Yesterday, Yahoo! launched a beta version of "Glue Pages", a new search experience that adds media such as images, video and blogs to standard text results when typing a query. As of now, the new beta feature is limited to U.S. users, but it should be soon rolled out to other internationalized versions of the site.

The testing of the feature had begun in early May for the Yahoo! India website to compete with the way its main competitor, Google, presented its search results. The feature was not originally planned to debut on the US version of the site, but was rather thought as an improvement that was deemed suitable specifically to the Indian audience.

However, Glue Pages are now in a beta testing stage for the search engine and can be found at this address. Users aren't currently able to perform searches on just any keyword, but the most common ones will get executed and return relevant results at quite a high speed.

As with the Ask.com search engine, the results include a Wikipedia article summary with pictures whenever possible; however, the Yahoo service presents the data in a much more organized fashion than Ask.com does, parsing news from authoritative sources as well as pictures and videos; towards the bottom of the page, users can even access a list of news sites featuring news on the search query and subscribe to their websites through their respective RSS feeds.

Adversisement is also featured in a prominent spot, at the top-right corner of the page, and although it uses quite a lot of space it doesn't quite interfere with the user search experience. When looking at the original Indian version of Glue Pages, it is easy to notice the difference between the two approaches, and the w

ay the Yahoo! US team is trying to apply a better layout and overal page design the original idea behind this feature.

While the Yahoo! India version, also in beta, explains the origin of the term "Glue Pages" by saying that it aims at gluing together standard search engine results with text links and related media on different colums, dividing the page in three different colums — the left for standard text results, and the remaining two for images and videos — the version currently being tested on the US servers reduced the number of colums to just two and generally improved the usability of the feature.

The feature was announced on the Yahoo! Search Blog yesterday:

"Tonight we're launching Yahoo! Glue(TM) beta. This newest iteration is a standalone experience focused on assembling useful information from all over the Web, giving users a new place to discover and explore images, videos, articles and more [...] These pages are built using an algorithm that automatically places the most relevant modules on a page, giving you a visually rich, diverse page all about the topic in which you're interested."

In other words, a philosophy that differs substantially from that of Google, which mainly displays text link results and very few images in response to most user queries and requires users to click on related links at the top of the page to access other types of media that satisfy the given query. A difference that also reflects the different history of the two search engines, one born as an "all in one" Web portal, the other with the sole objective of giving relevant search results to user queries.

The only open question with Yahoo's new search feature seems to be on why the company, after the failed advertisement agreement with Google, still chose to rely on several Google-branded services, such as YouTube videos and the new Google Blog Search service among others, which some say might end up hurting Yahoo's reputation.