Yahoo — Tag

With Yahoo! being forgotten with all these new “universal” search engines like Google and Ask.com, it relaunched with a new, slicker, search engine. And it’s fantastic.

You do a search and you get the results. Bland. But then you try and refine your search, this is where one of the bigger changes is made. You click on the little down arrow or start typing some more and suggestions will appear,

There are two things here. Search suggestions, and search “concepts.” The suggestions work as any other search engine these days, you click and it searches. Concepts append the words to the end of the current search term. Cool thing about the concepts is that the page doesn’t reload, it replaces the previous search results.

It has other tricks up it sleeve, which I think beats Google’s “Universal” search. Say you stumble across a YouTube video. Google will show you a thumbnail, but Yahoo! will show you a thumbnail that will make the video appear below the search result.

If you search for a music artist, it will give you a box at the top, with a link to the official website and if available some music previews, which once again play right there.

Sometimes it will integrate with Flickr, but that seems to be a bit hit-and-miss as usual. It has all the neat little Google tricks, like currency conversion and (what I just found out) time telling.

I’ll keep this as my default for now.

Update The link works now. Check it out.

To me, it seems Yahoo! is getting the whole internet at this point. They have released some rather snappy “technologies” recently that showed how much they “get it.” Look at the new home page for instance, they get it, you want simple. But take into account a new idea Yahoo! have just come out with - alpha.

• alpha

You go to the homepage and notice just a search box. If you are signed in, it gives you a warm greeting. So far so good. You start typing… but you notice it not giving any suggestions as you type. Weird, I was hoping for AJAX-ness. So, you hit the Search button, and hello! Suddenly, you notice all the AJAX-ness, and the fact that this is a Web 2.0 search engine. Why? It links to social websites!

You get your main search results to the left, and several boxes to the right. You must click on these to expand them and browse through the results. Better yet, it links to things not owned by Yahoo!. It searches YouTube and Wikipedia as well. Cool thing is, you can expand the search results box even more and make a certain box the prominent one on the left. Searching for Flickr photos? Then expand the Flickr section and hit “More Results.” Simple.

Perhaps the coolest thing I found was that you don’t have to be tethered just these searches. Click the “Customize this page” text in the upper right, and you can drag and drop the search spaces, and better yet, specify a custom information source. It is a bit tricky at the moment as the search results need to be in RSS form. I’m sure Yahoo! will come up with something where you can see other information sources that people have made (you can make certain ones public, but I haven’t seen any way to access the public ones).

Hopefully alpha will grow into something big as this is what the web needs. We have specific search engines for specific things, but these days the internet is all about making websites modular to the point where people can take the main part of several sites and mash them together to form some kind of new website, for example, Twittervision, a convergence of Google Maps and Twitter. This is happening all over the place, and this search engine shows Yahoo! “getting it.”