Yahoo Image Search's Fullscreen Slideshow

One of the features I've always wanted to see in Google Image Search is slideshows. Google lets you quickly go to the next image result using the right arrow shortcut, but a slideshow button would make things even easier. Picasa Web search used to have this feature. I know that webmasters will say that this wastes their bandwidth, so let's get past this.

It turns out that Yahoo already has this feature. Yahoo's search results are powered by Microsoft Bing, but Yahoo has its own UI and it does a pretty good job. Yahoo uses the same infinite scrolling interface (Google borrowed it from Bing), but things look different once you click a search result. Images occupy the entire page and you can click the small "play" button at the bottom of the page to start a slideshow or just use the "p" keyboard shortcut. There are some cool zoom effects for big images and, if you use a browser that supports the HTML5 fullscreen API (Chrome/Firefox for desktop and Android, Safari for desktop), you can click the "view fullscreen" button at the top of the page and only see the images. You may want to restrict the results to large images.

Yahoo has a similar interface for the mobile search engine and it looks more like the old Google Image Search for mobile. The new Google interface has some benefits if you don't want to see all the results sequentially, but the old UI placed more emphasis on the images. The nice thing is that Yahoo has the slideshow button in the mobile interface, as well.

Yahoo Mail Looks More Like Gmail

After Microsoft's Hotmail (rebranded as Outlook), it's time for Yahoo Mail to change its interface and look more like Gmail. The all-new Yahoo Mail adds support for conversations, custom themes for all devices and no longer requires you to pay for features like disposable email addresses, enhanced filters and automatic message forwarding.

"And if that wasn't enough, we're giving you a monstrous amount of storage, 1TB (that's 1,000 GBs), so you have ample space for all your emails and attachments." That's a lot more than Gmail's 15GB free storage shared with Google Drive and Google+ Photos. While most people will not even use 1% of Yahoo's 1TB of free storage, it's nice to no longer worry about storage. It's interesting to notice that this is actually a downgrade: Yahoo previously claimed that Yahoo Mail offers unlimited storage and now it "only" offers 1TB. Obviously, 1TB and unlimited are synonymous when it comes to email storage.

"This new desktop experience is available in English in the US, Canada, UK, Philippines, Malaysia, India, Ireland, New Zealand and South Africa with more countries and languages coming soon," informs Yahoo.

Marissa Mayer can finally switch from Gmail to Yahoo Mail, even though she still uses a command-line email client called Pine. Here are some screenshots.

{ Thanks, Sushubh. }

Yahoo Search Direct

Yahoo has recently launched a new feature called Yahoo Search Direct that aims to find answers for simple questions. "Search Direct is the first fundamental shift in search in more than a decade. For the first time, driving users to a results page filled with an overwhelming number of links is not the end game. We believe Search Direct will be the simplest and fastest way to find answers, not links," suggests Yahoo.

Yahoo Search Direct doesn't show new information, but it highlights the top results and the instant answers, while displaying them as you type a query. It's a simplified version of Google Instant that only focuses on the navigational queries and the queries that request simple facts.

When I tried Yahoo Search Direct, I noticed at least two features that aren't Googley. Yahoo shows a list of "trending searches" when you click on the search box and even highlights the first suggestion. This is both distracting and confusing for the average user that expects relevant suggestions.


Another feature that's not very helpful is promoting your own services, instead of showing unbiased suggestions. When you type "w", Yahoo shows only two suggestions that seem to be manually added: "Yahoo! Weather" and "Yahoo! Widgets". Type "m" and Yahoo shows 8 suggestions that are related to Yahoo.


Yahoo Search Direct works best for queries that already returned OneBox-like instant answers: [weather in london], [MSFT], [SF Giants] and the main advantage is that the answers are displayed faster. Google tried something similar with Google Suggest, but this feature is no longer necessary now that the results are displayed as you type.


Yahoo's tool doesn't even show previews for long-tail searches, so it can't replace Google Instant.


