Yahoo officials said that Search Direct is proof that the company is still very much a player in the search market and an innovator in this space, despite its search partnership with Microsoft.

"Search is incredibly important," said Blake Irving, Yahoo's chief product officer, during a press conference. "Search matters to customers and it matters to us."

Search Direct is a great example of how Yahoo has been able to focus on the search user experience while relying on Microsoft for back-end functions, like website crawling and indexing, Irving said.

With Search Direct, users get query results as they type, without having to finish the query, hit enter or scan the results page, according to Yahoo.

In conjunction with the feature's speed, Yahoo believes that Search Direct will attract the attention of end users and boost usage of its search engine. "It's a super-powerful results set," Irving said.