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.

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 Deals-based content and some is made possible by the company’s push into hyperlocal content in recent months, as well as its purchase of Associated Content earlier this year. (If adoption picks up, the new Yahoo Local could become a hyperlocal blog/content network to be reckoned with.)

As Greg pointed out in his article, the local search box is gone and there’s not even a map showing (but there is a “maps & directions” link in the right column).

You can see all this on the beta page (desktop version) for San Francisco, or one of the other cities and neighborhoods where the beta is available. If you live in one of those 30 or so towns, you can access the beta at http://beta.local.yahoo.com.

The New Yahoo Local On Mobile

What’s new to today’s announcements is the availability of the Yahoo Local beta where it will really be most important: on mobile devices. After choosing your neighborhood, Yahoo presents a mix of hyperlocal news, events, and offers.

It’s an interesting mix of content. I’m seeing movie listings, Groupon offers (not shown above but further down the screen), videos from Turn Here, events from Yahoo’s Upcoming.org property, and articles from hyperlocal blogs.

But, as Greg pointed out in his article a couple weeks ago about the desktop version, it’s not very useful as a tool for finding local businesses — and that’s one of the primary mobile use cases. For now, and specifically for me as an iPhone user, that task is better handled by Yahoo’s traditional mobile app.

The new Yahoo Local is in beta for now, so I’ll be curious to see if local business search/discovery gets added as Yahoo continues to refine the product.

Postscript, December 9: In regard to my question in the paragraph above, it seems unlikely that local business search will be added to the new Yahoo Local. Through its PR reps, Yahoo has clarified that Yahoo Local is about “local discovery” instead of “local search,” and asked that we correct the mention in the first paragraph of a “local search interface.”

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.

(three screenshots from scrolling down the search results)

There’s a lot of information being returned here:

• profile information with current stats
• news results
• web results
• Twitter results
• more web results
• links to Image, Local, and News search results
• related searches (“Also Try”)
• ads (one at the top, two at the bottom)

I counted 27 results, not including the links to ads, related searches and other search types.

Yahoo says the search result enhancements are available now at http://m.yahoo.com for most iPhone users in the U.S. and some newer versions of Android 2.x phones. It’s also available via the Yahoo Search for Android widget. Yahoo says more devices and countries will get the new mobile search experience in future months.

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 when asked by the BBC’s Maggie Shields to sum up what Yahoo was in a sentence. He rattled off a list of things.

Indeed, Irving had said during his opening, “People have seen Yahoo as disassociated set of verticals. Going forward there’s going to be ‘one Yahoo.’ You’re going to see us transition to an on network and off network player — something that you take with you and not as much as a place where you go.”

This sort of thing has been said before (remember YOS?).

During his opening remarks Irving laid out some elements (literally as a periodic table) of Yahoo’s “new” strategy:

• Building an ecosystem outside the Yahoo network: both ads and content. Irving suggests that Yahoo might create a “content exchange” like the RightMedia ads exchange. There will also be a focus on third party sites
• Personal relevance through data. Irving says 50% of Yahoo’s 600 million log in. “We are going to be striving for 100% authentication over the next three years.” (By honoring OpenID and not just Yahoo IDs.)
• Be where the consumer is (mobile and tablets will be equally important)
• Social: own real social relationships on the web. He implies that Yahoo’s social strategy involves smaller groups than large public networks
• Best in class services: Irving asserts that this is Yahoo’s challenge/task across devices

Beyond these principles, Irving previewed a few specifics: a rebuilt Yahoo Mail with speed and design improvements, some search UI changes that would be more visually pleasing and enable users to “act” on search results more than today. Irving said, “We’re going to bring you as close to that ‘answer’ as possible” (including conducting transactions from the search results page).

There was also a brief visual tease of a forthcoming iPad app for Yahoo that looked pretty nicely designed.

After Irving, CTO Raymie Stata got up and talked about bringing a “search mindset” to the whole of Yahoo and infusing everything being done with “big science” to generate “awesome experiences.” He went on to discuss Yahoo’s architecture and infrastructure, saying that many changes had been made to lay the groundwork for a “faster, more iterative” approach to product development going forward (to use Irving’s words).

Though both men were passionate and articulate the discussion felt a bit like a meal without the entree. But then I went into the hall, which not everyone did, and saw some of the product demos and talked to some of the product people about specifics. After those conversations my perception of things changed considerably.

