In an attempt to end their tenure as the red headed stepchild of Google and return to the status they once had, Yahoo! has updated its search engine to end what it calls “Web search fatigue”. That name alludes to a Harris Interactive poll for Yahoo, explaining that only 15% of users found what they were looking for on the first search.

The biggest upgrade for the search engine is the Search Assist, which acts much like T9 on a phone, trying to predict the topic the user is seeking based on the spelling, as well as other relevant subject matter. Upon typing the letters “hou”, the terms “house”, “Houston chronicle” and “24 hour fitness” all appear. The Yahoo! Search VP Vish Makhijani explains, “In testing Search Assist, we found that users were 61% more successful in completing their task with this new search feature at their disposal.” There is also an option for users to turn this feature off, as to some (specifically myself) it can come off as a little bossy.

Another notable update, with specific implications in the advertising world, is that now pictures, videos, audio and text are all compiled in the response to a search. Although Google has this capability, it was astutely brought to my attention that when a search for a news topic on Yahoo is done, videos come up in the results, whereas they do not on Google. What does this mean for advertisers? To begin, there may be more opportunities for interactive multimedia ads throughout the results page. Also, these new image and video rich search results may nicely compliment the similar qualities of brand advertisers’ content, marking a point where the search engine domain may not belong to only direct response advertisers.

By upgrading their search engine, Yahoo has made a clear statement that they are not going to lie down and succumb to the powers of Google. With the changes not even 48 hours old, it is difficult to see what role this will all have in their future success; it seems that not a day goes by when there is not talk about Google swallowing up another company of technology. Those things taken into consideration, Yahoo still has a long road ahead of them.