Yahoo promises that this is "the beginning of a new era in search", but this seems to be just an exaggeration. "We've been focused on refining how you use search, enabling awesome experiences for search intents about sports, news, TV, movies, local, finance, shopping, travel, weather, trending searches or pretty much anything else. But this is just the beginning. The coverage and rich content currently available in Search Direct is a fraction of the future state. Users can expect search coverage and the use of rich content to increase dramatically in the weeks, months, and years ahead. Get ready to be more social and personalized, through a richer and more interactive experience – it's going to be sweet."

You can try the beta version of Yahoo Search Direct at search.yahoo.com, but it will soon be available at yahoo.com.

{ Thanks, Niraj. }

Yahoo Search Clues

Yahoo launched a new service that shows information about the volume of searches, popular queries and demographic information about users. It's called Yahoo Clues and it's similar to Google Trends and Google Insights for Search. Unlike Google's services, Yahoo Clues is limited to the US and it only shows information for the past 30 days.

"With Yahoo Clues, you can discover and compare trending information for search terms of interest to you, or explore popular trending search terms on Yahoo. You can see search volume charts, demographic graphs, maps, or even related searches specific to a demographic group. We're also experimenting with an interesting feature called Search Flow, which offers a unique look at people's search patterns and the next most probable search term people try after searching for a query," informs Yahoo.


For example, if you compare the queries [Google Buzz] and [Google Reader], you'll notice that Google Reader is much more popular than Google Buzz, it's not very popular with teens, but it's very popular with women, which is rather peculiar.

New Yahoo Homepage In Opera And Safari

The new Yahoo homepage, available at http://www.yahoo.com/preview supports only Internet Explorer and Firefox. Opera and Safari's users can try the new homepage at http://www.yahoo.com/beta.

There are small rendering issues in Opera 8.5, but Opera 9 fully supports the page.

I think webmasters (and especially big companies' webmasters) shouldn't launch a page or a site until every browser can render it. If a browser doesn't support all the Ajax features or CSS 2.0 or other standards, that elements of the web page should degrade gracefully.

Yahoo Could've Bought Google In 2001

Terry Semel, Yahoo's CEO feels sad about something that didn't happen in 2001. Semel met with Larry Page and Sergey Brin and talked about the possibility of acquiring Google. Google's founders said that Google was worth $1 billion, but it's not for sale. After a week, Google's price was $3 billion. Terry Semel didn't understand why Google had a such a big price, since their revenue was almost non-existent.

"And I said, well you still have the same business you had two weeks ago, right? Which adds up to nothing. So obviously we couldn't and didn't buy the company."

Well, that's lack of vision. Google had a lot of problems convincing investors that a search engine is a good place to put your money. Andy Bechtolsheim, one of Sun's founders was the first to invest $100,000 in Google.

Yahoo Mail Beta vs. Gmail

Google Operating System got Yahoo Mail out of beta for thousands of Yahoo users. Their opinions aren't too favorable to the new webmail application.

"I tried the new Yahoo Mail Beta and is horrible slow, with bloated interface, obtrusive ads, I much prefer Gmail which is elegant, simple, fast, and more importantly it does not get in your way."

"I prefer Yahoo Beta to the folderless Gmail structure. "

"I agree with everyone about slowness. Even more to the point is its freakish desire to emulate a basic software email client. I don't want that for my webmail. That's why Gmail is brilliant, it's webmail and it's not like an average client (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.)."

"Wow. Yahoo has had Oddpost for 2 years now and after the long wait, we get this? This is very disapointing. The user interface looks like a bad version of Outlook Express. Gmail and Google Calendar eats Yahoo's lunch..AND dinner."

You are free to try Yahoo Mail Beta and tell what you think.

Also read:
5 ways to check Gmail faster
Yahoo Mail Beta review

Yahoo Homepage In Two Flavors

The newest design experiment for Yahoo homepage allows users to choose between two different layouts: a wide layout and a narrow layout.

