When you start typing the name of a person or company in the search box, Yahoo will now automatically suggest what or whom you might be looking for and offer to create a search term. So if you’re looking for a ticket you bought from American Airlines, for example, you can limit the results to messages from the carrier and exclude other messages that simply contain the words American and airline.
Yahoo is also indexing the attachments and links that people include in emails. If you search for “photos cricket and India” — as Sriram Chatrathi, one of the leaders of the email project, likes to do — you will get a screen of photos the algorithm determines are connected to the sport, avoiding the need to go through all the emails that contain them.
“It extracts just those photos,” Mr. Chatrathi said. “It makes photos first-class citizens.”
For all searches, users will be able to click a button on the right-hand side of the results to sort by relevance, most recent or oldest, or messages with attachments. And if you link your email account to Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, you can now see profile information about the people you correspond with.
