Yahoo Updates Search Engine With 'Immersive' Features

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Web pioneer Yahoo on Thursday rolled out an update of its search engine, offering new features that aim to bring users closer to popular news and entertainment content.

Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) is calling the service “immersive search,” integrating sorted displays of video, images, news stories and Twitter content into its results.

Shashi Seth, Yahoo’s senior vice president of search and marketplaces, called the new feature the “cornerstone of the overall Yahoo experience.”

“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,” Seth said in a statement.

The update builds on Yahoo’s promise to continue to innovate around the user experience of its search engine, even as it is in the process of transitioning the engineering platform that powers the retrieval of results over to Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT).

In the meantime, the competition is hardly sitting still. Just last month, search leader Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) rolled out its Instant feature, displaying immediate results as users type in their queries.

With immersive search, Yahoo is giving particular emphasis to entertainment-oriented content.

The new features include a partnership with Netflix in the form of a Web app that appears in search results for movie titles, enabling members to access their accounts with the popular movie service directly from the Yahoo site. Yahoo said the Netflix integration is the first in a series of Web apps it plans to roll out.

Additionally, movie searches bring up aggregated ratings from critics and Yahoo users, as well as links to popular movies sites IMDB.com and Rotten Tomatoes.

Yahoo is rolling out the features nationwide today, and plans to begin offering them globally next year.

Kenneth Corbin is an associate editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.