Wide Yahoo homepage



Narrow Yahoo homepage



The new interface puts the accent on Yahoo search box, My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail and Yahoo News.

Previous design changes:
New Yahoo homepage (February)
Another possibly new Yahoo homepage (March)

Multilanguage Search From Yahoo

Yahoo wants to make every language feel like English. Enter your query in your language and the search results will include not just the web pages written in your language, but also web pages written in other languages. For example, you'll be able to find this blog post if you search for [Recherche multilingue Yahoo], even if I didn't include these French words. And when you click on the results, you'll see this blog post translated in French.

The multilingual search is available at Yahoo! France and Yahoo! Germany. You just have to activate "Recherche multilingue" or "Suche Translator" option. The search results will include pages written in French, English, German, Spanish and Italian.

Get Yahoo Mail Beta

A reader posted in the comments a clever trick to try the new Yahoo Mail Beta:

To get Yahoo Mail Beta, just switch your content preference to Germany, France or UK. Then you will be asked if you want to join the beta when you log into your Yahoo Mail. Say yes, and join the beta. Then from the options menu, change your content preference what it was before. Then go to Yahoo Mail again. You should see Yahoo Beta. If you don't see it, go to options and click "Try Beta" button. That's all.

How to change your content preference:

* log in to Yahoo Mail
* click Options
* select Account information from the left panel
* go to Member Information, General Preferences, Preferred Content
* select, for example, Yahoo UK
* click Finished
* go to Yahoo Mail
* you'll see a page that says "It's the New Yahoo! Mail Beta... and you're invited."
* click on "Try Beta Now".

Related:

Yahoo Mail has unlimited storage
Yahoo Mail Beta vs Gmail

Update [September 16]: Now you can get Yahoo Mail Beta from this page.

Yahoo Buys Web 2.0

Yahoo is tired of buying Web 2.0 companies one at a time. They just want tje whole package.

"We're in the midst of buying Dogg (a Web 2.0 cross between Digg and Dogster "Where Every Dog Has A Webpage"), and you know what? It's a lot of work. Buying up Web 2.0 companies here and there in piecemeal fashion gets old after a while.

It's a lot of work on our Corporate Development team, the Public Relations team, and really isn't that efficient.

So after some long discussions with Tim O'Reilly, Michael Arrington, and other Web 2.0 experts, we've decided to just buy Web 2.0.

All of it. All the people, the round cornered boxes, crazy business ideas, and pastel colors." (Yahoo Search Blog)

So if you want to be a Yahoo company, just create a Web 2.0 startup and you'll automatically be a part of Yahoo's big family.

Read some great tips to create a Web 2.0 site:

"If the name of your app isn't short and catchy, it won't take off. Try recording yourself reading paragraphs from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, then play the audio backwards, slowly, for inspiration.

Make access to the app invite-only, but don't actually invite anyone. Nothing creates more desire for a product than its exclusivity. If no-one has it, everyone will want it. Simple!

Ask an A-list blogger to review your app (linking to your own "review", so that you drive traffic to both your web app and the site that reviews it). While it's unlikely that they'll do so without actually logging in and trying out your app for real, they might change their tune if you offer them some kind of incentive. Send them some Photoshopped screenshots showing tag clouds and images of your app in use, and blame your data centre for the server being down -- the perfect excuse for why they can't login just now. Then promise them 20% of your profit when you sell the app to Yahoo! Negotiate as required -- everyone has their price."

Related:
Yahoo buys a company before its foundation
Google acquires Writely
The best Web 2.0 software of 2005
Just what is Web 2.0?

The New Yahoo Mail Will Have Obtrusive Ads

The new Yahoo Mail, currently in beta, will be available to all users very soon. An evidence for that is the fact that Yahoo Mail started to display obtrusive ads: along with an animated flash in the right sidebar, you can now see huge ads (like the one for Vonage) that fill an entire page. Ironically, this ad is included in the Spam section.

