“Yahoo! Mail and Messenger are available as separate streamlined apps, however they offer common features that will give you a better mobile communications experience that’s easy to use and immediately familiar,” says Yahoo Mail Product Manager Lee Parry. “Both apps let you compose messages with rich text, express yourself through our many Yahoo! emoticons, access Yahoo! Address Book and phone contacts, as well as share photos that you’ve taken on your phone.”

“The Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger Android apps offer many of the core features that you find in their PC counterparts,” adds Perry. “In the Yahoo! Mail Android app, you can search for important messages with our Full Search and Smart Folders features and organize messages into the same personal folders you use on the PC. In Messenger you can set your Yahoo! Messenger status message, view the status messages of your buddy list contacts and chat with your MSN/Windows Live Messenger friends.”

“The new page is designed to help you easily find and explore the things that matter most to you. The Yahoo! Search team is delighted to demonstrate our commitment to innovate in search technology and deliver an amazing user experience,” says Larry Cornett, Vice President, Consumer Products, Yahoo Search.

Yahoo names the following as key highlights of the new Yahoo Search:

Intelligent Search Results – Allows you to explore results from key sites and narrow results using different types of SearchMonkey structured data. Over the past few months, even more enhanced results for product, local, entertainment, reference, social, and tech sites have been displayed automatically. With the new search page design, we have made it easier to see these riche results from an increasing number of sites.

Feature-Rich Experience – Provides quick access to search features that make people’s online lives safer and easier, including Search Scan/SafeSearch (which helps protect you from viruses, spyware, and spam while you search) and Search Pad. Now it will be even easier to return to the research documents you have created while searching.

Search Assist Expansion – With the new design, our powerful query assistance is still available directly below the search box, but we’ve also incorporated it into the left-hand column for quick access lower on the page, even when the Search Assist layer is hidden. You can use this column to easily explore and discover concepts related to your query. We have added Search Assist to the search box on every Yahoo! page in the U.S. with the launch of a new universal header.

Along with the change to Yahoo Search itself, comes a “revamping” of Yahoo’s image search and video search results pages. In the left-hand columns on these, you wil get links to related categories.

“Rather than building this new experience on top of our existing front-end technology, our talented engineering and design teams rebuilt much of the foundational markup/CSS/JavaScript for the SRP design and core functionality completely from scratch,” says Cornett. “This allowed us to get rid of old cruft and take advantage of quite a few new techniques and best practices, reducing core page weight and render complexity in the process.”

Yahoo says people can now “do more, share more, and stay better connected from their inbox.” They also say that the new enhancements they’ve made to Yahoo Mail are a “key milestone’ to the Yahoo Open Strategy, which extends social and open features.

The new design comes with an application box that users can personalize. It combines a calendar, a notepad, and other third-party apps. There’s a new Evie app, which will launch next month and let users create and send invitations to events, as well as check the status of events and add them to their calendar. The app list will also include Flickr, PayPal, Picnik, Xoopit, and ZumoDrive  apps.

There are some new photo sharing features in the new version, which let the user multi-select and drag and drop photos so they are easier to attach to emails. You can also view thumbnail previews and rotate pictures.

Speaking of attachments, they have also increased the limit on file size up to 25MB (it was 10 before).

Yahoo also has a new mobile version of mail on the way, which provides one-click access to check, compose, and search email. It comes with support for downloading attachments like Microsoft Office documents, PDFs, and photos. It also comes with the ability to access personal folders. Yahoo says the mobile enhancements will be available on over 400 devices with HTML browsers.

Yahoo Inc is considering developing new real-time search capabilities, even as it outsources its existing Internet search technology to Microsoft Corp.

Yahoo’s Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs, said that the company could potentially “mine” messages from Twitter, the popular microblogging service, to offer Web surfers search results beyond those offered by Microsoft’s Bing.

Bing is the Microsoft search engine that is to provide Yahoo’s standard search results, under the terms of a long-awaited partnership announced this week. [ID:nLU412795]

“I’ve always held that the interesting thing of Tweets is not necessarily searching them but mining them. So we could real-time mine them, then assemble what we mine into the search engine,” said Raghavan in an interview with Reuters on Friday.

By “mining” the data, Yahoo could offer search results far beyond a simple list of comments on Web sites, for instance, but instead could analyze data and group results by criteria ranging from topic to geography.

While Raghavan stressed that he was not “pre-announcing” any product plans, he said his comments were intended to paint a picture of some of the things that Yahoo is considering in its new form.

On Wednesday, Yahoo and Microsoft announced a 10-year partnership in which Yahoo will use Microsoft’s search and search advertising technology. The move will allow Yahoo to save some $425 million in operating expenses, the company said.

Raghavan said much of the savings will come from back-end infrastructure technology, now that Yahoo no longer invests in the resources to crawl and index the world’s vast number of Web sites.

But he said that Yahoo will continue to develop innovative search and communications products.

“In terms of satisfying user intent, the hard work and in some sense the bigger growth opportunities for differentiation are not the back-end of crawling and indexing, but really surfacing and assembling content the right way to satisfy user intent,” he said.

Real Time search is an increasingly popular online activity where Yahoo’s approach to search could provide a compelling user experience, Raghavan said.

Unlike traditional Internet search, which allows Web surfers to find Web pages on various topics, real-time search focuses on the flood of constantly updated messages posted by people using social networking services like Twitter.

A number of smaller private companies like Collecta and OneRiot have developed real time search products, as has Twitter itself, which offers its own search engine to cull through its Tweets.

Raghavan said that Yahoo sees value not only in the individual Twitter messages, but in the information that Yahoo could provide by analyzing the broader stream of Tweets and other real time data traveling across the Internet.

As an example, Raghavan said that a search on “LA Earthquake”, following a hypothetical temblor in Southern California, could return a map showing the concentration of Twitter messages from a certain neighborhood.

Raghavan also said that real-time data could increasingly be incorporated into future versions of Yahoo communications products, like Yahoo Mail, and that making deals to get access to feeds from companies like Twitter and Facebook could be worthwhile.

“Does it make sense to consider such deals? Absolutely. When you say do you need to, it depends on the business reality and the current market,” said Raghavan.

“It absolutely makes sense to think creatively on everything from getting the right feeds to crafting a different communications interface that combines the best elements of mail and some of these newer, emerging genres,” he said.

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