The result is a polished, fairly powerful email program that I prefer to Google’s much-hyped Gmail, which is undergoing an even longer gestation. It has been in beta status since April 2004.

I’ve been testing the new Yahoo Mail on both Windows and Macintosh computers. It has some downsides, but it beats Gmail, in my view, both in terms of features and in terms of its ability to act like a standard computer program rather than a Web page, something for which Gmail often gets more credit.

A closer competitor to Yahoo Mail is actually Microsoft’s Hotmail, now called Windows Live Hotmail. But Yahoo tops Hotmail, too, in my opinion.

The new Yahoo Mail, which works in Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows, and in Firefox on the Macintosh, is now more than just an email program. Like Gmail, but unlike Hotmail, it has a built-in instant-messaging module. You can choose to communicate with any of your contacts via a real-time chat, right from within Yahoo Mail, as long as that contact is online and has an IM account on either the Yahoo or Microsoft instant-messaging networks. You don’t need to be running your IM program.

Unlike either of its competitors, however, the new Yahoo Mail also allows you to exchange text messages with people on cellphones, although the message exchange must be initiated from Yahoo Mail.

Yahoo Mail offers unlimited storage of emails and attachments free of charge, and a very fast and good search capability — like Gmail’s — so you can keep years of messages on hand and retrieve them quickly. Gmail offers 2.9 gigabytes of storage free. It sells extra storage for prices ranging from $20 a year for six gigabytes to $500 a year for 250 gigabytes. Hotmail is in the process of boosting its storage to five gigabytes, free, and 10 gigabytes for $20 a year.

With Yahoo Mail, you can send attachments of up to 10 megabytes per message and 20 megabytes if you opt for a $20-a-year plan that also eliminates the annoying banner ads that litter the free version. Gmail offers attachments of up to 20 megabytes free. Hotmail allows 10 megabyte attachments and 20 megabytes under its $20-a-year plan, which also banishes ads. Gmail has no banner ads, just text ads that run alongside the emails and can’t be eliminated.

This new Yahoo Mail is gradually being rolled out in coming weeks. The company still plans to retain the older version of Yahoo Mail, now called Classic, for people who prefer it, or for those using browsers that are incompatible with the new version, such as Apple’s Safari.

The new Yahoo Mail allows you to do things that once were impossible in a Web-based email program. For instance, you can drag messages to new folders, or select a group of messages in the same way you would with a standard email program, to delete them or mark them as read or unread. Unlike in Gmail, when you right-click on a message you get a list of options that pertain to the mail program — like “Reply to Sender” — instead of options that pertain to the use of the browser — like “Add to Favorites.”

Also, Yahoo Mail features a very nice tabbed interface that Gmail and Hotmail lack. With this interface, which is separate from the browser’s own tabs, you could have your inbox in one tab, an instant-message or text-message conversation going on in another and a new email you are composing occupying yet another. You can move among these tabs without losing the content in any of them.

And like Hotmail but not Gmail, Yahoo Mail offers a preview pane, like Microsoft’s Outlook, so you can see the contents of an email without opening it. Gmail offers just a “snippet” of the message content. Unlike Gmail, which forces you to view your emails as bunched-up “conversations,” Yahoo Mail — like Hotmail — displays them as a standard email program does, sorting them by date, sender, subject or size.

So what are the downsides of Yahoo Mail?

Well, the biggest is probably that unless you pay for the $20-a-year premium plan, you can’t view your Yahoo mail account in a standard email program such as Outlook or Apple Mail. Gmail allows this free of charge. Hotmail allows it free in Outlook and in Windows Mail, though it will soon announce the capability for other email programs for premium members and, eventually, for free members as well.

Also, I found Yahoo Mail could sometimes be slow. When I created a new folder and tried to drag 200 emails into it, I was warned that I couldn’t do that because the new folder was “still being created.”

But overall, Yahoo did a really good job making its online mail program versatile, powerful and accessible.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online free at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

Google has made the occasional minor tweak but until recently, its search-results pages looked a lot like they always have. Its upstart competitor, Ask.com, took greater strides last year with cool features such as previews of the pages it listed, lots of summary information at the top of the page and prominent suggestions for narrowing or broadening searches.

Now, Google and Ask each have rolled out new ways of presenting search results. Google’s approach, which it calls “universal search,” is a modest thing, a first step in what it says will be a long effort to break down barriers between different types of information a user may be seeking, such as Web links, images and news.

But Ask’s new system, called “Ask3D,” is a much bolder and better advance in unifying different kinds of results and presenting them in a more effective manner. It shows, once again, that Ask places a higher priority than its competitors do on making search results easy to navigate and use.

Both new systems are now the defaults on the search sites. You don’t have to do anything special to use them. Indeed, Google’s change is so subtle you may not even notice it for some searches.

Both of the new systems are designed to spare users the extra steps needed in the past to view different types of content related to the same search term. But Google combines these different types of content into one list. Ask puts them on one page in separate sections, which I find to be the superior approach, because each type of result is displayed more effectively; it’s easier to see at a glance what you have.

In the old systems, if you were searching for, say, “Red Sox,” you’d have to do separate searches for Web pages, news, images and so forth.

To make this simpler, Google’s universal search now groups these different kinds of results within its single, familiar main list of results. As I write this, a Google search for “Red Sox” includes not only Web links, but also an entry called “News Results for Red Sox” with the latest headlines about the team and a news photo. At the top of the page, under the Google logo, are the two most relevant search categories — in this case, Web and News — if you want to separate types of results.

A Google universal search for a prominent person might bring up images at the top — something Google has been doing for a while — but also a video, which can be played without leaving the search page, a very nice feature. To see an example, search on “I Have a Dream,” to view the famous Martin Luther King speech without leaving the page. At the bottom of the page is a list of related searches.

But Ask3D goes much further. Instead of sticking with a single list of search results that mixes various types of material, it now presents results in a page divided into three panels. The largest, middle panel still contains Web links (and a few ads). But it is no longer topped by the search box and links to other sections of the search engine. Instead, where possible, it is topped by a set of salient facts or direct links to salient facts.

The thinner left panel contains the search box and links to other sections of Ask, but mainly it displays suggestions for refining your search, or for making related searches.

A somewhat wider right panel contains search results that go beyond Web links, such as images, news headlines, encyclopedia articles, videos, weather information, local time and, where relevant, music clips you can play without leaving the page.

A search for “Red Sox” in the new Ask3D, for example, has a summary box at the top of the main panel with direct links to Scores, Schedule, Stats and more. In the right panel, there are general images, news photos, an encyclopedia article on the team, videos and headlines. As always, the left panel shows suggestions for how to narrow or broaden the search.

If you hover over the image thumbnails, they enlarge. If you hover over the video thumbnails, they play, albeit without sound. For each of the right-panel content categories, you can even launch a further search without leaving the page just by clicking on a magnifying-glass icon.

If you search Ask for “James Taylor,” you get a biography at the top and, at the right, playable clips from “Fire and Rain,” “You’ve Got a Friend” and “Sweet Baby James.”

Ask also now gives you larger previews of the pages it lists, visible by just hovering over a binocular icon. And you can now get to the advanced search panel without leaving the page.

Google deserves credit for universal search, which I’m sure will get better. But Ask’s new design is much more compelling and well worth a try.

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online free at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.