Yahoo Totally Revamps Search Appearance
Big changes came to Yahoo today, as the company has totally reinvented the appearance of their search engine results pages, also known as SERPs. At first glance, the new look is cleaner, easier to scan and more focused on the results themselves.
While most of the changes are aesthetic, Yahoo has made some “under the hood” changes to make your Yahoo search experience faster too. If you’re still trying to decide between Bing and Google, now might be a good time to throw Yahoo into the mix as well. The news comes courtesy of the Yahoo Blog on Tumblr.
A Fresh New Look, Faster Performance to Boot
Yahoo’s top priority with the redesign was obviously putting more emphasis on the search results themselves. Results now appear just below the search bar, with tabs for “Web,” “Images,” “Video,” etc. moved to a left-side navigation bar. Related searches are no longer suggested, which ultimately allows for more white space and a cleaner appearance.
Yahoo didn’t just remove functionality from search to clean up the appearance, however. They’ve also added a new navigation bar to the top of every page that allows you to quickly navigate between Games, Weather, Finance, Sports, News and other areas of Yahoo. Yahoo says that the new navigation bar will be coming to additional Yahoo properties in the near future.
Overall, the new version of Yahoo search looks a lot more like the current Yahoo homepage, which is certainly no accident.
Finally, Yahoo says they’ve made “some under-the-hood performance improvements,” which are supposed to result in faster page loading, though there’s no word yet on exactly how big the improvement is.
But can Yahoo really compete with Google and all of the search upgrades they’ll be making over the summer?
Yahoo has an answer: “Over the coming months, you’ll see more from Yahoo! as we work to deliver a search experience that combines utility with beauty and gets you to your results faster. Today’s news is just our first step.”