The user interface of this widget is pretty simple and fits nicely on the size of your phone screen. You can interact with the widget by not only typing (via the touch screen) but also using your own voice. (Yes, it supports voice input, but I believe this is a feature of the phone/android OS itself). But regardless of how you enter the query, Y! search suggestions will help you to find what you’re looking for. The new Yahoo! Mobile search results also shows different shortcuts, news and deeper results only a tap away. For instance if you search for “world cup” it gives a concise set of the latest scores and news, with deeper results about the games, the players the stats and so on.

Yahoo Search Widget for Android

To get Yahoo! search widget on your android phone, firstly download the app from the Android Market and then touch and hold your homescreen. A list will popup, select Yahoo Search from the widget menu — and viola; it’s going to be on your home screen!

Yahoo Mail & Messenger for Android

Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger is also available on all Android devices now as standalone applications, but are also integrated to provide an optimal Yahoo! communications experience. Both the apps comes with features like rich text formatting, Yahoo! emoticons, and access to the Yahoo! Address Book, in apps that are designed from the ground up for the Android platform.

Features Yahoo! Mail App for Android:

- Push notification of new email messages
- Availability of Yahoo! Address Book as well as contacts in the native phone address book
- Good Search Feature. You can search email messages by sender, recipient, subject and keywords in the body of the email
- You can upload photos as attachments directly from camera or your android’s photo gallery
- You can toggle between the Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger apps with ease

Get Yahoo! Mail App for Andorid here.

Features of Yahoo! Messenger App for Android:

- Easy Contact management. Check friends’ status updates & availability as well as update their own status & availability
- Send instant messages to friends via SMS text messages
- Y! Messenger can run in the background with full multitasking support
- Full use of emoticons and rich text formatting
- Send photos to friends directly from the phone’s camera or the photo gallery

Get Yahoo! Messenger for Android here.

You can try out the Yahoo! Search widget and other available yahoo widgets by scanning the barcode below with your Android phone.

However with the new Yahoo Search assist the suggestions that you will get are likely to be ‘real-time’ and a bit ‘time aware’ says Linda Wang, Senior Product Manager of Yahoo Search. So if you want to find out who will Netherlands play next in the world cup, you can search – “Netherlands vs” and Yahoo search assist will automatically show you suggestion based on real-time results.

This feature also works in the Yahoo News search, thus when you are searching for a news story you will get real time news search suggestions based on the keywords that you enter in the search box.

For some reason, I couldn’t really test out this feature as its not working at my end. This might be one of those “US only” additions. I personally think that this feature would be excellent for mobile devices.

- Network Distribution Feature: This will let you run ads on Yahoo! search pages, yahoo partners’ sites, or both. If you run your ads on yahoo’s entire network (search & partners), you can now set different bids. This is very similar to how Google Adwords bidding works, where you can choose different bid price for search & content network.

- Import Campaign Data from Google Adwords: Since many advertisers are often existing users of Google Adwords, Yahoo is making it easier the Adwords users to bring in their campaign data & settings with them so that they can start at Yahoo more comfortably. Advertisers can import their files by simply clicking the “Import Campaigns” button. Yahoo strongly believes that the the ease of launching campaigns with existing data will encourage more advertisers to use Yahoo! Search Marketing.

Well I have to say that this is indeed a cool feature. Many advertisers doesn’t want to spend the extra time to go through all the steps of setting up an ad campaign. Once yahoo brings out this easy import feature, many adwords advertisers are likely to try out Yahoo’s network.

If you are interested to see how these features will work, check out the video below:

For example, if you search for Rome, Yahoo Image search will automatically show up a special column containing categories of a whole bunch of ‘places’ from rome that you are likely to be interested in. Clicking on any of the categories will show an overlay of images so that you can virtually take a tour of the image results without leaving the original search results page.

To test it’s usefulness & accuracy, I searched for Kuala Lumpur, and Yahoo did manage to give me a pretty decent list of places that most tourists would like to go.

Try it and let me know what do you think about this cool new feature of Yahoo Image Search!

