It seems like Yahoo is reminding people that it is still a search company a lot lately. In what I’m guessing is a response to Google launching its new search features, Yahoo has once again reminded us of its own features.

"As you know, Search innovation continues to be a top priority at Yahoo! – that’s why we have been working hard behind the scenes to continuously evolve the search experience for our users," Meagan Busath, Yahoo’s Director of Global Product Communications tells WebProNews.

"When we launched our New Yahoo! Search back in September 2009, we introduced a number of handy tools and a new interface that helps people find and explore what matters to them most through sites they know and love," she says. "We’ve been steadily adding more filtering options and relevant search suggestions to our left-hand navigation bar since then, and have seen engagement and click-throughs for those features double over the past seven months."

Features she refers to include:

·         Offering related suggestions modules, featuring thumbnail images for very relevant people, places or things related to the results you’re viewing – i.e. for entertainment searches, we show related people, movies, songs; for travel searches, we show related points of interest, etc.

·         Filtering results by favorite sites, for example if you enter the search term “how to make salsa,” we display filters for sites like eHow or Allrecipes.com on the left

·         Narrowing results by different types of structured data, i.e. for news searches you can filter by images, video, time

·         Links to “trending now” topics that highlight the most popular things people across the Web are searching for at any given time

·         Incorporating Yahoo!’s powerful SearchAssist technology for more generally related keywords – if you search for “digital camera,” you will also see links to related search results for Nikon, Canon, photography, etc.

As Yahoo often says, search is not just about "ten blue links" anymore. Really, it’s been that way for quite some time, but we continue to see different deliveries of results across all of the major search engines, and it makes the SEO game all the more interesting.