15 October 2007
Search engine Yahoo! has made a number of changes to its site, including a search assist feature, as well as video and photo display functionality in search results.
The 'search assist' functionality evolves from the search engine giving relevant vertical search results to certain queries.
Yahoo! claims that this new feature improves user satisfaction – finding that task completion (users clicking on a search result) improved by 61%.
To boost the user experience Yahoo! has also begun to integrate results from a range of media into its search results. When searches turn up results from YouTube or other video sites, videos are now embedded into the results page, and likewise results also display images from Flickr.
Some search marketers are concerned that this trend towards 'universal search' will make it harder to get visibility on the first page of search engines, as Google, Ask.com, and Microsoft have all started to turn towards this trend of include video, news and images in their search results pages.
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