Yahoo! Axis

It's no secret that Yahoo has been falling behind in the Web search game. So it comes as a welcome surprise that the company has come out with a real innovation in the genre. Yahoo Axis has as its main mission to change search from a destination page that yields yet another page of ten blue links, to a browser companion that makes search part of your Web experience. The idea is to go from query directly to results, without the intervening page that lists a choice of links.

Axis takes the form of free mobile apps (iPad and iPhone now, Android later) that themselves double as browsers, and browser plugins for today's popular Web navigating software. Besides fast access to result pages, another Axis fundamental is that all your devices and computers are synced, in terms of bookmarks and recent searches, if you choose to sign in. In particular, the mobile app makes excellent, intuitive use of touch gestures, while the browser plugins have their own HTML5 slickness, and mostly stay out of the way.

Signup and Setup
Less than a day after its release, Yahoo Axis is already in the number-two spot of the iTunes App Store's top free downloads. The small 3.7MB download installs faster than most iOS apps. Since anything on the Web could show up in the app, iOS first displays its obligatory "Mature content" warning before you install it. The next notification during install asks if you'll allow push notifications, and then you finally OK the lengthy but standard terms of service.

Interface
The Axis iPad app functions as a full Web browser, using Safari's underlying page-rendering engine (as all iOS browsers must.) It starts you out with three clear, simple overlay instructions in a fun handwriting font, explaining its sparse, all-black interface. As in every browser, there's a search bar at the top. To see results, you swipe your finger down on the screen, and thirdly, you're instructed to sign in using a Yahoo, Facebook, or Google account.

I did run into a glitch where the sign-in box changed into the iPhone-size Yahoo search app when I tried signing in with a Google ID. Facebook and Yahoo sign-in worked without incident. Another notification box appeared, disclosing that Yahoo would store my bookmarks and the application's most recent state, so that I could pick up where I left off on another device.

Next to the search bar are six buttons?back and forward arrows, a sharing button. This button can also take you to your home page, which shows three sections?Read Later, My Favorites, and Continue from device. You can re-arrange the first two, while the Continue section stays put.

Once you click in the search box, Axis's theme of trying to simply show you results immediately kicks in. A dropdown shows trending searches, and tapping any of these opens a flyout box with nutshell info on the topic. For example, when I was testing, Zachary Quinto was trending. The flyout offered a photo, movie trailers from his popular movies (Star Trek and Down with Love), and the latest news on him. But the best part came when I looked to the right of this info box. Thumbnails showing the most likely page results for Zachary Quinto?his own home page, Wikipedia, and IMDB. I could simply swipe left to see all the page results, and click on one to see it fill the screen. It?s a supremely intuitive experience.

Even after you've full-screened your chosen result, you can swipe in from the right to go to the next result site, or from the left to get to the previous. And dragging down anywhere on the page drops the thumbnail results back down from the top. You have to keep in mind the difference between this last action and swiping down from the very top of the iPad screen, which shows iOS notifications. Trying this gesture also occasionally opened a link on the page at hand rather than getting me to the Axis list.

I was able to get stock quotes when entering a symbol, and typing an MLB team name showed the ballclub's latest game result and next scheduled matchup. But typing "weather" didn't bring up a quick look at my local forecast, as I'd expected it to.

Settings in the app are few. You get to log out, choose to view a page formatted for iPad, Desktop, or iPhone, and to switch to a Local Only mode. The latter is a good choice for when you don't want your search history synced with Yahoo Axis on your other computers or devices.

Bookmarks
You can add your own new bookmark sections to the preexisting ones, My Favorites, and Read Later. Since newly added bookmarks appear at the end, I appreciated how the Axis app let me press and hold a bookmark to move it anywhere in the list. It's an action that any iOS user is familiar with from the way app icons themselves work.

Tabs
Unlike the built-in Safari tabs, which mimic those of desktop browsers' across the top, Axis's are large thumbnail previews of the pages in the tabs along the bottom. You see an icon of overlapping pages with a number, flanked by the word "Tabs" at bottom right of the screen, so there's no mistaking how to access them. The first thumbnail is empty, with a plus sign, which obviously lets you create a new tab.

I had less luck on the iPhone than on the iPad. Though the interface was well-fitted to the smaller screen, my result pages were all dark, with buttons for Web and Images. Some page text was jumbled, too in this initial view. Once I did get a result page displaying, however, the swiping back and forth among results worked well.

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