Danny makes a valid point. If Yahoo! wants people to believe it intends to compete in the search industry, then Yahoo! needs to take pride in its search technology innovations.

Yahoo! could certainly use a much leaner user interface but every advance its engineers make in helping users find relevant content should be proclaimed from all the rooftops in the land.

Yahoo! missed a great opportunity to take points away from Google.

Yahoo is testing to find a simple and intuitive UI to get a better user experience. I agree, they’re not going to gain a greater search share by fixing their UI alone, but it will help contribute to it and certainly shouldn’t lower their share.

My only complaint is how long it’s taking. Seems testing has been going on for months. With 60-70MM hits a day you’d think they’d figure it out faster.

But I’m pretty certain that Yahoo!’s strategy around UI innovation doesn’t just involve picking the best of 43 shades of blue. It doesn’t involve just shiny buttons and floating bubbles and arrows or whatever.

No, Yahoo! has the freedom to take the raw results from Bing and remix and insert and delete and refactor and shuffle. In short, Yahoo! has complete freedom to implement what Danny in 2006 called the “invisible tabs” model.

Like it or not, an “invisible tab” is a UI design element.

A user interface isn’t just a graphical widget. It never was. A user interface is that which the user can interact with and manipulate. A user interface is something that shows the internal “state” of the computer to the user.

And so if Yahoo! starts remixing Bing results to create a better overall interaction experience, it will in every sense of the word be manipulating and changing the user interface.

Don’t think so narrowly, Danny!