Another usability problems regarding ads in Yahoo Mail Beta. There are two group of ads in most of the pages, one in the right sidebar (animated flash), next to the scrollbars that lets you select a mail or read it. The other group of ads sits at the bottom, right under the navigation, and includes the usual "credit card", "free loan consult" small ads. The problem is that it's very easy to click on the ads by mistake. And if you click on an ad, it doesn't open a new page or tab, the page just replaces the ad in the iframe, so you'll get this funny picture.



Because Yahoo chose to stick with the flash ads, if you move from a page to another (from inbox to the RSS reader, for example), you'll notice a big delay in page loading, especially if you have a slow connection.

And another thing: Yahoo didn't drop the welcome page that announces you how many emails you have, and whose only purpose is to make people click on the ad if they don't have any new messages.

Yahoo Messenger with VoIP

Yahoo launched a VoIP service in the United States that lets people make phone calls through the company's instant messaging software.

Available in several other countries since December, the service allows users to make calls from their computers for 2 cents a minute or less to the top 30 national phone markets, including the United States.

Here are the new features of the VoIP service:

• Phone Out: Calls within the U.S. and to more than 30 other countries can be made for two U.S. cents a minute or less.
  
• Phone In: For $2.99 a month or $29.90 a year, people can select a personal phone number, and receive incoming calls free. In the beta service, country-based phone numbers are initially available in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States with additional country-based numbers available in the coming months.
• Free Voicemail. Additionally, Yahoo! Mail now includes useful links to Yahoo! Messenger with Voice, enabling people to easily check their voicemail directly from Yahoo! Mail.

Of course, this service competes directly with Skype that offers similar features for slightly higher prices. Yahoo Messenger with Voice rates average between 20 percent and 30 percent lower than Skype to many major markets outside the United States, according to a comparison furnished by Yahoo. Yahoo has struck phone partnerships with headset maker Plantronics, VTech, a maker of USB handsets, and Siemens AG, a big maker of cordless phones.

More at Reuters.

Yahoo Mail Beta Review

Yahoo! Mail Beta is a web-based email application that combines the rich, responsive interface of a desktop program with the available-from-anywhere convenience of your existing Yahoo! Mail account.

Benefits of Yahoo! Mail Beta include:

* Drag and drop messages into folders for better organization

* A preview pane makes it easier to read your messages

* Speedier Ajax-interface

* Keyboard shortcuts such as Ctrl-S to save a message

* Navigate from message to message with the arrow keys

* Messages open in tabs or new windows so you can multitask

Yahoo! Mail Beta doesn't work in Opera (GMail does), it's pretty fast, loads faster than GMail, but you don't have the feeling you're using a desktop client. For example, scrolling the list of messages takes some time, you have to wait a couple of seconds after you select a message (you only see: "Loading message...").

The built-in RSS reader works very good, it imports your feeds from My Yahoo, but you can't categorize them or move them, you can't export your subscriptions into OPML.




Yahoo Beta Mail doesn't preview attachments (not even images) and it opens any external link in a new window. The tab functionality is really limited: you can use it for searching, composing messages, but you can't compose two messages simultaneously. I wonder why they implemented the tabs (I know: so you can multitask) if they are so limited.

The shortcuts are really nice:
Check Mail m
New Message n
Reply r
Print Ctrl+p or p


You can finally attach files easily, but they could remove the Browse and Attach buttons and instead use a Add button to make the interface more user-friendly. It would be one single step, a very intuitive list UI, that could be integrated into the Compose tab.


Spell checking has some flaws.

Overall, the new Yahoo Mail is much better than the previous version, you can't see (too many) ads, but it doesn't have many features included in GMail (label, fast reply, POP3, forwarding, automatic mail saving, attachment preview). Still, it outperforms GMail with is Outlook-ish design.

