Few days after Microsoft announces some improvements to its Live Search Engine, now is Yahoo’s turn to surprise the world with its new Search Assist and the integration of audio, video and photos directly in search results.

Search Assist is in fact a technology which gives goes beyond basic search “suggestions” and gives consumers real-time query suggestions as well as related topics and concepts. The Search Assistant could be especially valuable when a person is searching on an unfamiliar topic.

When a user inputs a search term the Search Assistant opens a drop down menu of suggestions and related concepts that enables further exploration around their search topic.

“The new Yahoo! Search is focused on getting consumers the most relevant information as well as providing the best user experience. We know that consumers want a complete answer, not a bunch of links, and the changes we’ve made are focused on getting people to the best answer — whether it be a Web link, photo, video or music clip — in one search,” said Vish Makhijani, general manager and senior vice president of Yahoo! Search.

Yahoo decided to revamp its search engine after a recent research conducted by Harris Interactive had revealed that consumers are suffering from “Web search fatigue.” Harris Interactive concluded that while 99 percent of online adults use a search engine to find information on the Internet, a mere 15 percent of them find what they’re looking for with their first search, with most needing to conduct three to four searches.

Beside the Search Assistant, the web giant introduces also Yahoo Search Shortcuts, with the most useful information found on the Web and contributed by other online users. The new shortcuts were designed to help consumers save time when searching for popular categories such as events, music, movies, travel, sports, health, shopping, businesses and restaurants.

But with these improvements Yahoo also hopes to gain a better market share in a search market dominated by Google. According to the latest data released by comScore Media Matrix in August Yahoo had only 23 percent from US search market, while Google was leading the pack with 56,5 percent.

“We'll chip away [at Google's lead],” Yahoo senior vice president Vish Makhijani said. “We have our eye on being number one in search.”

Last week Microsoft also announced some major improvements to its Live Search application. For example Microsoft announced it has quadrupled the size of Live Search’s index.

The larger index coverage, completed by the use of advanced ranking algorithms, auto-spell correction and better stop word handling, lays the foundation not only for better search-results, but also provides Microsoft with a solid background when dealing with the continuous expansion of the Web.

Apparently, the increase in indexed content ranges from 5 billion pages to more than 20 billion, and Microsoft said that it had come up with a new way of extracting data from the Web which automatically adds information from specific domains to the data base, including ratings and reviews; businesses (locations, contact information, photos, hours of operation, ratings and reviews); celebrities (buzz, images and videos) and more.

Also Microsoft added Entertainment, Shopping, Health and Local to Live Search, but went even further with Scopes (which allows people to see search results from Web pages, local maps and directions, images, videos, and more without the need to re-enter the same query each time or to leave the page) and Video.

Currently, Microsoft’s Live Search engine trails Google and Yahoo, having a market share of 11.3 percent in the US.