Yahoo unveiled a package of improvements to its e-mail, search and other products Monday, hoping to become the foremost one-stop Internet hub and weave the world's largest stable of e-mail users into a more cohesive social network.

With some analysts saying the experience of searching the Internet could change as much in the next 18 months as it has in the past five years, the new version of Yahoo search, its executives say, will produce a much richer and more detailed set of results than the simple list of text links to other Web sites that have long been the standard of Internet search.

At the same time, the e-mail upgrade, to become available to Yahoo Mail's 295 million global users in coming weeks, focuses heavily on social networking, one of the hottest areas on the Web right now.

"Yahoo's goal is to be the center of people's lives online," said Tapan Bhat, senior vice president of integrated consumer experiences.

Coupled with a revamping of its home page in July, Yahoo said the thrust of the changes are to simplify, filter and enrich a person's experience on the Web.

With Yahoo badly lagging Mountain View-based Google in search, the changes reflect Yahoo's need to stay current with an area of the Web where technology is changing rapidly.

The company also emphasized that although it will eventually use technology supplied by Microsoft to produce its search results, Yahoo's presentation of results to users would differ from Bing, Microsoft's new search engine.

"I think they are trying to create some buzz around the fact that Yahoo is not going to kind of fade into obscurity, the way AltaVista did, or some of the previous search engines did," said Hadley Reynolds, director of search and digital marketplace technologies for the Framingham, Mass., research firm, IDC.

Larry Cornett, vice president of search products and design, told reporters that Yahoo's new search technology - still in testing - would allow it to compete directly with Google in one area where the search giant has made the transition from a noun to a verb - "googling a person."

A search for a prominent politician or CEO would deliver a full composite of quality biographical information right to the search page, Yahoo executives said, rather than forcing a user to burrow into the individual Web pages produced by a standard search.

"Searching for people has been Google's domain. Well, we're going to take that away from them," Cornett told reporters. "When we launch this, you're going to come to Yahoo to search for people. This is a very different experience."

In addition, a column on the left of Yahoo's search results will produce results from other prominent Web services - even Google's YouTube. A user who clicks on one of those icons would see information from that service matching the search keywords, in addition to the standard search results at the center of the page. A second left-hand column would produce a list of "related concepts" a user could explore.