Chan's Personal Blog

Earlier this month, I had a post about the new Yahoo Search. This was a major product release, so they threw a big launch party associated to celebrate. I've finally posted pictures of the Yahoo Search Launch Party, so check those out.


The launch party happened over at Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale. The main celebration and after party happened back in Santa Clara (where I work), and they had an open bar, and appetizers for all.

I've just received the green light to blog about this subject, so here goes. Hot off the press, Yahoo has just launched a new version of Yahoo Search. The look and feel of the search pages have been updated, and lots of new features have been introduced.

The show stopper is the new Search Assist feature on the Yahoo search result pages. If you go to the Yahoo homepage, you'll see a sticky note telling you to try Search Assist as seen below.



Here's a screenshot of Search Assist which is the dark blue box under the search box. On the left column of Search Assist are related queries that will help you narrow your search. On the right column are related concepts of your search. More info about Search Assist can be found here.


Please try out Search Assist and leave feedback and comments.

Search Assist is pretty neat. I really like the user interface for it. Originally I thought it was developed in Flash, but it turns out they did it all using Javascript. It's nice to see search finally getting richer user interface elements.

For those who want to do quick searches, we have the Yahoo Search front page (http://search.yahoo.com). It has been cleaned up and it loads pretty darn fast now. I think this search page is one of the least known things about Yahoo Search. I certainly didn't even know it existed until I joined Yahoo. I asked my university friends if they even knew this existed, and none of them did. I actually prefer using this page because my purpose is to do my search and get on with it. I don't want to wait for the page to render before I type in my search.