Among the enhancements to Yahoo’s search page design–the features that, in the company’s words, “exemplify how Yahoo! is continuing to innovate in search technology and the user experience”–are the following:

• a unified, Bing-like design
• an enhanced search assistant
• the ability to play video within search results
• a set of filters that allow users to refine their searches based on prior queries or follow-on searches of other sites like YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (click on image below to enlarge).

“The Web is huge, billions of pages, millions and millions of sites and domains,” explained Larry Cornett, Yahoo’s VP of search products and design. “You do not care about all of it. We are bringing front and center the features that are going to make it easier and safer to search.”

Which is all well and good. But isn’t that exactly what Google and Microsoft claim to be doing as well? Doesn’t everyone have a search assistant these days? Doesn’t Microsoft’s Bing already offer in-line video viewing in its search results? (Google once did as well, but disabled the feature over performance issues.) And aren’t Yahoo’s filters basically another version of Google’s “Show More Results” feature? They certainly appear to be.

So these things aren’t true innovations; rather, they’re innovations of the new-to-Yahoo sort. They’re table stakes at a search game that Yahoo has already lost. So “bringing front and center the features that are going to make it easier and safer to search” doesn’t really mean much when they’re already front and center in market-leading offerings, as Danny Sullivan notes over at Search Engine Land.

“There are certainly some aspects that are becoming commoditized in the foundation in search,” Cornett said. “You can either overwhelm people and give them millions and millions of results or show them what they care about the most. That is exactly where we’re going to continue, building a search experience that understands what they’re looking for.”

That sounds great–except it’s not anything different from what Microsoft says. And if Google doesn’t say it, that’s because searchers are voting with their actual search activity that Google’s already doing it. In addition, while Cornett suggested that Yahoo is somehow spending huge amounts of time and money coming up with a better personalized experience over competitors, the fact remains that Google has long offered personalized results that outdistance Yahoo.

Cuil, sophomorically pronounced “cool,” isn’t exactly the sort of name from which global brands are made (Google arguably wasn’t either but at least people knew how to pronounce it). And if its search engine boasts greater comprehension and relevance than Google’s (GOOG) as Cuil claims, why doesn’t it display the company itself in a search for “Cuil” instead of “Restaurants in Cuil Dabhcha,” “French Cuisine,” and “Lochaber”? (My first search for “cuil” returned nothing at all.) This, from a search outfit with a Web index three times the assumed size of Google’s and an executive team of Google veterans?

“You can’t be an alternative search engine and smaller,” said Anna Patterson, Cuil co-founder and president. “You have to be an alternative and bigger.”

And you have to be useful. Effective, too. Right now, Cuil seems to be lacking in both areas. “This is the most promising thing I’ve seen in a while,” said Search Engine Land editor Danny Sullivan. “Whether they are going to threaten Microsoft (MSFT), much less Google, that’s another story.”

To be fair, Cuil does have one thing going for it: a privacy policy that seems to be quite a bit more favorable to users than Google’s.

Privacy is a hot topic these days, and we want you to feel totally comfortable using our service, so our privacy policy is very simple: When you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on this later). Your search history is your business, not ours.”