Yahoo has introduced some new vertical search reatures for recipes, shopping and entertainment searches.
If you search for a food item + recipes, a window will appear on top of the search results page with popular choices from “leading food sites”. You can also filter by ingredients.
The shopping vertical utilizes a similar approach, with the window and the tab.
“The new entertainment results on Yahoo! Search present you with immediate answers about your favorite movies, music artists, celebrities and news stories,” the company says. “To read latest news, watch a popular video, or even see what people are saying in the Twittersphere, find it all in one convenient place within Yahoo Search.”
When asked if Bing’s search index plays a role in the results for these verticals, Caroline Tsay, Senior Director, Search Product Management at Yahoo tells WebProNews, “Bing does not play a role in these new experiences. We use our own technology to find the content – from across the web and from our partners – users are looking for, and assemble them into these new user experiences.”
“We may introduce more vertical search tabs for specialized content, depending on what our users are looking for,” she says. “Any new vertical search tabs will automatically appear based on the user’s search term and the search results content.”
Re-emphasizing Yahoo’s independence as a search engine, despite being powered by Bing, Tsay tells us, “Yahoo has amazing content in almost every major category like sports, finance, local, celebrities, movies, television, music etc. In the past we have used this content for properties like Yahoo! Sports, but never really used it for Search. Now we have started building a parallel index called the content index, which provides every bit of information about entities. We are using this content index to build these amazing experiences. This does not come from Bing – its proprietary to Yahoo!, and our secret sauce for the Search products of tomorrow. No other Search engine can have such an amazing content index.”
