Yahoo is coming on strong!

I’m very impressed with the way Yahoo has come on really strong. First they acquire Flickr, then they introduce tag-based searching in MyWeb 2.0 (which, I believe will be a far more efficient way of searching than using google in the near future, if only because it is humans that are tagging webpages, rather than google’s algorithms). Yahoo local is really powerful too (too bad it isn’t available locally). Yahoo Adsense is now beta, and they promise to release it at then end of the year. Yahoo 360 is a worthwhile challenger to Myspace, and now we see Yahoomail leapfrog Gmail! Holy cornball batman!

As anyone who’s used both Gmail and Yahoo Mail knows, one of the standout features of Gmail is its search ability. But Yahoo seems to have leapfrogged Gmail’s search, for now, anyway. The Sunnyvale company has rebuilt its search capabilities, expanding its indexing to include photos and attached documents, and designing a user interface aimed at making it easy to drill down to the messages you want to find.

There are lots of little improvements to Yahoo’s mail search that make it far smarter. But especially clever are the photo and attachment views. A single mouse-click will bring to the surface all the photos in your in-box, displayed as a page of thumbnails. Ditto for document attachments.

Yahoo has also added a side panel that lets users refine search results by sender, date or other criteria.

Power users can also build more precise search queries right in the search box, such as “from:michael” (only messages from michael) or “tahoe -from:bob” (anything on “tahoe” not from “bob”)

It’s incremental innovation, but important as it helps nudge up the bar for the whole industry.

Rebuilding the search capability was a massive undertaking, Yahoo’s Drew Garcia tells us. Until today, Yahoo only indexed the subject and sender fields of an email message. Now, the company is vowing to go back and index the entirety of every stored email message and attachment in every Yahoo Mail account in the world. That’s many, many terabytes of data stored across a dozen data-centers. Because of the scope of that task, Yahoo says it will take several months to roll out the new search capabilities. Some users will see it starting tonight. Others will have to wait.

The original article is available here.