Main Search Engines

Yahoo! at SES San Jose

With Search Engine Strategies starting this week, we get a sneak peek from Vice President Larry Cornett on his panel on how searchers interact with search engines on Wednesday at 1 - 2:15 p.m. Also you'll find a glimpse of where the entire Yahoo! Search team will be throughout the show.

Be sure to check out the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog for more details on other Yahoo! speakers at the event.

We hope to see you there.

Yahoo! Search Blog team

Yahoo! Search Blog (YSB): Can you give us a sneak peek into what you plan to talk about at the show?

Larry Cornett (LC): I will be on a panel at SES entitled "Search User Behavior Update." The title of my talk for that panel is "Thinking Beyond the Search Results Page." What I mean by that is most of us in the Search industry have historically been focused on the performance of the search results page, referrals and conversion. We need to step back to consider what people are really trying to accomplish in the real world, which extends well beyond the Web and into their daily lives. I plan on sharing what we at Yahoo! Search do to better understand our users and how they experience Search end-to-end within the context of their larger tasks. This includes the great work done by our Customer Insights and Metrics & Analysis teams, which ranges from ethnographic field studies to eye-tracking research. We are really interested in helping users more easily craft better searches and get straight to the answers they are looking for.

YSB: What are you most focused on for Yahoo! Search today?

LC: First, we have continued to focus on our mission to help get users from "to do" to "done" as quickly and as safe as possible when they use Yahoo! Search. That includes continuing to advance the great Search Assist technology that we recently launched and SearchScan a feature launched in May 2008 that helps protect users from viruses, spyware and spam. Second, we've added a really exciting new development platform called SearchMonkey which allows publishers, site owners and developers to leverage structured data to enhance the functionality, appearance and usefulness of search results in our Search experience. We are continuing to evolve the Monkey and work with publishers and developers to bring more enhanced results to our users from sites like Yelp, Yahoo! Local, and LinkedIn. It's a great way for users to more quickly find the information they need to complete their real world tasks. And recently we've launched Yahoo! Search BOSS, which is a web services platform that allows developers and companies to create and launch web-scale search products by utilizing the same infrastructure and technology that powers Yahoo! Search. We are continuing to work with startups and developers like Me.dium, Hakia, Daylife, and Cluuz to bring entirely new search experiences to life.

YSB: What kind of innovation do you see happening in Search today?

LC: Well, of course I am a little biased, but I have to say that both Yahoo! SearchMonkey and Yahoo! Search BOSS are two of the biggest innovations in the Search landscape today. We are encouraging and enabling innovation on a whole new scale. But, there are a number of other companies doing very interesting things in the Search space as well.

Yahoo! Search Speaker Schedule

Monday, August 18th

Universal & Blended Search
9:45 - 11 a.m.
Cris Pierry, Senior Director of Product Management

Semantic Search -- How will it change our lives?
11:15 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
Amit Kumar, Director Product Management

Tuesday, August 19th

Shopping Search Tactics
11 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
Greg Hintz, General Manager, Yahoo! Shopping

Wednesday, August 20th

Searcher Behavior Research Update
1 - 2:15 p.m.
Larry Cornett, Vice President, User Experience and Design

Thursday, August 21st

Organic Listings Forum
1:30 - 2:30 p.m.
Sharad Verma, Senior Product Manager

Get ready for SES 2008

A quick note about my upcoming keynote at the Search Engine Strategies conference, Tuesday, August 19^th at 9:00 am in San Jose. Kevin Ryan and the entire SES organization put on one of the best search conferences around. This year I have the privilege to present to more than 4,000 of you down in the Valley. Our large presence around the show will let us hear from all of you about our products and services and help us better understand the perspective that you bring to the show.

During my keynote on day two, I'll share with you our perspectives on how the search landscape has changed and how it will continue to evolve, based on key trends and our ability as an industry to react to them. I'll take you back in time a bit to talk about our early days of search marketing and look forward to the industry’s recent moves into semantic search. It’s an exciting time for us all as we begin to usher in a new phase of search that looks at how we can deliver a more intuitive user experience and a better ROI for advertisers. With these changes, I'll talk about how Microsoft is addressing and embracing this evolution. Specifically, I'll highlight some of the new product features, including Live Search cashback, which we unveiled at Advance08. I’ll also focus on how we think about building more open and sophisticated tools for advertisers and publishers, and show a few demos like our recently released Webmaster tools.

