Geekblok

Yahoo! Search has a lot of cool features, that really take searching to a next level. Back in the day, when Google came into focus, the clean interface and awesome search results defined the standard for modern search engines. Yahoo!, however, has beaten Google, in my humble opinion, by completely reinventing the search engine.

Google’s search results are not what they’ve used to be. I usually show people the awesome Dutch website zoekmachinetest.nl. It shows you a the results of the major search engines in Dutch in random order so you can see for yourself which one you really like best. Since I couldn’t find an English version of this website, I’ve created one myself: searchenginetest.swal.org. Go check it out!

But let’s look at some of these new features!

Yahoo! goes beyond the traditional plain list of search results. I’ve really questioned the new features at first, for we all are so used to the idea of just a page full of links, but I now do think offering a bit more is pretty cool.

Say you’re looking for information about a movie. Just type in the query (in this case Bourne Ultimatum) and Yahoo! will recognize it’s a movie. Besides the ever growing list of links, it’ll show you a box like this:

As you can see, the give you the rating given by Yahoo! users (called Yahoos) and critics, a little description and a link to the trailer. If you’re looking for this movie, these things are probably fairly handy! You can also enter your city or zip code to find out the showtimes for your local cinema (but that’s fairly useless to non-US folks).

Let’s move on to music. I fancy the good old Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson. Searching for him will show you a similar box as above with direct links to albums, lyrics and videos. Popular songs can be played from within the same page and even videos (I wasn’t even aware of the existence of Bruce Dickinson videos!) just popup in the way we know from the Lightbox javascripts as show below.

Again, fairly impressing!

But that’s not all. Yahoo!’s mission statement is:

to connect people to their passions, their communities, and the world’s knowledge.

The two examples above clearly show they’re trying to connect people to their passions (movies and music). But what about the world’s knowledge? They do that too.

How often do you find yourself searching for an online dictionary to look up a word? (I always use a simple perl command line script). Yahoo! offers you dictionary lookups too. Just use the word “define” like define geek. This will give you the definition of the word geek as shown below:

Useful!

There are a lot of these kind of shortcuts. For example look at these searches

• capital of kenya facts
• asthma
• convert 84 degrees fahrenheit to celsius

The list is endless.

The final thing I will cover is the new Search Assist. Unlike the shortcuts, that have been around for a while now (and can be found in other search engines too), the search assist tool is pretty fresh. It helps you dig deeper after your initial search. By showing popular other related queries, you might find the document you’re looking for a little faster. For example, when you look for information on Britney Spears (I agree, why would anyone care?), the search assist as shown below suggests other keywords, like “gimme more video”, “and her kids”, “kevin federline” etc.

This truly might come in handy. I now know that Kevin Federline was married to Britney Spears, woohoo!

Conclusion: life doesn’t end at Google. Yahoo! showed us it’s a fairly big competitor, leading us into a new age of searching.