Simon Willison’s Weblog

More on the new Yahoo

7th April 2003

Unsurprisingly, the new Yahoo is generating a whole load of commentary. There’s a good thread going on Signals vs Noise, and ia/ has coverage as well. I’ve been playing with it a bit and it’s definitely an immense improvement on the current Yahoo, although it’s still not quite as usable or responsive as Google. I also noticed that the search results are exactly the same as Google’s (even for image search) so it looks like Yahoo haven’t switched over to Inktomi just yet.

It’s worth clicking through the tour to get an overview of the new interface. The “open in new window” icon for each search result is a clever addition, but the smartest feature in my opinion are the specialised Yahoo shortcuts. mail! takes you to Yahoo mail, calendar! to Yahoo calendar and so on. It looks like are Yahoo hoping to out do Google by capitalising on their many other services, which seems like a very sensible approach.