All of this, coupled with a Q&A session with Kevin Ryan, should make for a great opportunity to talk about how search is evolving and where Microsoft is headed.

I look forward to meeting many of you at another great SES San Jose conference. And please stop by our booth #309.

Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President, Search, Portal, and Advertising

Where you can find us

Monday, August 18

9:45am-11:00am: Universal & Blended Search Todd Schwartz, Group Product Manager, Live Search
11:15am-12:30pm: Semantic Search: How Will It Change Our Lives? Scott Prevost, General Manager and Director of Product, Powerset
2:45pm-4:00pm: Everything but Google: Alternative Search Advertising Options Mary Berk, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft

Tuesday, August 19

9:00am-10:00am: Morning Keynote Satya Nadella, SVP, Search, Portal & Advertising Platform Group, Microsoft
4:00pm-5:15pm: Identify, Analyze, Act: SEM by the Numbers Brian Cosgrove, Site-Side Analytics Engineer, AvenueA / Razorfish

We're also hosting a sponsored session, Diagnose SEO Issues Using Live Search Webmaster Tools, on Tuesday from 2:45pm-3:45pm. Speakers are:

Nathan Buggia, Program Manager Lead, Webmaster Tools, Microsoft
Andy Woods, Development Lead, Webmaster Tools, Microsoft
Ani Babaian, Senior Product Manager, Webmaster Tools, Microsoft

Wednesday, August 20

10:30am-11:45am: Building a Search Friendly Site William Flaiz, VP, Search Engine Optimization & Web Analytics, AvenueA / Razorfish
1:00pm-2:15pm: Searcher Behavior Research Update Pavan Lee, Research Manager, Microsoft
1:00pm-2:15pm: Auditing Paid Listings & Click Fraud Matthew Gretzer, VP & Global Discipline Lead of Search Marketing, AvenueA / Razorfish
2:45pm-4:00pm: Keywords & Content: Search Marketing Foundations Jorie Waterman, Lead Program Manager, adCenter Keyword Research Platform

Thursday, August 21

10:15am-11:15am: Effective Contextual Search Management Dennis Buchheim, Sr. Director - Product Management, APS Networks, Microsoft
1:30pm-2:30pm: Organic Listings Forum Nathan Buggia, Program Manager Lead, Webmaster Center, Live Search
2:45pm-3:45pm: Site Clinic Jeremiah Andrick, Program Manager, Webmaster Center, Live Search
2:45pm-3:45pm: In House SEO: Lessons learned & Victories Won Derrick Wheeler, Senior SEO Architect, Microsoft

Find out more about Microsoft's presence at SES in the Webmaster blog and the adCenter blog.

See Moments Missed in the 2008 Olympics

The opening ceremony has come and gone and the 2008 Summer Olympics are well underway. Every day moments of achievement, defeat and disappointment are captured and if you're lucky, you witness them first hand. If you're not so lucky, don't fret, Yahoo! Image Search has just rolled out a new image carousel to make finding those history-making moments easier.

Now when you do a search on Yahoo! Image Search for Olympics-related content, you will see a carousel of some of the freshest, most comprehensive photos from Yahoo! Sports coverage of the Olympics. The carousel images will appear above the regular search results, with arrows in the right hand corner to make toggling through the images easy. So, if you want to peruse images of Michael Phelps as he makes Olympics history or view photos of Yang Wei, who just brought home the gold medal for China in Men's Gymnastics, here's what you'll see:

Accessing the photo carousel is simple. To get the latest of Olympics photos, search 'Olympics' and you might get a glimpse of the intensity between Brazil and Latvia in the women's basketball games or catch the concentration at the Shunyi Olympic Rowing and Canoeing Park. You can also hone in on more specific photos. Try a search for a particular athlete, i.e. 'Roger Federer' or your sport of preference, like 'Olympics diving.' And, to get photos of a featured event, search it in conjunction with Olympics, like 'Olympics opening ceremony.'

