Yahoo! Revamps Search, IM and Mail

Yahoo! has rolled out changes to Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger, including some new social networking features.

Over the last few months, Yahoo! has made a number of improvements to both its online products and the way things are run behind the scenes. This week, the company announced that in conjunction with the recent changes made to the Yahoo! Homepage, the company is redesigning Mail, Search and Messenger.

First up is Yahoo! Mail, which is getting new multi-select, drag-and-drop functionality designed to make attaching images much easier. Yahoo! has also upped the photo and filesize limits from 10MB to 25MB. Photos aside, the company is also going to start filtering your important emails from the other junk you get on a day-to-day basis. When you log in, you get a small panel that only shows you mail from your contacts. From there, you can move along to your inbox, which will show you all of your mail. Of course, Yahoo! has also made things a bit more social. The new and improved Yahoo! Mail features a new panel called 'Updates' which shows you "what your friends are  sharing online." It basically brings all your Flickring, YouTubeing, and tweeting friends' actions to you.

Next up, Yahoo! is introducing Yahoo! Messenger 10, which features high quality video calling. You can also change the language before you sign in, which will change all your menus from English to whichever language you've selected. Lastly, enter that 'Updates' panel that made its debut in Yahoo! Mail. Again, twitter, Last.fm and Flickr updates (among others) along with the ability to IM a friend about a specific update.

Finally, Yahoo! yesterday said the company is currently testing a new search results page that "ups the ante on personal relevance." As well as providing new tools for refining results (e.g. explore related concepts or narrow down your search to only include people or videos), Bryan Lamkin SVP of Yahoo! Applications said that the company is also putting in place technology that will try to figure out what you're searching for based on your previous searches. If you search for 'cat' and then 'jaguar', Yahoo! will show you the animal and not the car. The improvements to search are currently only being tested with selected users. No word on how long it will be before we all have the chance to try it out.

You can read more about all these changes on the Yahoo! corporate blog here.