[Techtaffy Newsdesk]
Yahoo has launched the Yahoo Axis, a ‘search browser’ or a new cross-device Yahoo way to search and browse the Web. This development is a little bit out of the blue, the company had been making the headlines for most of the wrong reasons, for a while now. Yahoo’s renewed foray into the Search business is also a bit surprising because Yahoo search has been ‘Powered by Bing’ for a while now, and it looked like the Search ship had sailed for the company a while ago.
On the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Axis serves as a standalone mobile browser app. On the desktop, Axis is a browser plug-in that works with Firefox 7+, Safari v5+, Internet Explorer 9 and all versions of Chrome.
(Senior vice president, Connections, Yahoo): Our search strategy is predicated on two core beliefs—one, that people want answers, not links and two, that consumer-facing search is ripe for innovative disruption. We have re-defined and re-architected the search and browse experience from the ground up.
Axis gives people instant answers and visual previews, within the search results itself. Once on a search results site, Axis also lets people simply swipe or click to the next result.
Axis also allows you to move seamlessly across devices. You can start a search on your computer, flip through the results on your iPhone, and finish the search at an iPad. Content can be easily shared by email, Pinterest and Twitter.
After signing in with Yahoo, Google or Facebook credentials, Axis centralizes online lives with a customizable Home Page that provides direct access to your favorite sites, saved articles and bookmarks across all devices where Axis has been downloaded. Axis is built upon the Yahoo Cocktails mobile development platform, which is designed for creating deeply personalized products that are built for connected devices first. Comprised of Mojito, an open source JavaScript MVC framework and Manhattan, a cloud-based hosted environment, Cocktails is a blend of open, standard web technologies including HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and Node.JS.
Axis is available tfor download across iOS devices and as a desktop plug-in for HTML5-enabled browsers.