And don't forget the Yahoo! Shortcuts for Olympics-related information. To get a real-time snapshot of what's going on at this year's games, try one of the following:

Olympics Medal Count: To get a quick overview of the ranking in this year's games, simply search 'medal count.' And, if you're more interested in your team, just add your country before the search, 'USA medal count'
Game Updates: For a first-hand look at who's leading a specific game, do a quick search like 'Olympics swimming'
Athlete Stats: To learn the latest on a specific athlete, search their name and Olympics. Tough to keep up on how your favorite Indian American gymnast is doing? Search 'Raj Bhavsar Olympics'
Olympics Results: For a real-time overview of the games, search 'Olympics results'
Olympics Schedule: To keep up with what's when, search 'Olympics schedule'

Give 'em a try and enjoy the games. Happy Olympics!

Yahoo! Search Blog team

Inquisitor Gets Smarter, Faster and Multi-Lingual

A few months back we announced the acquisition of Inquisitor software, which helped to extend our query suggestion features, similar to Yahoo!'s Search Assist, to the Mac community. We've been quietly working on enhancements since, and today we're rolling out a new look, a few performance improvements and we're also going global.

To start with we tapped into the Yahoo! Search infrastructure, using the recently announced Yahoo! Search BOSS, our open search web services platform, in order to speed up the search results delivered in Inquisitor. You should notice a significant improvement in the speed of your query results in Yahoo! Search. We also gave Inquisitor a little facelift with a new, refined, yet simple home page (inquisitorx.com) and a cleaner user interface of the Inquisitor client.

You can now also utilize Inquisitor in different languages, eight to be exact, including Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German.

Great design will continue to be a pillar of Inquisitor. We hope you enjoy these changes, and as always, let us know what you think in the comments below.

Ariel Seidman
Director of Product Management
Yahoo! Search

SearchMonkey for Site Search

In the past few months, SearchMonkey developers have told us they'd like to use Enhanced Results for site search. Yahoo! and other search engines have long had a site restrict operator (e.g. site:anysite.com) and other site search tools, but we decided to launch a new capability that lets you add a query parameter that automatically turns on the SearchMonkey Enhanced Result for the site you're searching. This is important for site owners because it makes it easier for their communities to get more complete answers when they search on Yahoo! Search.

This new parameter will work with any app that's in the Yahoo! Search Gallery as well as any official app. (To make an app official, a site owner just needs to authenticate their site using Site Explorer and then associate their app with their site when they make it sharable in the Developer Tool)

How it works
To use this functionality, you just need to append a few parameters to a typical Yahoo! Search query string. Here's a quick example:

Start with a standard query string: http://search.yahoo.com/search?q=u2
Add the site restrict parameter: &vs=last.fm
Add the SearchMonkey app ID parameter (case sensitive): &sm=xho
Final result: http://search.yahoo.com/search?q=u2&vs=last.fm&sm=xho

This query string can be generated using whatever mechanism you choose, including a simple search box on your site or blog. It works with both Infobars and Enhanced Results -- as long as the app is either in the Gallery or is official. If you accidentally try a SearchMonkey app along with a site restriction that doesn't match, the results will look like a typical site-restricted search. Here are a few more examples:

Site: Wikipedia
App: http://gallery.search.yahoo.com/application?smid=knb
SearchMonkey for site search query: http://search.yahoo.com/search?q=george+washington&vs=wikipedia.org&sm=knb
Try a search:

Site: Yahoo! Answers
App: http://gallery.search.yahoo.com/application?smid=ylc
SearchMonkey for site search query: http://search.yahoo.com/search?q=can+pigs+fly?&vs=answers.yahoo.com&sm=ylc
Try a search:

Site: java.sun.com
App: http://gallery.search.yahoo.com/application?smid=Zq0
SearchMonkey for site search query: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=exception&vs=java.sun.com&sm=Zq0
Try a search:

Before we continue work on this feature, please let us know what you think below or on the Developer group. We'd be particularly interested to hear what else site owners would like to be able to customize in order to make SearchMonkey a more valuable site search tool.

