We are taking steps to make you feel safe when searching the Web — warning you about dangerous sites before you click on them. Today we’ve launched SearchScan (in beta), a new safety feature tucked into Yahoo! Search, courtesy of our friends, the dedicated security experts over at McAfee.

It provides alerts that appear within your search results, flagging “risky” sites with dangerous downloads that can include spyware and viruses. SearchScan will even warn you about sites that have dubious email practices to help you keep your email box free of spam.

No other search engine today offers you this level of warning before visiting sites. Period.

Yahoo! Search with the SearchScan feature is like your Internet security guard, warning you of danger so you can search with confidence… another reason to make Yahoo.com your starting point

Vish Makhijani
SVP & GM, Yahoo! Search

Today, we evolve again with the introduction of the new Yahoo! Search. We’ve invested in research, design, and engineering to better understand your intent when you’re searching so we can do a better job of getting you to your answer in one search.

With this launch, we took some liberties with the search box itself, turning it into an interactive experience that senses when you need a hand. In a dropdown window on our home page and on our results page, Yahoo! Search Assist provides both query suggestions as you type as well as related concepts you can explore to get you to your answer by just pointing and clicking. Try it with searches like “energy savings” to see what we mean. In testing Search Assist, we found that users were 61% more successful in completing their task with this new search feature at their disposal.

We also realize that the right answer is often more than a link – it’s a photo or a video. So we’ve integrated this multimedia content directly into the search results to give you a more complete answer. Looking for images of Nepal? You’ll find thumbnails of Flickr images tagged with that query. Typing in “Dove evolution”? Chances are you want to watch the video, which we’ll serve up in your results as an inline video. No need to leave the page — give it a try.

And we’ve continued to improve the Yahoo! Search experience by giving you more of the answers you’re looking for directly on the search page for popular categories like music, movies, travel, athletes, health, restaurants, events, and local information.

This is just the beginning of some of the improvements you’ll be seeing from Yahoo! Search over the next few months. Our mission is to get you from “to do” to “done.” Give it a try and tell us what you think.

Vish Makhijani
SVP & GM, Yahoo! Search