Yahoo Index was a guide though your personal data. It surfaced the right information based on context, allowing users to plan and complete tasks more efficiently. Users could also search their personal information across different data sources (social, mail, calendar, contacts).
While Google mainly searches the public web, Yahoo aimed at searching your personal, private web. The Index app would allow users to connect popular services like Facebook, Email, Dropbox, Evernote - and many others - to the system. The information from those services would then be indexed and thus searchable. Yahoo ranks and intelligently connects search results on the fly, based on the user's intent.
One of the biggest challenges was to design a modular card system that could display a wide variety of content from any number of sources.
Engineers developed a tool that allows anyone to build cards for any product at Yahoo with a small amount of simple code. The tool provides an editable library of modules and templates made by us designers. Each template is comprised of more than one module, and usually corresponds to a particular source or content type (see example).
For each source/content type, there are 4 common permutations; regular, mini, compound, and multi. When a user performs a query, Yahoo returns a set of results in the form of cards. The cards and their appropriate permutations are displayed and ranked based on a confidence score. The confidence score is determined by many different variables like location, search history, behaviour tracking, and others. The idea was to create a search system that not only surfaced the most relevant content in your personal web, but also brought forth appropriate actions for that content.
This prototype was designed with the previously mentioned feature set in mind. It was shown at a company allhands as a way to communicate an evolving concept for the company's top priority of 2015/16, and to give coworkers something more tangible to align behind.