Yahoo is rolling out a couple new search experiences that are aimed squarely at holiday searchers: recipes and shopping. 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 [...]

Related Topics: Top News | Yahoo: Search | Yahoo: Shopping | Yahoo: User Interface

Yahoo is making a big push today for its new local search (edit: see below) interface, which offers a somewhat dramatic change both in the content it includes and how it's presented. Greg Sterling actually covered most of this a couple weeks ago here on SEL, but here's a quick recap: The new desktop beta offers a stream-like display of local news, deals, events, and other content that comes from Yahoo editors, local websites and blogs, and community members contributing directly to Yahoo Local. A lot of that content is new to Yahoo Local; some of it expands on Yahoo's recent focus on De [...]

Related Topics: Top News | Yahoo: Maps & Local | Yahoo: Mobile & Go | Yahoo: User Interface

Users of Yahoo's mobile web search site (http://m.yahoo.com) on smartphones should notice new enhancements and expanded search results the next time they search using certain types of queries. Yahoo has announced changes to how it shows search results for local business listings, entertainment, stocks, videos, and images on smartphones. Yahoo says it's "pulling more essential information from the web, and employing the latest HTML5 technology to help you easily browse the content you're interested in." A search for Brett Favre, for example, shows how the search results have expanded. [...]

Related Topics: Yahoo: Mobile & Go | Yahoo: User Interface

There are a number of critical articles, even complaints, coming out of yesterday's Yahoo press event featuring new Chief Product Officer Blake Irving. The main portion of the event had Irving and CTO Raymie Strata discussing Yahoo strategy and reiterating that Yahoo wasn't simply a media company but a company with deep technology as well. Some of the informal comments and conversations that immediately followed the 90-minute discussion were along the lines of "We've heard this before, what's new?" or "Where's the vision?" During the Q&A portion of the session Irving stumbled a bit w [...]

Related Topics: Top News | Yahoo: General | Yahoo: Mail | Yahoo: Search | Yahoo: Search Ads | Yahoo: SmartAds | Yahoo: User Interface

If you thought instant search suggestions and results was fun, get a load of this: At Yahoo Taiwan and Yahoo Hong Kong, searchers can handwrite their search queries and Yahoo will try to match the handwriting to letters, and then show suggested searches. It's all described in this Yahoo blog post, complete with screenshots showing how users can begin their search by using a "handwriting panel" next to the search button. Yahoo says that's the Chinese language character for the first letter of Lady Gaga's name. To the left of what the user has drawn, Yahoo shows six possible character [...]

Related Topics: Search Features: Query Refinement | Yahoo: Outside US | Yahoo: Search | Yahoo: User Interface