Life without Google: Yahoo revamps search; Gets smarter

Yahoo has been playing catch-up on the search front for a while, but its latest update enhances the user interface and may just help close a widening Google gap.

The company unv

eiled its search assist technology and a slick interface that offers suggestions and related topics. These features are also available on other engines such as Ask.com, but Yahoo's delivers the experience well. The goal: Get you where you want to go faster. It's apparent from this latest launch that Yahoo isn't seriously considering outsourcing search to Google. Yahoo obviously sees search as a core competency.

In its corporate blog, Yahoo said that the company "took some liberties with the search box itself, turning it into an interactive experience that senses when you need a hand."

Vish Makhijani, general manager of Yahoo Search, also wrote:

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.

Here's what Yahoo has to say in its Yahoo Search blog (also see Techmeme roundup):

The whole point is we want to get you from "to do" to "done." Whatever it is you want to do: research a topic, find a website, plan a vacation, research a medical condition, view a funny video, or any of the other billions of queries we get from users -- their intents expressed via a few keywords in a search box.

One thing we've learned since launching our own algorithmic search engine back in 2004 is that at the end of the day, people really don't want to search; they want to get things done. Today, we're launching an all new Yahoo! Search experience that gets users the answers they're looking for quickly and easily, and often in one search.

Yahoo has also integrated Flickr images into its search, which is helpful to discovery. Frankly, the most interesting images are often the user generated kind compared to the stock photos--at least when it comes to a search like "Baba Booey."

With Yahoo's update, all of Google's rivals have now revamped the search experience. Microsoft last week rolled out its upgrade, which was generally well received. Mary Jo Foley outlined the big takeaways from Microsoft's latest search and has a gallery of the changes.