Yahoo Search has been experimenting with colors, features and layouts, as the company tries to determine the correct mix to boost clicks across properties and query traffic on its search engine, as well as increase revenue per thousand searches (RPM).
A light-screen purple background highlights the search page with a cleaner look, along with tabs at the top of the page rather than under the search bar. Ads appear in the query stream under "Personal Results for You." Several searches serve up multiple configurations depending on the query, specifically using a Firefox browser.
"Yahoo is continually developing and testing new product concepts in an effort to offer the most delightful experiences for users and advertisers," according to a Yahoo spokesperson. "We don't have anything new to announce at this time."
The Sunnyvale, Calif. tech company has a few announcements forthcoming. If Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has her way, purple will become the hot color as the company makes the Internet a more creative canvas.
Yahoo has been pushing for search users to log in even with a Google or a Facebook account. But the one-sign-in model creates more questions than the companies are prepared to answer. Signing in allows users to customize the categories of information they received about Yahoo products and services or opt out of each, but which owns the data when logging in to Yahoo Search from a Google or Facebook log-in?
Do the companies share the data? Can the two target ads across company platforms? There is also the issue of where Microsoft Bing comes into the mix, since it supports the back-end technology for Yahoo Search.