When you're already on the ropes, it can't hurt to try something new. That seems to be the attitude over at Yahoo. Hot on the heels of their Livestand mobile digital magazine, the venerable search engine made major changes to its search results for two things that users look for the most at this time of year: recipes and gifts.
It's been a long time since I've even thought about preparing a holiday feast, but I know friends for whom it just wouldn't be a real celebration without inviting friends and family over for a big meal. So when I saw Matt McGee's article on Search Engine Land about the changes Yahoo made to enhance the user experience of searchers looking for recipes, I knew I had to try it out. So I popped right over to Yahoo and began searching for holiday recipes.
I performed several searches, but I'll use my search for “diabetic apple recipes” as my example. (Hey, why should we get left out of all the holiday cheer just because we're not allowed to overdo the sweets and starch?). The first difference I noticed was tabbed browsing. Right under the search box, there's a line of tabs labeled Web, Images, Video, Shopping, Apps, Blogs, Recipes, and More (clicking on more, of course, gives you more options). The Web tab is the default. In general, this setup gives a very clean, intuitive look to the page.
Naturally there are ads at the top of the results, but at least they're on target; one even offers a free diabetic recipe book. Right below the ads is a slider with images from recipes all over the web. I counted at least three sources on my slider at the original setting, two of which I've heard of and respect. By the way, even the slider is tabbed; in this case, the choices were Top Recipes (the default), Quick Recipes (recipes under 30 minutes), and Low Calorie Recipes.
For each image on the slider, you can click on a bar to “Show Ingredients & Time;” note that this will give you the time from start to finish, but only show a very few of the ingredients. That combined with the picture, however, should tell you enough to decide whether or not to click through to the recipe itself.
Are there particular ingredients you want to use or avoid? At the upper right hand side of the slider you'll find an option to Filter by Ingredient. When I clicked on that, I got a drop-down menu that included radio buttons next to certain ingredients listed under either “Ingredients I Want” or “Ingredients I Don't Want.” I had to click on “Ingredients I Don't Want” in the drop-down before I could click on any of its radio buttons (only one of those headings is completely visible with all of its options at one time).
Yahoo Optimization 
