Yahoo also wants to let its search engine users perform and complete more tasks within the search interface, by bringing in more information to the results page from Web sites like the customer reviews site Yelp.

All of this is designed to make Yahoo's search engine more "personally relevant" than it and competing search engines have been so far, said Larry Cornett, vice president of search products and design.

For Yahoo Mail, the company will add what it calls an "application box" with wares from both Yahoo and other providers, so that people can accomplish more within the mail interface.

In addition, Yahoo is taking a page from Twitter and Facebook and giving Yahoo Mail users a box to enter a status message about what they're doing or thinking about.

Yahoo is also simplifying how Yahoo Mail users share photos, whether they're stored on their hard drives or online on sites like Flickr, said John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail. For example, Yahoo has raised the ceiling on photo attachment size from 10M bytes to 25M bytes.