Yahoo took the final wraps off of their improved search today. The engineers have been working hard to catch up to Google in the feature department. I have to say that after my early tests I may just re-join the ranks of the Yahooligans. The most prominent change comes in the form of the “Assisted Search”.  As you type in your request, the drop down menu starts culling suggested terms and phrases. The concept is nothing new, Ask.Com has had this feature for a while and Google has something similar in the built in search field in the FireFox browser. Yahoo takes the concept much further, offering up the ability to “Explore Concepts”. I’ve found that the relational results are very good. Ask.Com doesn’t hold a candle to it. In fact, I found in Ask.com that the levels of suggestion are very shallow and when it does display the results, you seem to get twice as many sponsored results as you do organic. I also don’t care too much for the fact that it’s really hard to tell the difference between the two. Yahoo is also stepping up it’s effort to compete with Google’s universal search efforts by adding more including user generated content from other Yahoo properties like Flickr in the results matrix. Below are some combined screen caps I did of a search using the assist feature. I started by typing in an area that one of our clients concentrates on, Cy-Fair Texas. As I typed it gave the opportunity to search Cy Fair Texas Real Estate and also served up several concepts to explore, the first of which is the term “podcast”. Clicking through to Cy-Fair Texas Real Estate showed the number 7 and 10 results as hits to our client’s MLBroadcast Channel. Clicking the concept term of “podcast” (see graphic) showed 9 of the 10 results on the page as destinations where the broadcast channel exists. Our client’s overall results for organic search are actually a little better in Google, however, I think the user experience in Yahoo’s new interface could be enough to start taking back some much needed market share.

Public event calendars will also be included in Yahoo’s results. Let’s say you’re doing a search on your favorite band, concert dates and other related events like television programs will show up as structured data. One idea to take advantage of the additional exposure opportunities would be to use Yahoo’s calendar application to create community event calendars for the areas you farm.

From our perspective, another avenue where Yahoo seems to be winning the battle for eyeballs is with their shared video platform, Yahoo Video. We are finding on average 2 to 3 times the number of viewings for listing and community content in Yahoo Video as compared to YouTube. So, if it’s been a while since you’ve Yahooed, go back and give it a try. Let us know what you think.