Yahoo has made some big changes to its image search and video search features, calling upon its existing partnership with Getty Images, to provide photos from its collection of over 20,000 images added per day.
“Of course we also help people find top quality images of the very latest headline news, sports and entertainment events within minutes of being taken,” says Yahoo’s Multimedia Search team in a blog post.
The new experience comes with a new titled thumbnail view:
“We have introduced two prominent filters on the left rail to help you find the highest quality and most recent images,” the team notes. “For images, the HQ badge identifies photos with at least 2 megapixels and a 1024 x 768 aspect ratio. For Yahoo! HQ videos, we use adaptive streaming technology to optimize your viewing experience by continuously adjusting the quality of the streamed Yahoo! hosted video to match the capabilities of your network and device. The Latest filter allows you to discover the most recent photos and videos available on the Web, so you can always keep up to date.”
A new similar video search results page now comes with continuous scroll, and each video sized the same (before becoming larger and playing a preview upon hover):
Also, as part of the video experience, there’s a new “search while you watch” option. This allows you to to search for a video while you’re already watching one, without going back to the search results page.
It’s a nice feature, but the continuous scroll is missing in this section. Once you get to the bottom of the results Yahoo returns, you have to click to see all results, and that takes you away from the video you’re watching. If you don’t find what you’re looking for in those top results, the feature is useless. Let’s hope the relevancy is there.
The experience appears to keep viewers on Yahoo, rather than sending them to the sites the videos are hosted on. This way, the “search while you watch” feature is able to work. This can’t be good for these sites’ traffic.
Anyhow, it’s always nice to see Yahoo announce new search-related features, since turning over its web search back-end to Bing. This, along with the search-focused mobile browser Axis, shows that Yahoo still cares about search, even if there are rumors that the company is exploring the option of selling its search business.