Classic Yahoo rating: 4/10
Beta Yahoo rating: 7/10
GMail rating: 8.5/10

Related:
Google Toolbar vs Yahoo Toolbar
How to switch to GMail from Yahoo Mail or Hotmail
Yahoo and the evolution of search

Yahoo! buys a company before its foundation

SUNNYVALE, CA, Jan 11, 2006 (YARDLEYPRESS) — Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YAHOO), a leading global Internet company, today announced the acquisition of an unnamed Web 2.0 company three days before it was to be founded. “Yahoo! is committed to generating mass quantities of free public relations by acquiring more pre-revenue, pre-business plan companies than any other global Internet company,” said Chris P. Bacon, Director of Hype Production.

“We’ve been acquiring companies earlier and earlier - before VC funding, before revenue, and in some cases before the completion of their products,” explained Hugh Jorgan, newly-appointed Vice President of Pre-Business Development. “By buying companies before they’re founded, we move directly to the natural conclusion of the trend.”

Yahoo’s! Department of Compiling and Distributing Favorable News Clippings to Executives is already girding itself for the inevitable deluge of laudatory press. “I mean, our latest ‘acquisition’ was described by its author as ‘buggy software,’ which ‘may and probably will crash your browser or cause your computer to burst into flames’, but it still became one of the most discussed topics in the industry,” laughed Director of Stapling Kerry Oki. “This time around, we’re expecting nothing less than the establishment of a major religion.”

LOL.

Reply from Yahoo?

Ah, satire. If you ever wonder whether you company is getting a reputation, just wait for the blogosphere to make fun of you.

(Jeremy Zawodny)

Yahoo connects PC, TV and mobile phone

Yahoo launched at CES its Go initiative, a series of connected initiatives which exist outside the browser. Yahoo will present at go.connect.yahoo.com:

• Yahoo Go Mobile - apps for mobile devices that will organize your content on your phone and keep it automatically synched with your online account. Will include Yahoo Mail, Messenger, Photos, calendar, address book, Web and image search, news, sports and finance, and come with Nokia 60 series phones (Nokia N70 Nokia 6680 Nokia 6681 Nokia 6630 Nokia 6600 Nokia 7610 Nokia 6670 Nokia 6682 Nokia 6620) and available to Cingular and AT&T customers in 10 countries. In order to use Yahoo! Go, your phone requires:
  2 MB free on the phone’s internal memory and 8 MB free on a separate memory card.


• Yahoo Go TV - sends entertainment related services to a TV connected to a PC, like Windows Media Center does. Will include local and video search, access to content from CNN and MTV, movie trailers, and other info from My Yahoo. Will hit in April and be ad supported. Will have a program guide that combines TV listings with user-supplied ratings and reviews. Will work with any remote control.


• Yahoo Go Desktop - another name for Yahoo Widgets, or Konfabulator.

Yahoo buys del.icio.us

Social bookmarking service del.icio.us announced on Friday that it had been acquired by Yahoo. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Joshua Schachter, creator of the site, said that the acquisition would allow it to work more closely with photo site Flickr, which was acquired by Yahoo in March.



Schachter created del.icio.us in 2003 as a way for himself and his friends to save and share Web pages that they visited. Earlier this year, del.icio.us, Inc. was formed to attract investment and help grow the service.

Since then, the site has received funding from a variety of companies and individuals, including Union Square Ventures, Amazon.com, BV Capital, Marc Andreessen, Esther Dyson, Seth Goldstein, Josh Koppelman, Howard Morgan, Tim O'Reilly, and Bob Young.

"I look forward to continuing my vision of social and community memory, and taking it to the next level with the del.icio.us community and Yahoo," Schachter said in a blog post announcing the acquisition Friday.

Yahoo Search's Jeremy Zawodny said the company has big plans for del.icio.us in the future. "Just like we've done with Flickr, we plan to give del.icio.us the resources, support, and room it needs to continue growing the service and community," he said.

Zawodny also hinted at some integration to come with Yahoo's My Web service and del.icio.us.