Yahoo Pushes Out the New Search Design

Along with Yahoo's big new "Y!ou" campaign, the company has begun rolling out the new Yahoo Search. They unveiled the new design last month, which compliments the recently launched redesigns of the Yahoo Home Page, Yahoo Mail, and Yahoo Messenger.

"The new page is designed to help you easily find and explore the things that matter most to you. The Yahoo! Search team is delighted to demonstrate our commitment to innovate in search technology and deliver an amazing user experience," says Larry Cornett, Vice President, Consumer Products, Yahoo Search.

Yahoo names the following as key highlights of the new Yahoo Search:

Intelligent Search Results – Allows you to explore results from key sites and narrow results using different types of SearchMonkey structured data. Over the past few months, even more enhanced results for product, local, entertainment, reference, social, and tech sites have been displayed automatically. With the new search page design, we have made it easier to see these riche results from an increasing number of sites.

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. Now it will be even easier to return to the research documents you have created while searching.

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. You can use this column to easily explore and discover concepts related to your query. We have added Search Assist to the search box on every Yahoo! page in the U.S. with the launch of a new universal header.

Along with the change to Yahoo Search itself, comes a "revamping" of Yahoo's image search and video search results pages. In the left-hand columns on these, you wil get links to related categories.

"Rather than building this new experience on top of our existing front-end technology, our talented engineering and design teams rebuilt much of the foundational markup/CSS/JavaScript for the SRP design and core functionality completely from scratch," says Cornett. "This allowed us to get rid of old cruft and take advantage of quite a few new techniques and best practices, reducing core page weight and render complexity in the process."

Yahoo says the new Yahoo Search includes improved page load time, improved perceived load time, and inline data URI images. It's now available in the US, the UK, France, Spain, Mexico, and India.

Understanding AdSense for feeds

Google AdSense program offers more than one way of earning revenue from serving Google AdSense Ads. Though ‘AdSense for Feeds’ is one of the more recent ways of advertising using Google AdSense Ads, it’s in no way less effective than the others. Here, Google places the Ads of the advertisers in the relevant feed articles (again, note the most important characteristic of the Google AdSense program comes into play here too i.e. ‘relevant feed’ not just any feed).

The feeds are in the form of articles, headlines or summaries. These content formats allow the users to easily access the content from several publishers (content owners) at one place. This is achieved through feed aggregators like Bloglines etc. Again, Google uses its technology to determine what advertisements would be contextually suited for a particular feed. You get paid as the publisher of original content and hence make easy money. As for the readers, they as such get a rich experience because they can see the relevant advertisements with the content that they are interested in. Moreover, they can also choose the feeds that they want. Users can click the advertisements to visit the advertiser’s website and check if their products and/ or services are of any use to them. Of course, the Advertisers benefit too. They get targeted advertising which means only the really interested people get to know about their products and services (and hence there are more chances of a better conversion rate for sales).

So, the prime concept for ‘AdSense for feeds’ remains the same as the Google AdSense program; only the orientation changes a bit. But note that Google is currently beta testing ‘AdSense for feeds’. Beta test for the program quickly got fully subscribed, so Google is not accepting any more applications for AdSense for feeds.

It’s only a matter of time before Google AdSense for feeds hits the internet and opens another revenue earning opportunity for website owners.