Yahoo Rolling Out “Accordion” Search & Other Features

Yahoo is launching a number of search enhancements this evening that start to deliver on the UI innovation that the company has been promising since the Microsoft search deal was announced. It’s part of Yahoo’s bid to remain relevant in search by spicing up the user experience and trying to bring more utility to page one.

Many of these new features were previewed at the recent “Runway” event last month. The two biggest changes or enhancements that users will immediately notice involve image search and a new “accordion” module at the top of search results (though it doesn’t always appear).

Do a search for “Toy Story 3″ or “Lady Gaga,” for example, and you’ll see this:

Users can flip through panes that contain different types of information. In the case of Toy Story 3 there are “overview,” “video” and “Twitter” tabs. The content types and number of tabs will vary and be relevant to the query. In the case of Lady Gaga there are additional “events” tabs and “album” tabs. The events tab contains a link to buy tickets. There are also horizontal tabs with related content on top.

Search SVP Shashi Seth told me that there will be more such transactional elements in search results going forward. It doesn’t currently exist but one could easily imagine an embedded OpenTable link tied to a specific restaurant query. And there are other scenarios in which this accordion module could enable actions or transactions. Travel is another category that quickly comes to mind.

I spoke to Seth about the potential appearance of display and rich media advertising in this area of the page. (Earlier today I moderated the SMX East panel on search and display, so it’s on my brain.)  He said that isn’t the case at launch but Yahoo has thoughts along those lines in certain commercial contexts.

This module also enables “discovery” of information in a way that traditional search results do not. There’s a mixture of push and pull going on here, which is very interesting. Accordingly it goes beyond the “smart box”/”one box” universal search approach favored in the past couple of years.

Consistent with the notion of making page one more “actionable,” Yahoo is integrating what it calls “quick apps” into search farther down the page. The first of these is a Netflix app that will open a window and enable “Netflix members to add movies to their Queue right from the Search results page.”  You could also watch trailers and theoretically stream entire movies in this window.

The philosophy behind all these moves involves taking search “from finding to doing.”

As mentioned, image search is being revamped. Image pages get a new more visually engaging and “immersive” environment. Yahoo is putting more slideshows (from Flickr and other Yahoo sites) in image search results that then lead to pages that look like this:

Beyond this, Yahoo image search will allow people to “view personally meaningful public Facebook albums from friends when they sign-in and connect their Yahoo! accounts to Facebook.”

Finally Yahoo says that iPhone and Android users will see faster and “more sophisticated” search results built on HTML5. The new Yahoo Finance app is an example of this.

This collection of new features and tools rolls out immediately in the US and then globally next year.

Yahoo has been promising UI/UX innovation for many months and these new capabilities represent something of a down payment. However the company says it will continue to do more and go further over the coming months. This “is just the beginning.”

 

Source : Searchengineland

 

Google Might Be On Yahoo’s Home Page

Senior director’s comments elicit big “huh?”

The Yahoo search experience might at some point change in a very surprising way.  That Bing may take over, we’ve come to accept.  But at least one high-ranking Yahoo employee thinks Google could get a shot, too.

Let’s talk about said employee for a moment.  Burke Culligan is the senior director of product planning and strategy over Yahoo’s front page and My Yahoo, so he’s in a good position to discuss significant adjustments.  Also, Culligan’s worked for Yahoo since October of 2005, so it’s not like he’s some newbie who doesn’t know the score.

Judge the next bit for yourself, then.

Joseph Tartakoff reported, “During an update on the status of the home page, Yahoo senior director Burke Culligan told analysts that the company was not opposed to letting users replace Yahoo search with Microsoft’s Bing or even Google.”

Culligan apparently explained, “Right now, we’re not doing that but long-term that may not be out of the question.  We want to provide the best experience for the user and, in some way, if that was the best experience for the user we might be open to that.”


This led Kit Eaton to speculate that the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo deal is falling apart.  Or perhaps Culligan was talking about what will happen after it expires in ten years.  Regardless, his comments were rather striking, and we’ll keep an ear out for any denials or clarifications that follow.

Google Might Be On Yahoo’s Home Page

 

Yahoo Exchanges Alibaba.com Stake For $150M

Yahoo should soon have about $150 million more to its name.  By selling 57.48 million shares, the Sunnyvale-based company is liquidating its stake in Chinese business-to-business site Alibaba.com and collecting a tidy profit.

Yahoo acquired its 1.14 percent stake in Alibaba.com during the company’s initial public offering in 2007.  Now, Reuters reports that Yahoo will sell the stake at a 4.0-6.4 percent discount on Alibaba’s most recent closing price.

That might indicate that Yahoo’s in a bit of a hurry; there’s a definite concern, at least, about how both Yahoo and Alibaba.com shareholders will interpret its move.  (A relevant note: Yahoo’s stock is already down 1.22 percent this morning).  But even after the discount, Yahoo should realize a profit of 47 percent or more, which makes its investment look like a good one.

