. In Louisiana, searches for the Colts’ logo had a one day jump of 150 whereas Indiana jumped 67 percent on “Saints logo” searches.

When you search for the name of a business, or a local business category, Yahoo will show the local shortcut if it believes the search has local intent. For me, typing “pizza” into Yahoo’s search box returns a map with local results.

Google started doing the same thing this spring, and Bing also offers the same feature, so Yahoo is playing a bit of catch-up here. But Yahoo’s results will, in some cases, be better because, when available, it uses the location that users provide via their Yahoo Profile; Google and Bing both rely more on IP-based targeting, which is far from accurate for some users.

One other improvement Yahoo has made over how Google and Bing implement this is the inclusion of neighborhood filtering. A person in Seattle who’s looking for pizza will get the option to narrow results by neighborhood.

Perhaps the main innovation here is the inclusion of content and information right inside the Search Assist dropdown. For example, do a search for a company’s stock symbol, and Yahoo will show real-time stock prices and a couple related links before you even execute the search.

Yahoo says similar features are available for queries related to sports, travel, and movies.

Search Assist can now also help users reach other Yahoo properties more quickly. For certain queries, Yahoo will show quick links to Yahoo News or Yahoo Images. For other queries, Yahoo will show deep links to other Yahoo properties, like Flickr or Yahoo Mail. Type “mail” while you’re viewing Yahoo Sports, for example, and you’ll get quick links to send an email, visit your in box, or create a new email address.

The new features aren’t available yet in the main search box on Yahoo.com, but are accessible in the search box of nearly all other Yahoo properties.

Google’s had help pages like this before. For example, this one still remains, showing various special features such as the ability to get weather results. But this new page is being featured right from the Google home page:

The page frames many of Google’s features in an easier-to-read format:

And it comes with an introduction highlighting how serious Google is about search:

Search is at the heart of everything we do at Google. Our engineers work every day to solve the hardest search problems, and thus improve your online experience. Here’s a glimpse at what they do, the features they’ve built and the remarkable user stories that inspire our work.

As I said before:

Google’s never really had to market itself to consumers, to trot its stuff. The recently held “Searchology” event didn’t cover anywhere near the range of what Google offers. But if the praise for Bing keeps largely rolling in — if people keep discovering features that aren’t necessarily unique to Bing — Google may find it has to step up.

To me, this page is all about doing that stepping up. Of course, the page is well worth reviewing, for those who aren’t aware how Google can provide everything from sports scores to flight tracking. As can Bing, and as can Yahoo.

Yahoo has added a way to search for your favorite sports team. For example, a search on Chicago Bulls returns this Yahoo Shortcut:

Google has added Tennis stats and scores, according to Google Operating System. For example, a search on Federer returns this one box:

The two things I’m going to discuss in this post are Microsoft’s “Live Search Accelerators” and Yahoo’s new “visual search shortcuts.”

Live Search Accelerators perform a range of functions, searches or lookups on, for example, a piece of text, a product name or address within a web page. You can also translate text into another language or send it to Facebook or Digg, among other options. To use the tired phrase: it’s like right click “on steroids.”

Users highlight the text and an Accelerator icon appears. That in turn opens a menu with various options with what to do with the passage or text (those options can be expanded with a range of add-ons). The benefit is that information or a search result appears in a window on the page so you don’t have to open a new tab or visit another site to get the desired information.

This is a great feature; however, I was having some difficulty getting it to work on my older PC laptop (probably a function of the laptop rather than IE8).

Here’s a list of all the current Accelerator add-ons. The mapping Accelerator, one of the most useful features in my mind, allows users to lookup addresses on Live Search Maps or Yahoo Maps right on the page you’re on. So if you want to see what neighborhood a particular hotel is located in, you can do that without going “over” to a mapping site. Conspicuously absent, however, are options to use Google Maps or MapQuest.

Hopefully those options will be added in the near term.

I’m sure that Microsoft sees this and other features of IE8 as a way to grow share in various categories and expose Live Search (or whatever it becomes) to more users. So there’s some tension between using this property to advance Microsoft’s specific interests and offering a service or toolset that is fully user centric. I’m sure the developers would argue the company is trying to do the latter.

The other development I wanted to discuss is Yahoo’s “visual search shortcuts.” This operates from the search box on the browser toolbar. Yahoo must first be selected as the search provider in the IE 8 search box (Live Search is the default). If you then enter a query you see search suggestions but also “shortcuts” for certain categories of information: stocks, movie showtimes, movie reviews and weather.

Here’s an example of what you get on a lookup for the stock quote for “Yhoo”:

Like Accelerators, this feature is also very helpful in quickly getting to desired information without opening new tabs or pages. Yahoo says that it will roll out more categories of shortcuts in the future.

There are no ads in visual shortcuts for IE8 however. If one were to perform the same searches on Yahoo proper there would be, or potentially be, sponsored listings that appeared with search results.

Yahoo, Ask and Microsoft have all run past ad campaigns to try and eat into Google’s market share, almost entirely without success. The message in this campaign (from what I could tell) is that Yahoo is more efficient than Google: answers vs. links.

Despite increasing discomfort within the industry regarding Google’s size and power, there seems to be no indication from the public that they’re ready to abandon Google. In fact, Google outscored other engines in the 2008 American Consumer Satiisfaction Index.

With the right approach, however, there may be an opening and opportunity for Yahoo to gain some incremental usage.

Looking for cheap gas? Sure, the price has been falling, but drivers are still looking to save. Enter Yahoo, which has rolled out a new shortcut that maps gas stations and gas prices directly within in the search results page.

Just use the words “gas prices” or “cheap gas” followed by a ZIP code or city name, and you’ll get back a map with prices mapped. I found that using only the word “gas” with a ZIP or city name also worked. The screenshot above shows how it looked for a search on gas prices 92663.How are things at other search engines? When I looked last June, Google was listing local stations in a map but without prices. That’s still the case:

It still feels like Google is missing an opportunity here. The situation is similar with Microsoft Live Search and seems more a wasted opportunity, since MSN Autos has a gas price mapping service.

Ask has a special shortcut that links to gas price services GasBuddy and MotorTrends:

That’s better than what Google and Live Search do but still far behind Yahoo’s new feature.

Yahoo’s prices come from GasBuddy.com. My past article, Looking For Stations With Cheap Gas Prices? Search Tools To The Rescue!, goes into detail about that service and several others like it.

Annoyingly, if you click on the map at Yahoo, you can’t zoom in on what’s shown. It’s not interactive at all. And if you click on the “Gas Price” link at the top or the “more gas prices” link at the bottom of prices listed, you’ll get shunted over to one of GasBuddy’s many regional sites. In my 92663 example, that sends me to orangecountygasprices.com, where my ZIP code entry isn’t passed along. Hopefully, Yahoo will fix this, so you don’t start from scratch if you try to look for more.

I’d also like to see Yahoo, Google and Live Search send a big signal to GasBuddy that it’s just not on for them to be operating so many different “independent” sites, each clearly designed to target a regional search for gas prices. If these were all within the same gasbuddy.com domain, they wouldn’t “crowd” out other listings. But as they are all on separate domains, they push other sites aside.

For example, in a search on Google for gas prices, I get a Gas Buddy site in these positions:

• 1) gasbuddy.com
• 2) gasbuddy.com
• 3) losangelesgasprices.com
• 10) twincitiesgasprices.com
• 12) atlantagasprices.com
• 14) newyorkgasprices.com

Surely one site that Gas Buddy owns and operate per results page should be enough, shouldn’t it?