The SearchMonkey team

What's Being Built with BOSS

It's been about a month since Yahoo! Search BOSS launched, so it seems like an opportune time to look at some of the mashups and search products that have been built using the BOSS APIs & services. As we've said before, our goal with BOSS is to remove as many of the barriers as possible to creating new search products. By providing deep access to Yahoo! Search's investment in engineering, sciences and core search infrastructure and removing key usage restrictions, we are encouraging a whole new level of innovation in search experiences. We are very excited to see the diversity in products that many of you have already created. What follows is just a small sample of what's being built -- we'll post again soon with a bunch more.

4HourSearch -- Built by Sam Pullara, 4HourSearch is a demonstration of the power of Yahoo! Search BOSS combined with a slick user interface. Aptly named, it took Sam four hours to build the site using a combination of the BOSS API and YUI design tools.

PlayerSearch -- Ted Kasten and team are building a sports search engine that pulls in content from a host of sources, including BOSS. Fantasy sports fanatics, check it out here.

NewsLine -- As part of the Daylife Developer Challenge, the folks from Dipity built a mashup using their timeline API, Daylife's news API and the BOSS API. The result is a really interesting way to visualize news for any topic. Congrats to the Dipity team on winning the BOSS mashup prize!

Tianamo -- Tianamo is a 3D search visualization early prototype built by Lachlan James. It maps the relationships between the search results from the BOSS API and displays them visually. To check it out, you'll need to be running Windows with Java 1.6+.

As you can see, the possibilities for creativity and innovation in search are almost endless. If you're building a mashup or product using BOSS, make sure to tag it with "bossmashup" on Delicious so we and the rest of the world can discover it.

The BOSS team

We're bringing the Olympics to you

Microsoft is into the Olympics in a big way through our partnership with NBC on NBCOlympics.com, the official online home of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing! And Live Search is ready to help you find everything you want during the games.

Feeling competitive? We’ve made it easy for you to find out if your country is ahead or behind – just search for “Olympic medals” and you'll get up-to-the-minute tallies by country:

Check it often to watch those medals add up!

If you just want to see a specific country or sport, you can do that, too. Try “Medals for Portugal” or “Medals for Swimming” and you'll get the latest counts as they happen:

It isn’t always about who is winning, although those heart-wrenching stories of hardship leading up to victory make some Olympians more popular than others. If you don’t want to be left out of the conversation over lunch, check out Olympic xRank. Not only will you know who is hotter than the torch but why.

On the other hand, if you hear an athlete’s name or want to find out why you keep seeing their face on your co-workers' monitors, try our Athlete Answer. Enter “Michael Phelps” and we give you everything you need in a neat little package:

Speaking of news, we’ve pulled it all together for you with our new Olympic News scope. We look for stories – articles and videos – across all the sources we can find and constantly provide the freshest, most relevant stories for you. If you just want to get right to the videos of the events and athletes try video search.

And we're not done! In our last blog post, we introduced you to our new homepage. It's gotten great reception and we wanted to do something special during the Olympics, so we'll be updating the image twice a day with great shots from the Games. Watch for it when the Olympics begin on 8/8/08.

We hope your team brings home the gold from Beijing!

Jacquelyn Krones - Senior Product Planner for Live Search

Improve your site's standing with new Webmaster tools

Today we are bringing our Webmaster Tools out of beta and releasing several new features that help webmasters see how Live Search crawls and indexes your sites. As a website owner, you can use these tools to improve your results on Live Search when a someone is looking for your site. The new Webmaster tools give you more data about referring links, identify issues Live Search encountered when crawling your site, and help you improve the overall indexing of your site. For the full story about this release, see the Webmaster Center Blog.

You can check out the new tools at http://webmaster.live.com/. And for questions, be sure to visit the Live Search Webmaster forums.

Nathan Buggia, Live Search Webmaster Center

Yahoo! Shortcuts for Summer Olympic Fever

With 205 nations, approximately 10,500 athletes and 302 events in 28 sports, it's going to be tough to keep up with all that's going on at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. That's why Yahoo! Search is launching a series of shortcuts to Olympics-related information and news coverage.

