Yahoo on Thursday unveiled several new search enhancements that focus on more relevant, entertainment-centric results. Among the changes are shortcuts to movie and celebrity news and a Netflix integration that lets you organize your queue within Yahoo search results.
"Our goal is to understand what people care about and to make it fun for them to explore the most personally relevant, interesting, and informative content so that they can get things done faster and stay in the know," Shashi Seth, senior vice president of Yahoo Search and Marketplaces, said in a statement. "Yahoo's new immersive Search is a cornerstone of the overall Yahoo experience, creating more ways to connect people with whatever and whoever interests them."
Results for movies, musical artists, celebrities, and news topics will now "cut to the chase," Yahoo said, by returning the most relevant content, like images, articles, videos, tweets, event listings, and ratings. There will also be easy access for purchasing movie or concert tickets while searching.
Yahoo will also soon release a series of "quick apps," the first of which will come from Netflix. Users will be able to add movies to their Netflix queue from the search results page and also activate "Watch Instantly" streaming content with one click via the app's "play" button.
Yahoo will also display image slideshows above search results, with content pulled from Flickr and other Yahoo content sites. Users can also view photos from friends' public Facebook albums when they connect Facebook and Yahoo.
Yahoo also touted its HTML5-enhanced Android and iPhone apps, which Yahoo said will produce faster, more sophisticated mobile results.
The features are rolling out to U.S. users now, and will launch in global markets in 2011.
The upgrade comes about a month Yahoo announced that Microsoft's Bing is now officially powering Yahoo's search results in the U.S. and Canada. The collaboration is part of a July 2009 search deal under which Microsoft will power Yahoo's search site while Yahoo will manage the sales force for both companies' premium search advertisers.