You can read all about the buzz around Yahoo's new brand campaign at Techmeme. Yea, the "Internet is Under New Management... Yours," campaign. With this, Yahoo launched a new search interface to help convince people that search is more about the interface then the underlining technology, that they hope to outsource to Microsoft.
The new interface impacts their web search, image search and video search and includes:
- Intelligent Search Results – Allows you to explore results from key sites and narrow results using different types of SearchMonkey structured data.
- Feature-Rich Experience – Provides quick access to search features that make people’s online lives safer and easier, including Search Scan/SafeSearch (which helps protect you from viruses, spyware, and spam while you search) and Search Pad.
- Search Assist Expansion – With the new design, our powerful query assistance is still available directly below the search box, but we’ve also incorporated it into the left-hand column for quick access lower on the page, even when the Search Assist layer is hidden.
- Improved total page load time – Even though the new design includes dozens of additional assistance features and graphical assets, we are seeing faster page loading time and significant speed improvements.
- Improved perceived load time – In addition to reducing the weight of the page, we also greatly reduced the perceived load time by sending the page in three semantically meaningful chunks: first the search box and page header, then the rest of the visible content, and finally JavaScript for rich behavior.
- Inline data URI images – We’re taking advantage of specialized techniques for modern browsers such as inline data URI images, which we use to generate our subtle repeating gradients. This improves perceived and real performance dramatically. For legacy browsers, we provide the same gradients with traditional image sprites.
You can view some screen shots over here.
Do you like the new interface? Please take our poll:
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
