Things
haven't exactly gone swimmingly for Yahoo, with the recent unceremonious
departure of CEO Scott Thompson just the latest string of nasty news. But the
beleaguered Internet company hopes consumers will focus on new product
offerings rather than the machinations in and around the executive suite. On
Wednesday night Yahoo unveiled Yahoo! Axis, a slick new mobile browser and
desktop browser plug-in that lets you view visual search thumbnails of
webpages, without leaving the page you're on.
CEO Scott Thompson
The
new "search browser" as the company coins it, is available as a free
download in Apple's App Store, and as a free
plug-in for versions of Internet
Explorer, Safari, Firefox and the Chrome Web browsers. An Android
version comes later.
When
you enter a search from within the browser, you'll see visual previews of up to
25 search results that appear in small boxes . If you're on the iPad, you can
swipe down from near the top of the screen to reveal thumbnails, then swipe
left or right to move from one search result to the next, tapping the image
when you want the page to take over the entire screen. On a computer you can
click for the next search result.
Yahoo
told me that it can serve up visual thumbnails for about 80% of the pages you
might come across in a search. In the absence of such as a visual, you'll see a
thumbnail-sized box filled with text.
As
you'd expect, Yahoo lets you customize a home page by logging in with your
Yahoo ID. But Yahoo also gives you the option to sign in with your Facebook or
Google credentials.
If
you do log in, your search isn't tethered to any one machine. So if you search
to plan a vacation, buy a car or whatever from one device, your computer at
work, say, you can resume from where you left off on the iPhone as you ride
home or consult your PC back home.
"Our
search strategy is predicated on two core beliefs—one, that people want
answers, not links and two, that consumer-facing search is ripe for innovative
disruption, especially on the front-end," Shashi Seth, senior vice
president for Connections said in a press release. "With Axis, we have
re-defined and re-architected the search and browse experience from the ground
up."
Axis
adheres to the latest open web standards such as HTML5,
and was built on a mobile development platform called Yahoo! Cocktails.
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