New Yahoo! Search
The new Yahoo! search came out yesterday. My first impression was good. As others have pointed out, with its clean and simple interface, it’s a pretty clear shot at Google.
Then I saw the search results page and was much less impressed. My results didn’t start until the middle of the page because Yahoo! took lots of room to show me what’s inside Yahoo that’s related to my search and sponsor search results. I understand Yahoo! has to make room for branding, and I understand that they need to make a dime, but starting my search results in the middle of the page makes my search look pretty unimportant to Yahoo! It’s ironic because search is why I’m there.
The new search uses Google (see the tiny print at the bottom of your search results) and identical search terms on the two sites turn up the exact same results. But Yahoo! takes Google’s index and combines it with some of their own features to create a useful results page. First, they default to showing 20 results at a time, which seems like an apology for sometimes taking up half the page with search junk. Second, they use some thoughtful wording. Instead of saying “Category: Arts > Music…” they say “More sites about: Rock and Pop > The White Stripes,” which is a friendlier label that points to their own directory, not the Open Directory as Google does. Next, they use Google’s ability to restrict a search to a specific site and provide a “more results from this site” link. This made me wonder if they found “more results from this site” more useful than Google’s “Similar pages” in user testing. The finding wouldn’t surprise me. I rarely use “Similar pages” and would much rather see more focused results from my search than a list of similar sites, a task not directly related to my search.
Two particularly cool features are search shortcuts and what I’ll call Yahoo! keywords. Search shortcuts allow you to display specific information at the top of your search results. For example, weather columbus shows my local weather. 15531 pizza shows a few pizza shops near my parents. Where Google usually guesses what type of information you’re looking for, you have to specifically ask for it at Yahoo! This brings up another usability balancing act: Yahoo! chose to rely more on the user than on complex algorithms. Perhaps they found that users often know what they want when they search, so they gave them the power to ask for it using shortcuts. This makes sense to me as I usually know exactly what I want and prefer Yahoo!’s shortcuts to Google’s guessing.
The other feature, Yahoo! keywords are simply Yahoo specific shortcuts to their products and services. Pets! takes you to Yahoo! Pets. Travel! takes you - guess where. This is extremely handy and shows the advantage of being a search engine with many other services. However, if Yahoo! wants to position their search more as a command line to Yahoo! (as Google is a command line to the Web), they’ll need to include the search on all of their pages. A command line isn’t much good if it’s not always there. Of course, if you use Internet Explorer, you can install the Yahoo! toolbar, which will then always be at the top of your browser.
Finally, I’d like to touch on their use of tables and CSS. I’m happy to see that they’ve used CSS extensively throughout their new search site, but they’re still relying heavily on tables for layout, especially in their page headers. I can only attribute this to laziness as they’re not doing anything on their pages that CSS can’t handle. If ESPN can go all CSS, Yahoo! can too.
Update: Douglas Bowman created an all CSS version of the new Yahoo! Search. As usual with Doug, excellent work.
The new Yahoo! search is definitely a big step in the right direction and I’d like to congratulate Christina Wodtke and the rest of her team at Yahoo! for their hard work. I’m anxious to see what Yahoo! does next to shake up the search engine world.
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Comments
If ESPN can go all CSS, Yahoo! can too.
No, I disagree. Yahoo cannot afford to isolate any users, even if they’re using Netscape 4.x
Such people shouldn’t have to see a “vanilla” page. Given the traffic Yahoo gets, even 1% of their user base would be millions of people.
MadMan on 8 Apr 03
I don’t agree with ESPN’s decision to force their users to upgrade to see any content. All CSS doesn’t mean isolating users or even showing a “vanilla” page as there are HTML/CSS techniques that allows all visitors to have a quality experience even if they’re using Netscape 4.x.
Joshua on 9 Apr 03
I think they can afford to isolate some users. Most sites that have switched over to CSS claim there’s a big cost savings in site maintenance. So at some point the savings become higher than revenue generated by those 1% of users they leave behind. And any negative impression they leave with consumers in the switch should be well offset by the positive impression that Yahoo stays on the “cutting edge” of web technology.
Tim on 9 Apr 03
“positive impression that Yahoo stays on the “cutting edge” of web technology.”
Because we know mainstream people care about that.
scH on 11 Apr 03