Sunnyvale, California-based online pioneer Yahoo has given users of  Apple's popular iPhone an improved way to search the Web using its Yahoo Search for iPhone online service, including a feature to cut down on typing time while performing Web searches. Users of the upgraded search service can now also utilize add-ons created with Yahoo's Search Monkey open development platform on their iPhone. Yahoo Brings SearchMonkey Applications To iPhone Yahoo's new iPhone-specific mobile search engine site, which debuted earlier this week, offers the new features to users of Apple's iPod Touch device as well, in a service building on the Sunnyvale company's previous mobile search efforts for the Apple products. In April Yahoo, the second-most-used Internet search engine, expanded its OneSearch software with certain features initially available only to iPhone users. The features added this week resulted from a Yahoo initiative to bring the myriad features that have been added to the company's computer-based search service to the iPhone with as few changes as possible. The new effort sought to bring iPhone users "the full Yahoo Search experience, including SearchMonkey, Search Assist, [and] shortcuts," according to Yahoo senior Web developer Ryan Grove, who along with Tom Chi and Jeremy Hubert, also Yahoo developers, worked to create the new Yahoo Search for iPhone. Apple iPhone Users Get Word-Suggestion Tool "In June, my boss came to me with a challenge: bring the full Yahoo! Search experience [...] to the iPhone with as few compromises as possible," noted Grove in announcing the new iPhone product in a message posted Tuesday on his blog. In their attempt to achieve "an iPhone search experience that matched the desktop experience," the  Yahoo team added type-ahead word-suggestion feature it called "Search Assist," similar to the "Search Assistant" functionality the company added to its mobile OneSearch product in April. "Search Assist saves you time by completing your queries before you’ve finished typing them," Grove wrote in his Tuesday announcement. The feature uses typing recognition logic to make searches faster by deducing possible words from the first letters a user types in. The Yahoo Search for iPhone site, which is accessible directly from the Web at search.yahoo.com/i, offers quick access to various popular search shortcuts such as links to movie show times, local information, weather and news, and online images from Yahoo's image-sharing site Flickr, Grove said. Yahoo Brings iPhone Upgraded Mobile Search Experience The addition of seamless integration with SearchMonkey desktop applications may bring the widest variety of new utilities to iPhone users, who are now able to utilize any tool created with the platform, as long as they have a Yahoo account and are signed in to it. "All your favorite SearchMonkey modules will follow you from your desktop browser to your iPhone," Grove noted. SearchMonkey lets Web site owners add new types of information such as photos, addresses, related stories, reviews, contact information and ratings to the basic descriptions currently shown on Yahoo's search engine listings. The moves come as Yahoo has sought to improve its mobile device services under its Yahoo Open Strategy plan to unify the company's online services such as e-mail, photo and bookmark management, instant messaging and calendar planning, by allowing Yahoo's 500 million monthly visitors worldwide to use a single profile and command center. Related Links:
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