SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Searching email is generally an exercise in frustration.
You plunk in a few keywords that you think might be in the message you want, then get pages of results of every email that contains those words. Unlike a web search, there is no ranking by importance, no best guess by the algorithm about what you really want — just a list of items, most recent first.
“Mail search is broken,” Jeff Bonforte, the senior vice president for communications products at Yahoo, which runs one of the most popular free email services, said in an interview.
That is a problem, he continued, because email is our most important memory service, storing photos, conversations, activities and documents from plane tickets to party invitations. “There’s a lot of history in your inbox,” he said.
For the last year, Yahoo has been working to transform email search. Over the next week, the 225 million users of Yahoo Mail will begin to see the fruits of that effort in the web version of the service.
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.
The changes are modest so far, and searches still end up defaulting to standard keyword searches most of the time.
But Yahoo says that the hard engineering work that has gone into Project Bootcamp — its code name for the email overhaul — will allow it to make other improvements in the coming months.
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