Yahoo Enhances Mobile Search By Showing Similar Content

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Yahoo continues to compete against the other two major search engines by highlighting different types of content that are similar to the search query that was entered, including images, videos and reviews. Yahoo officially announced the changes on Thursday, and they will apply to mobile search, Chrome and Safari.

Yahoo is stealing a page from Google’s playbook, as the popular search engine already highlights popular search queries with a variety of related content. Not surprisingly, Bing offers something similar. Yahoo is just entering the game with its highlighted content. During the last quarter of 2014, mobile search traffic made up about 50% of Yahoo’s searches. That number was up from 32% in 2013.

Yahoo strives to meet the needs of mobile internet users

As more people use their smartphones for mobile internet access, Yahoo manages to keep a focus on reaching out to them. The tech giant also wants to incorporate its search into more third-party apps. Late last year, Yahoo even replaced Google as Firefox’s default search engine. This was a pivotal move for Yahoo.

Yahoo also wants to entice more internet users to try its search engine. The company is working with Oracle to get internet users to change default search engines via a pre-ticked installation box. Yahoo claims the whole thing is transparent to internet users, but users are forced to opt out if they don’t want to change their default search engine. Google did a similar move with Adobe when users were forced to opt out when they didn’t want the Chrome browser.

How to prevent the switch

Even when Java changes someone’s search provider without installing an app, it remains a hassle to reset when you don’t want the change. The best thing a user can do when installing Java on their computer is locate the box with the tick and un-tick it if you don’t want to make Yahoo Search your default search engine.

Yahoo will continue to vie for the top spot.

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