If Carol Bartz's remarks about "pretty search" (made during the Yahoo Investor Day event) left you scratching your head, her company's acted quickly to clear up the confusion.  Today, Yahoo updated its image and video search homepages so that trending terms are represented with rows of pictures.

Five pages of images representing trending topics have been made available in each case, and it's possible to either click through the pages one by one or let them scroll automatically.  Then, by hovering over an individual image, a user can see what site it came from.  Current top sources include the Washington Post, Yahoo News, the New York Daily News, YouTube, Yahoo Video, and Metacafe.

It seems like this approach is bound to get Yahoo a lot of additional clicks and attention.  After all, it's one thing to know that tensions between North South Korea are running high, but a picture of three warships - or of Megan Fox or Michael Jordan, depending on one's interests - is more likely to draw an individual in.

Early results have been quite positive, too.  A post on the Yahoo Search Blog explained this morning, "Already, we've seen double-digit percentage increases in engagement for both image and video search since launching these new homepages, with a 60% increase in time spent on the image search homepage."

And more "pretty" updates should be on the way.  The post continued, "This is just the start of a set of changes we'll be making to help you find the information you're looking for."

source: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/05/28/yahoo-updates-image-video-search-with-visual-trends