Reporters who wrote their stories “in the room” without the benefit of seeing the demos only heard what sounded like a familiar aspirational speech. But if you actually saw some of the product specifics it put some interesting “meat on the bones” of Irving and Stata’s general remarks.

Asked to discuss my reactions immediately following the press conference, I told the BBC that Yahoo has “strong products and strong content but they don’t have . . . . products that have gotten people excited.” I told the Wall Street Journal that “They need to show up with sexy, exciting stuff to regain some of their old credibility.” These were my immediate, quick reactions to the general and short-on-specifics speeches. But I felt differently after speaking to the product people.

Out in the hall I saw:

• A new version of Yahoo Messenger than includes a “Face Time” like PC-to-smartphone video chat capability
• A better looking and seemingly faster Yahoo Mail
• A very well-designed version of Yahoo for the iPad (nothing like the browser version) that was visually rich and capable of customization
• Some impressive new rich media ad units
• A much improved version of Yahoo Groups that was visually more pleasing and seemingly more useful
• A partly new search interface with some intriguing possibilities, including the presentation of rich display ads in the “accordion” module at the top of results:

Yahoo Search SVP Shashi Seth told me that this accordion module, which allows users to quickly browse through information, was testing very well and would be coming this fall. Whether you like it or not personally it’s the kind of thing that Yahoo has said it was going to do in the post-Bing era: innovate on top of the Microsoft index.

I came away from these and a couple of other discussions thinking (in contrast to my immediate remarks) maybe Yahoo doesn’t need a single big vision. Maybe that’s not possible given Yahoo’s legacy. Instead, maybe it just needs to do what it does already but do it better and update it more frequently. In other words make its products better and easier to use and bring out improvements more rapidly. (There are some who might argue it has lost some of the engineering talent required to do so.)

Yet this is precisely what Blake Irving said that Yahoo would do now: “iterate more rapidly.” In a sense Yahoo doesn’t need lots of flashy new stuff so much as it needs to stop neglecting some of the assets it already owns. That was acknowledged to me several times in my demo-related conversations. Yahoo Groups is a case-in-point.

Yahoo says it has 10 million groups, with a total of 115 million users globally. By comparison, MySpace officially claims just over 120 million users globally (though “active” users may be fewer). Groups was a social network of sorts before there were social networks.

Yahoo has in the past tried to turn Mail into a social network but Yahoo Groups is already a version of what Google has been considering around smaller sets of connections; it has just been long neglected. A better designed and more functional Yahoo Groups, which is what I saw, could represent a major avenue into “social networking” and it’s already there.

I’m not entirely reversing myself here. I do think that new and exciting products would help Yahoo. But I also believe that if Yahoo can do a better job of developing what it already has it can not only retain but grow usage and regain some of its lost “mojo” — whatever that is exactly.

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 matches. And once the searcher indicates which character s/he drew, Yahoo then shows 10 suggested searches.

Yahoo says this feature should make it easier for searchers who typically type their queries in Chinese, but the feature also accepts handwritten queries in English. Here are the results of me using the writing panel with the letter “s.”

You’ll need the latest version of Adobe’s Flash Player for this writing panel to work. Yahoo says the technology supports Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, English, and numbers.

Users can add Yahoo search to the home screen (as an Android Widget). It’s also voice-enabled.

It’s not clear to me whether that voice search capability is provided by partner Vlingo (in which Yahoo is an investor) or whether it uses Google’s voice recognition baked into the OS itself. It would be highly ironic if Yahoo search on Android were powered by Google voice recognition.

If you’d like to download any of these apps you can scan the barcodes below (or go into the Android Market).

In general Yahoo’s mobile search experience is very good and Yahoo has the opportunity to make gains if it can truly “innovate around the UI and UX” as the company has promised.

It will be interesting to see later what sort of usage Yahoo gets with Search on Android. Most Android devices, with a couple of narrow exceptions, are wedded to Google search. I would imagine however that there are many Android buyers who use Yahoo Mail and Messenger.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Postscript: Not being an Android power user I was confused about how to install Yahoo Search. It appeared to be an app that wouldn’t launch on my EVO. In fact, after speaking to Yahoo, I found out it’s a “widget” that you install on your homescreen.

You download the “app” from the Android Market and then touch and hold the homescreen. Then select Yahoo Search from the widget menu (all the apps/widgets appear as a list) — and viola; it’s on the homescreen.