Here’s another important detail: Yahoo is holding onto its 40 percent stake in Alibaba.com’s parent company, Alibaba Group, so it’s not getting out of China or anything of the sort.

John Spelich, a vice president at Alibaba Group, also stated, “We are pleased to learn of the Yahoo! decision because having broader ownership of Alibaba.com with increased liquidity and support among institutional investors is what Alibaba.com hoped to achieve when it released the cornerstone investors.”

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Yahoo Exchanges Alibaba.com Stake For $150M

 

Yahoo’s Social Plan : Twitter, Twitter & More Twitter ?

Yahoo’s moves this year is like watching a kid in class fall head-over-heels for the prettiest girl in class. He scribbles her initials inside his notebook and tries to impress her at every turn. She never seems to reply, at least not when the rest of the class would see it, so he just keeps trying harder. And harder.

Here’s what I’m getting at: Yahoo has spent 2009 making a series of moves that suggests it really has a thing for Twitter. Most of these moves have been made out of the spotlight’s glare, but altogether they leave an unmistakable trail of evidence that, at minimum, Yahoo has great admiration for Twitter. And they could mean much more than that. Consider the evidence….

Yahoo Meme

Don’t know what Yahoo Meme is? Well, the closest comparison is Twitter. It’s a micro-blogging service where users post updates that can include photos and/or video. Meme supports reposting and following other users to stay abreast of their updates. Sound familiar?

Yahoo Meme launched a few months ago, but only in a Portuguese version. TechCrunch reported Wednesday that Yahoo recently launched a Spanish-language version with little fanfare.

TweetNews

In January, Yahoo programmer Vik Singh created TweetNews, a search engine that uses Twitter to re-rank Yahoo’s latest news search results.

Singh is the architect of Yahoo BOSS and was just named one of MIT’s Young Innovators Under 35. It means something when he starts messing with Twitter.

Yahoo Home Page

When Yahoo announced its new home page last month, one of the new features is a Twitter-like status update tool that lets you post short messages to your Yahoo account.

The new home page also has an “Updates” tab in the left navigation, which mimics the Twitter experience in a couple ways — showing you updates from your own “connections” (like followers on Twitter) or from all Yahoo users.

What you post as your status on the Yahoo home page will also show on your Yahoo profile, which was redesigned several months ago and now features, you guessed it, a Twitter-like invite to answer the question, “What are you doing now?”

Yahoo Mail

Yahoo Mail is the company’s most popular property, and Yahoo has been bent on making it more social this year. In June, Yahoo announced several new features with Twitter-like sharing in mind. One of those is the ability to update your status from inside Yahoo Mail.

Know Your Mojo

Just last week, Yahoo introduced a site called Know Your Mojo that purports to tell you what kind of Twitter user you are.

There’s no real purpose for Know Your Mojo to exist that I can see, other than to give Yahoo another way to show its affection for Twitter.

Important People

Just yesterday, Yahoo was spreading the word about Important People, a new tool that’s “so beta it’s not even alpha.” What is it? It’s a tool that tries to determine “the most influential people tweeting about a specific topic.”

And how did Yahoo spread the word yesterday? Via Twitter, of course.

Sideline

Important People is being considered for inclusion in Sideline, a desktop application that Yahoo developed to let Twitter users monitor hot trends and other keyword searches in the Twitter stream.

What’s It All Mean

When new CEO Carol Bartz came on board this year, she promised what I previously called a back to the future approach to Yahoo’s properties. She promised Yahoo would “create community from isolated sites.” Adding social elements to Yahoo Mail and the Yahoo home page makes sense given Yahoo’s huge user base. But, as you can see above, a lot of these new social touches aren’t just about getting social in a general sense; they’re either directly about Twitter or mimic Twitter very closely.

Is Yahoo interested in buying Twitter? (Who isn’t?) In May, Yahoo CTO Ari Balough told the Reuters Global Technology Summit that the company is looking at buying companies that will help Yahoo be a bigger player in social media. “It’s a good time to be buying now…. I can guarantee you there will be some acquisitions, and we will do some stuff in-house.”

People have been speculating about Yahoo buying Twitter for some time. Back in February, John Battelle suggested that “Yahoo might see Twitter as a way to get back to the days of Flickr.” In May, an opinion piece on CBSNews.com made the case for Yahoo to buy Twitter. But both of those, along much of the other speculation, were written before the Yahoo-Microsoft deal.

What’s been said since the deal? Not much.

In last month’s Yahoo earnings conference call, there were several mentions of Yahoo’s plans to be more social. But the word “Twitter” wasn’t mentioned once, not even in passing. If Yahoo has any designs on Twitter, it’s playing things close to the vest (as it should).

But perhaps in this case, Yahoo’s actions speak louder than its words.

Source : searchengineland.com