In June, my boss came to me with a challenge: bring the full Yahoo! Search experience—including SearchMonkey, Search Assist, shortcuts, and other awesome Yahoo! Search features—to the iPhone with as few compromises as possible. He wanted an iPhone search experience that matched the desktop experience and took full advantage of Mobile Safari’s excellent featureset. And he wanted it in a month.
I grabbed Tom Chi and Jeremy Hubert from Search UED and we hashed out a plan over lunch. We used Jeremy’s existing iPhone Search prototype as inspiration. Tom had to fly to Paris to judge the Imagine Cup 2008 interface design competition, but in his spare time he churned out interface mockups and perfected the design while watching “young ladies in debutante dresses drinking and getting on a boat” on the River Seine. Meanwhile, I wrote the code.
Two weeks later, we quietly launched Yahoo! Search for iPhone. Here are just a few of the awesome features you can now enjoy on your iPhone:
- Search Assist saves you time by completing your queries before you’ve finished typing them
- All your favorite SearchMonkey modules will follow you from your desktop browser to your iPhone (just make sure you’re logged into your Yahoo! account on your iPhone)
- Movie showtimes, weather, local results, breaking news, Flickr photos, and other useful Yahoo! Search shortcuts are now at your fingertips
- Other helpful features like Quick Links, same-host indent, and more
Try it out and let us know what you think. And if you don’t have an iPhone handy, head over to Flickr to see some sexy screenshots of the iPhone SRP.