The new Yahoo! Search

Yahoo! began as a human-powered search engine back in 1994. Okay, so it was Jerry and David’s guide to the World Wide Web, but the goal was the same as it is now — give people a simple way to find exactly what they’re looking for, whatever it is they’re looking for. And from those humble beginnings in Jerry and David’s campus trailer, while our search engine has evolved, our mission has stayed intact — providing the best search experience for our users.

Today, we evolve again with the introduction of the new Yahoo! Search. We’ve invested in research, design, and engineering to better understand your intent when you’re searching so we can do a better job of getting you to your answer in one search.

With this launch, we took some liberties with the search box itself, turning it into an interactive experience that senses when you need a hand. In a dropdown window on our home page and on our results page, Yahoo! Search Assist provides both query suggestions as you type as well as related concepts you can explore to get you to your answer by just pointing and clicking. Try it with searches like "energy savings" to see what we mean. In testing Search Assist, we found that users were 61% more successful in completing their task with this new search feature at their disposal.

We also realize that the right answer is often more than a link – it's a photo or a video. So we’ve integrated this multimedia content directly into the search results to give you a more complete answer. Looking for images of Nepal? You'll find thumbnails of Flickr images tagged with that query. Typing in "Dove evolution"? Chances are you want to watch the video, which we'll serve up in your results as an inline video. No need to leave the page — give it a try.

And we’ve continued to improve the Yahoo! Search experience by giving you more of the answers you’re looking for directly on the search page for popular categories like music, movies, travel, athletes, health, restaurants, events, and local information.

This is just the beginning of some of the improvements you’ll be seeing from Yahoo! Search over the next few months. Our mission is to get you from "to do" to "done." Give it a try and tell us what you think.

Vish Makhijani
SVP & GM, Yahoo! Search