With Holidays Near, Yahoo Upgrades Its Shopping & Recipe Search Results

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 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.