Yahoo! Axis debuts to rave reviews, while revamped image and video search add amazing eye candy
Search is an integral part of the consumer Web experience, and search engine marketing is typically a key piece of the digital marketing media mix. So we thought we'd keep you up to date on the latest enhancements the Yahoo! Search team has recently unveiled, designed to dazzle search users and keep them coming back to Yahoo! for more, so you have a large and highly engaged audience for your search campaigns.
Yahoo! Axis: Designed to be fast, visual and mobile
First up is Yahoo! Axis, which combines search and browsing into one visual experience, removing the need to scan a page of blue links to find what you're looking for. This innovative approach to search ultimately delivers answers more efficiently and even provides instant answers as you type. You can use Yahoo! Axis on your iPhone, iPad, or on the desktop and seamlessly move from one to the other, picking up where you left off every time. PCMag.com and CNET recently gave Yahoo! Axis strong reviews, Read Write Web hailed it as "a slick product and feels great to use," and Venture Beat proclaimed "a really awesome, significant step in mobile browsers." But most impressive is the average 4.5 out of 5 star rating in Apple's App Store from more than 2,000 reviewers.
The Yahoo! Search blog has a full overview of Yahoo! Axis. And you can watch Yahoo! Axis in action.
Yahoo! Axis brings potentially new opportunities for advertisers. Though ads did not appear at launch, we are actively exploring ways to present the most compelling ads for this new integrated browsing search experience. We believe the advertising experience should benefit both the user and advertiser, and by introducing ads post launch, it allows us to observe user interaction with this completely new search experience. This will enable better forecasting and insights for advertisers to help them get a better-informed and high-performing experience with Axis.
Our research showed that Axis was particularly well received by users who own three devices, so it provides an opportunity to grow search volume on all devices, perhaps most importantly on phones and tablets. Heavier searchers are more likely to use Axis, finding it particularly appealing since it makes searching more efficient.
We also anticipate acquiring new users who are interested in a simpler, faster more integrated cross-device search experience, which should lead to greater search volume, market share and overall marketing opportunities for our SEM advertisers. In addition, our research showed that searchers not currently using Yahoo! were likely to start searching on Yahoo! with Axis. We are actively exploring new, more powerful marketing opportunities that leverage the unique attributes of Axis and the visual search and browse experience it enables.
Yahoo! Image and Video Search gets new features, plus premium Getty Images content
As part of our overall effort to make search more visually fun and eye-catching, we've partnered with Getty Images to infuse the Yahoo! Search experience with the highest-quality images culled from Getty's more than 20,000 new images available every day from their award-winning global network of photographers. And to showcase this bevy of beauties, we've re-engineered Yahoo! Image Search and Video Search with a host of enhancements. Key new features include:
- Thumbnail viewing experience — The image and video search results pages now have a clean tiled look, with each image neatly squared, and expandable when you hover — videos even play a preview when you hover too.
- New Filters — Right rail filters help you easily identify the highest quality and most recent images from the results pages.
For the full details on these enhancements, check out the post on the Yahoo! Search blog.
---The Team
