Yahoo has been promising to invest in search innovation. The Internet giant on Thursday appears to be making good on its promise with new search features due to roll out this fall.
Yahoo Chief Product Officer Blake Irving unveiled a three-year vision for the company at an event at Yahoo’s headquarters. The vision positions Yahoo as an “innovative technology company with the largest digital-media content and communications business in the world.” The focus is clearly shifting toward entertainment.
But Blake didn’t offer much to back up that vision, leaving some to wonder how the company is going to stem the tide of search-market share loss. Microsoft’s Bing just surpassed Yahoo as the number-two search engine in the U.S. Google remains the overwhelming market leader.
Richer Content Results
“Yahoo demo’d a number of interesting and useful improvements to its products yesterday. There was no single, major announcement — although I saw a very nice iPad app for Yahoo.com and a FaceTime-like PC-to-mobile video chat feature,” said Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. “In general, however, the company seems to finally be improving some important but long-neglected properties, including Mail and Groups.”
One of Yahoo’s promises is an update to its search engine that offers “new experiences” on the results page across its network, which boasts 600 million users. At the event, Yahoo offered a sneak peak of the coming updates, which include searches for music, movies and news, as well as more visually compelling results that help searchers discover information while also being entertained.
“The new Yahoo Search experience for entertainment-related searches will provide richer content results whether you’re searching for movies, music artists, or celebrities by combining images, news articles, videos, tweets, events and ratings,” said a post on Yahoo’s blog.
News searches, meanwhile, will be better organized with videos, images, articles and tweets…