Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

So, there's this great feature of the Yahoo! Toolbar that simulates tabs in Internet Explorer 6.0, allowing you to open up multiple instances of Yahoo! Search in the same browser window!

...wait, wait, already did that one.

Ah, right, not those kinds of tabs. :D The afore-mentioned Yahoo! Search has a set of fun search tabs that show up above the search box---Web, Images, Video, Audio, Directory, Local, News, Shopping, Maps, People Search, Travel, Jobs...hold on, what? I was with me up until Shopping, but where'd those other ones come from?

Turns out Search has a couple extra tabs up its sleeve, furtively hidden away in the Search Preferences. In fact, even the Search Preferences are kind of hidden away; you can access them either by performing a search (Preferences link shows up in the upper right corner) or by swapping to the Images tab (Preferences link shows up to the right of the search box, under the Advanced Image Search link). From there, you go on to Edit your Display & Layout, then Edit your Tabs, and, shazam! Customizable Search tabs: you get to pick and choose the search types that are most important to you, making them more accessible and making the Search page more applicable to you.

It's really not the most fully developed feature I've ever seen, which may explain why it's tucked away out of sight; several of the search tabs don't function as well as you'd probably want them to and the customized tabs aren't universally present on Yahoo! search boxes (notably, on the Yahoo! front page and the search results pages). However, I love the concept, and think that it would be very, very useful if someone fleshed it out a bit more. So...get to fleshing, someone!

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