Yahoo has recently updated their home with a brand new design and has included some social & personalization features to spice things up a little bit.

Well personally, I don’t feel that the changes that yahoo made will give them much boost, in terms of getting new users to use their search engine. Probably some of the features may be useful to people who likes to have a ‘start page’ on their browser and are already using Yahoo as their default page.

However for someone like me, who never goes to the Yahoo homepage won’t really feel any difference. What is Yahoo anyway? Is it a search engine? Well to me yahoo just looks like a tabloid, which is cluttered with articles, links and ads. And 8 out of 10 times, those featured articles on the home page are mostly celebrity gossips. If Yahoo really wants to improve their business on search and online advertising, they need to really find out their core objective and purpose of existence and focus on the important areas rather than tapping into everything.

Yahoo is not small by any means, Yahoo is still the world’s most visited website. However they for some reason can’t capitalize on that and slowly slipping away from the real game.

What New in Yahoo’s Homepage?

Nothing ground breaking or earth shattering! It now lets users to add their favorite sites to the left side of the page. This includes popular social media applications such as Facebook and Twitter. Once the new search page is up and running, a user’s favorite applications will also show up on the search page itself. You can also add in your own favorite sites on that list. Once you click on any of the links, it sort of opens the page under a frame within the yahoo page along with a huge banner ad. (Well, I’m not sure whether users would appreciate the ad on that position).

Yahoo now shows the top 10 most searched queries on their home page, which is pretty cool. I guess showing that information on the home page would tempt people to find out more about those topics via Yahoo search.

And thats pretty much it! They have tried to strip down some of the unnecessary stuffs, and made the home page a bit lighter and more organized. However, to me it still looks like an online tabloid and not a “Search Engine”. I don’t think adding these features will actually encourage people to search at yahoo.

I think people will start using Yahoo Search more, if http://search.yahoo.com was their homepage. I have always been a fan of Yahoo Search as they were always the 2nd best in Search after Google. In fact in many cases, when Google failed to give what I was looking for, Yahoo saved me! Now that Bing.com is here, Yahoo’s chances in Search is almost gone – unless they agree to merge with Microsoft. (Personally I think it would be the best thing to do for both the companies).

See the Yahoo Design in Action

Yahoo is slowly rolling out the new design in different regions/countries all over the world. It is already live in US, and most parts of Asia (Malaysia, Singapore — at least) are now seeing a notification on their Yahoo page that sort of asks you to try the new design by clicking on a link. You can try it now by visiting: http://m.www.yahoo.com/

Bonus: Yahoo Easter Egg

Yahoo has still kept their hidden Easter egg on their new home page. Try clicking on the “!” exclamation mark on their logo and see what happens! [You will need to keep your speakers/headphones on...]

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land explains that this will give advertisers the ability to show graphic ads to users based on their previous search history. Advertisers will also be able to target those graphic ads based based on what other web sites that user visited and their actions on those web sites.

As the economy continues to put pressure on advertising budgets, marketers are looking for increased accountability for every dollar they spend. Yahoo!’s new targeting products significantly improve the ability for search and display advertisers to reach their target audience, providing increased efficiency and accountability,” said Michael Walrath, senior vice president, Advertising Marketplaces Group, Yahoo!. “Yahoo! remains incredibly well positioned to meet the growing advertiser demand for performance marketing offerings, and no other company can provide marketers with such scale and expertise across search and display advertising.

The new Ad products include:

Search Retargeting - This will give advertisers the ability to target display advertising based on user search activities and past search history.

Enhanced Retargeting - This feature will allows advertisers to deliver dynamically generated display ads across the Yahoo! network based on user activity on an advertiser’s site.

Enhanced Targeting - This feature will give Advertisers more capability to manage their search advertising campaign, including ad scheduling and demographic targeting within search etc.

You can get more coverage on the Yahoo’s New ad products at Techmeme.

Finally the impossible has happened! Yahoo has managed to find a New CEO to replace Jerry Yang. According to Wall Street Journal, Carol Bartz, former chief executive of software company Autodesk Inc., has accepted an offer to become Yahoo’s next CEO.

