Yahoo Upgrades Search Engine

Internet giant Yahoo said on Tuesday that it has added on new features to its search engine to make it faster, more accurate, and thereby, more user-friendly. The response to the new features has been mixed, though most of it has been positive.

Yahoo has enhanced its search engine with the addition of the Search Assist feature to the tool. Simply put, the new feature provides assistance to users with their search operations. Search Assist would, effectively, provide a user with a list of suggestions regarding related topics to search for, a big help when the user is searching for new topics or unknown material.

A member of the search development team at Yahoo, Tim Mayer, has written in a blog that Search Assist would throw up a list of suggested search queries related to the item being searched for, right on the main search page. Citing an example, Mayer said a search for ‘United Nations’ would, for instance, would result in Search Assist giving the user a list of related search items/topics, such as general assembly, security council, etc.

Mayer said Search Assist could seem pretty intuitive. It would pop up automatically as a drop down from the search box when it kind of feels the user is having issues with a particular search query. However, it would appear only if a user asked for it.

Mayer wrote the decision to have the Search Assist show up only on user request came from a common complain most users had about search engines. According to him, most search engine users complained the suggestions appeared on the search page irrespective of whether they wanted to know about them or not.

Mayer also wrote Yahoo had been testing the Search Assist feature for quite a while now. He said rigorous testing had ensured there were improvements to the feature, which had translated to successful searches when users opted to use Search Assist. He said there was a 61 percent increase in the success rate of searches when users opted for Search Assist.

Another announcement from Yahoo said it would provide users with a player to view videos that users had searched out from YouTube, Yahoo Video, or Metacafe. Another upgrade to the search engine was picture/photograph related. Yahoo said its updated search engine would allow Flickr photographs to be embedded on the main results page.

The response from users has been mixed. Some of them have said the upgraded engine with the new add-ons would enable the company to have users stay back and use their search engine instead of going for other engines. However, they said there was still a distance to go before the company could think of hijacking users of rival search engines such as Google and getting them to use the Yahoo search engine.