Very interesting! Oh, I’m not talking completely about Yahoo’s announcement from last week concerning the new popularity information available from Yahoo’s video and image search, I’m talking mostly about the sentence, “Already, we’ve seen double-digit percentage increases in engagement for both image and video search since launching these new homepages, with a 60% increase in time spent on the image search homepage.” It’s like going car-shopping for a car and having the salesman say, “… and this model gets 40 miles per gallon and has driver and passenger side airbags. Since getting in this new model I have reached my quota 50% faster and believe I will actually be able to afford a beach vacation this year.” There’s nothing inappropriate or bad about it… it’s just… weird.

Anyway, let’s get back to the heart of the matter. The new changes are on Yahoo’s image and video home pages, which are available at http://images.search.yahoo.com/ and http://video.search.yahoo.com/
respectively. The front pages show you the top 18 trending things people were searching for. (If you turn autoscroll on, the front page will wander through the
top 90 trending things.) When I went and looked at those pages today (Sunday) I found both the expected (Gary Coleman, Stanley Cup, NBA) but also the unexpected (Alice Cooper, Old Spice Commercial).

In the case of the images search, click on an image and you’ll get both the results for an image search and the most recent images for that search (very nice.) I noticed on some of the searches (Michael Jordan) I also got a left nav of related people (like Scottie Pippen) and one related movie for whatever reason. I did notice that occasionally the search results were a little odd, as when I looked at the results for Robin Hood 2010 and found a picture of a 2010 Ford Mustang sitting smack in the middle of my search results.

In the case of the videos, you’ll get results from a video search and the latest relevant videos via Twitter (nice) AND a autoplay embed of the video that you clicked on to get started on your search in the first place. Most of the embeds I looked at were YouTube, though I did see one video from Yahoo.

Yahoo’s made a quick and handy way to see what’s trending in multimedia. I just wish that instead of trending to everything, we got the option of looking at certain categories — business, technology, etc.