Yahoo's fresh search results, site redesign

Following in the footsteps of search giant Google, Yahoo! has decided to give its search results pages a makeover.

Yahoo!'s new design is influenced by clean and simple aesthetics. The refined layouts attempt to remove the design clutter and assimilate the company's entire web, multimedia and vertical search results pages under the one unified search experience.

"At Yahoo!, we're always looking for ways to make the Yahoo! Search experience even more organized and streamlined while serving the most relevant content," posted Yahoo! Search team members Paul Ko, Girish Ananthakrishnan and Caroline Tsay on the Yahoo! Search Blog.

The changes are apparent throughout Yahoo!'s Web, Images, Video, News, Blogs, Finance and Sports search results pages.

New features include browser-inspired tabs that automatically appear below the Search box to provide users with easy-to--access links to other vertical search results pages and Left Filters that help users sort results by time, sources, content type or related searches.

There have been upgrades to Yahoo!'s Image search too with "Latest" pictures (which provide an indication of how long ago each image was published), more images sourced from Facebook, and better recommendations at the end of galleries.

On September 14 Microsoft rolled out a new personalized search feature for US users in its Bing search engine called Adaptive Search.

"Every time you search on Bing, the information provided helps Bing understand what you're trying to do. The more you search, the more Bing can learn - and use that information to adapt the experience so you can spend less time searching and accomplish what you set out to do," explained Microsoft.

Google recently rolled out new streamlined designs for a number of its popular products including Docs, Calendar, Gmail and Blogger.