Voice search is enabled by Google voice recognition technology on the device, but otherwise it’s all Yahoo. The Android Yahoo Search interface is very much like its iPhone UI. And in many respects it’s more “mobile-friendly” and pleasing — although that’s a matter of taste — than Google’s mobile UI.

The new feature acts similarly to what Yahoo’s done in the other verticals. Now, when using Yahoo Video Search to find TV shows, searchers will get a series of refinements in the left-side column that offer deeper searches for specific characters, popular episodes, and seasons. Here’s the screenshot of a search for How I Met Your Mother:

The second refiner deals with searches for popular film actors. The video results page will now show links to clips from an actor’s popular movies, like this search for Tom Hanks:

Yahoo calls these search “refiners” but their real strength is in organizing the available content into logical, user-friendly subsets.

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.

The next revolution isn’t with the algorithms that provide results, it’s in creating a better, more personally relevant search experience. This is where we’ll differentiate ourselves and compete vigorously without the billions required to keep up in the arms race that generating search results has become.

Let me give you an analogy that Carol has been using to explain this point. Consider basic search to be an Intel chip. An Intel chip is used in Dells, HPs and Macs to provide the computation needed to operate them but the differentiation between these products isn’t at the chip level, it’s in the different user experiences that are provided on top of them. It’s the same for us in search. We’ll innovate on top of the results that are provided to us by Microsoft.

While a clever way to discuss Yahoo’s new role, vis-a-vis Bing (the algo “chip”) it doesn’t seem to be convincing many industry insiders.

Yesterday at the Web2.0 event in San Francisco Google co-founder Sergey Brin made a “surprise” visit and talked about a range of things. Dow Jones newswires captured some of the discussion. Specifically Brin lamented the “abdication” of search by Yahoo. Here’s TechCrunch’s version of the relevant part of the exchange between Brin and interviewer John Battelle:

JB: Do you like Bing? You a Bing users?

SB: I use all search engines out there. Bing reminds us that search is a competitive market. There’s Powerset that Microsoft bought. There’s Cuil. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on. It’s a shame Yahoo is abdicating.

JB: They would say they’re not.

SB: Sorry that was my impression.

JB: Do you have a comment on Microsoft/Yahoo search deal?

SB: I shouldn’t comment on that. But Yahoo had some interesting things, they should stick with it.

The Cuil folks should be pleased that Brin gave them a shout out.

Yahoo previewed these new features previously and Danny discussed them at some length in an earlier post. These changes are now in effect in the US, UK, France, Spain, Mexico, and India and will roll out more broadly to other markets in the near future. Overall there’s more visual appeal to the new format and the Search Monkey refinements are useful in most cases.

Below is an example search for London. Shortcuts remain at the top of results, now the center column:

If we click the “Yahoo Travel” filter in the left column, we get the following results without entering a new query:

Further down in the left column you can also refine by “weather” (not a Search Monkey filter, but a related “Search Assist” concept):

Search Assist continues to be a prominent feature of the overall search experience. And Search Pad gets more visibility:

The newly launched search format generally mirrors the new Yahoo homepage with its brand-centric left column:

With this new look and feel Yahoo Search moves somewhat closer to Bing, ironically. Bing has seen its market share slowly creep up and is probably a greater threat to its partner Yahoo than it is to Google.

In the relatively near future the actual results on Bing and Yahoo will be the same (assuming regulatory approval of the deal). Thus Yahoo will continue to need to make changes and upgrades to the interface and overall user experience to prevent a loss of usage and market share.

I haven’t systematically tested Yahoo’s new search against Google and Bing. However I generally like the new appearance as well as the Search Monkey features.

One thing that Yahoo should consider is a personalized left nav/column (a la the new home page) where users can select favorite Search Monkey filters (e.g., Yelp for local, Kayak for travel). Indeed, the more prominent appearance of Search Monkey in the new Yahoo Search may encourage more sites and publishers to participate in the program.

We hope that these changes are part of an ongoing series of upgrades to Yahoo Search, although many continue to believe that with the outsourcing of its back end and index to Microsoft, and exodus of key search engineers, that Yahoo has effectively given up on search. New Yahoo CMO Elisa Steele tried briefly to rebut that idea in her IAB MIXX keynote speech announcing the new Yahoo branding campaign.

Here’s more on the new search changes from the Yahoo Search Blog.