“Our goal is to be best-of-breed in certain categories”
-Vish Makhijani, Yahoo!’s Senior VP of Search.
The new Yahoo! is out and I think it kicks ass. As a user types in keywords, Yahoo! provides suggestions in a pull-down menu. Google’s main search engine only provides suggestions after a search is conducted and keeps its Suggest feature behind a curtain.
The Yahoo! suggestions feature seems to only apply to Web search for now, but hopefully it’ll be rolled into other searches. So as I type in “Nelly” while having Video selected as the Search preference, the suggestion should automatically give me the option to click on Nelly Furtado or Nelly, the rapper. The faster it takes the user to find what they want, the faster they switch search preferences.
As users are searching, events will be pulled from Upcoming.org and image indexing is powered by Flickr. “Our goal is to be best-of-breed in certain categories,” stated Vish Makhijani, Yahoo!’s Senior VP of Search. “Our sense of confidence is greater because of all the work we have put in on the new platform.”
“The proof will be in the pudding, but we think we can bring a fundamental change to the Web search experience,” added Vish. Yahoo! is still young and judging by the redesign, their proof won’t be in tapioca rice pudding. The new and improved Yahoo! is reassuring that the company will be around for a long time and will continuously improve.