Wall Street Journal writes:

Ms. Bartz, 60 years old, will face a number of challenges as she tries to turn around Yahoo’s flagging performance and stock price. Some investors have been lobbying for a break-up of the Internet giant, for instance. Yahoo faces tough competition from Internet rivals such as Google Inc.

TechCrunch speculates that Bartz is most definitely an ally of founder and outgoing CEO Jerry Yang as they both sit on Cisco’s board. Bartz also sits on Intel’s board with Yahoo president Susan Decker. So this shows that she really has some strong connection with existing Yahoo’s management team.

Yahoo is yet to release any official statement on this regard. So I’ll try to keep an eye on the Yahoo’s Corporate Blog for latest updates.

Don’t worry, like always I’ll keep you informed! So what do you think of Yahoo’s New CEO? What would be her possible strategy & Goal – Save yahoo or Sell yahoo?

Robert Scoble suggests that Yahoo should integrate all their services and produce a live-feed like service, similar to what friendfeed & facebook is doing.

He writes:

Yahoo is in a good position — if it builds a decent news feed like what friendfeed and facebook have and does it quickly. That is the key to integrating all of its services together (and giving its sexy services like Flickr and Upcoming.org a shot).

John Battelle highlights that Bartz does have a lot of media experience even though she may have a lot of experience in other parts of the technology world.

He writes:

Yahoo needs a stronger suite of media-savvy executives now that Weiner and Rosensweig are gone.

Catch more discussion on this topic @ Techmeme.

Update: CNBC has confirmed that Bartz is taking the job! CNBC writes:

Shares initially climbed about 1 percent on the news but quickly settled back as investors began to digest whether Bartz would indeed be the best executive at the right time for the struggling internet pioneer. Speculation about Bartz transition into Yahoo’s C-suite began circulating last week, and while her name initially sparked raised eyebrows

For instance, when you perform a search on Yahoo for “eBay” you will notice that the sponsored ad contains a graphical logo of Ebay, just like the above screen shoot.

Yahoo’s Spokesperson confirmed that the company is testing new search ad units that include “images, brand icons, videos, search boxes and deep links.”

My Two Cents

I certainly don’t think that this is a bad idea for Yahoo. Infact for brand queries, I think it will really help the advertiser to increase its brand recognition as the searchers will over time associate the logo/image with the brand easily.

But the downside of this feature is, the advertisers will probably spending more because the CTR (Click-Through-Ratio) will definitely be a lot higher compared to the traditional sponsored ads. So even if the advertiser ranks really well organically, people will tend to click on the sponsored ad (with a Logo) without being bothered to see the organic results down below it.

So basically when you to Yahoo to perform a search, you enter a keyword and Yahoo Search assist can automatically show you some other related search keywords that you may be interested in. This feature is more powerful than Google’s Autocomplete feature as it displays logical queries that are related to the search term.

But now it seems like Yahoo has taken things even further by adding Image Preview within Yahoo Search Assist. So when you are searching for something, yahoo will not only recommend you some other related search keywords but it will also show you pictures related to that keyword inside the search assist box. For instance a search for Obama displays the following:

Yahoo Buzz has came up with a nice report of the Top 10 Searches of this year – 2008.

Yahoo writes:

Olympian highs and politics as unusual, to celebrity hopefuls and market meltdowns: Through millions of searches and thousands of stories each day, people sought to make sense of the world around them. Take a look back at what captivated our imagination and fueled our passions in 2008, a very historic year indeed.

So here is the Top 10 Searches for 2008 in Yahoo:

1. Britney Spears
2. WWE
3. Barack Obama
4. Miley Cyrus
5. RuneScape
6. Jessica Alba
7. Naruto
8. Lindsay Lohan
9. Angelina Jolie
10. American Idol

To come up with the Yahoo! Year in Review, Yahoo editors analyze different search queries based upon many factors such absolute volume and growth versus previous periods, to figure out which themes and trends bubble to the surface. The Yahoo! Year in Review for top searches were based on absolute volume and growth versus previous periods on search queries.