Starting with the torch-lighting at the opening ceremony on August 8th, there will be a ton of Olympics-related information out there, such as breaking news, results and medal counts. The shortcut will help you get a real-time snapshot of what's happening in Beijing each day in one search.

If you're looking for a quick update on medal counts, just search for 'Olympics medal count' and you'll see something like this (once the games actually start):

If you want a medal count for a specific country, just add the country's name to your query (e.g. 'Japan medal count'). If you're looking for info on a specific sport, like recent results and a schedule of upcoming events, do a search for 'diving + Olympics' and you'll see a shortcut like this:

And if you're looking for the latest on a specific athlete, simply add his or her name to the query (e.g. 'Jingjing Guo Olympics') and you'll see something like this:

So now you can keep better tabs on Michael Phelps' road to sweeping another eight medals or how the Russian track team will recover from their recent loss.

With the Olympics shortcut, users can also play the news cast or interview video from Yahoo! Sports without leaving the search results page. And if you want to find out more information on a given topic, we'll of course include links to the relevant content on Yahoo! Sports as part of the shortcut. Try it with 'Olympics 2008' and click on the "Videos" link.

Once you've caught the Olympics fever and want to be up-to-date and organized with your favorite teams and athletes, try it out and let us know what you think in the comments below. Please note that many of these shortcuts won't begin working until the games kick off in Beijing, but we just wanted to let you sports fans know before the mania sets in.

Yuko Kamae
Yahoo! Search

Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Index Update

We'll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index, but expect the update will be completed soon.

Please visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board to share your thoughts or check in with other Yahoo! Search users.

Sharad Verma
Yahoo! Search

Yelp, Yahoo! Local & LinkedIn SearchMonkey Apps Now Default-On

Last month we opened up the Yahoo! Search Gallery to showcase all of the useful SearchMonkey applications that have been built by developers, site owners and Yahoo!. Today, we're turning on a few of those applications for all users. Now, the Yelp, Yahoo! Local and LinkedIn Enhanced Results will automatically appear in the search results, eliminating the need for users to go into the Search Gallery to add them.

Why did we start with these applications? Before making an application "default on" we require a few things: access to the site's structured data through semantic markup or a data feed, a well-designed and broadly useful application and positive user metrics. To understand how a SearchMonkey app affects user metrics, we generally expose a small percentage of our users to a default-on experience and measure if and how it changes their usage. We started with Yelp, LinkedIn and Yahoo! Local because they were among our first partners to share structured data. Our tests uncovered that users found these apps useful; in fact, in some cases, we saw a lift in click-through rate of as high as 15 percent.

In addition to testing a "default on" treatment, we also tested giving users the ability to add the LinkedIn Enhanced Result directly from the search results page. We'll continue to use this treatment as another way to promote high quality SearchMonkey apps to users.

While these are the first apps to be automatically included in the search results, they will certainly not be the last. We'll continue to work with our SearchMonkey developers to increase the exposure of other high-quality applications to the search results page in the months to come (so, make sure to submit your applications to the Gallery). Making it easier to find and add SearchMonkey apps is an important step in improving and enriching the search experience for our users.

In addition to turning these Enhanced Results on by default, we've also added "share-with-a-friend" functionality. By clicking the envelope icon on any Enhanced Result, users can now quickly send an email to their friends to share the app.

Let us know how these Enhanced Results are working and others you'd like to see in the comments below.

Amit Kumar
Director, Product Management
Yahoo! Search

Hola / Olá! SearchMonkey

Getting an international passport can be tough for the average monkey. But that's not the case with this SearchMonkey. Today we're proud to announce we've launched the Yahoo! Search Gallery in Latin America, so our friends in Argentina, Mexico and Brazil can now join the party.

Since our initial launch two short months ago, the team has been busy releasing major enhancements to the Gallery, supporting new microformats, putting on developer events in Sunnyvale, London and Paris, and picking the winners of the SearchMonkey Developer Challenge from hundreds of novel submissions. Now that the Gallery is extended to Latin America, we're getting closer to finally seeing the output of an infinite group of monkeys with an infinite number of keyboards... well, maybe not quite, but it'll certainly be fun to see the innovative enhancements they build.

And keep your eyes out for where SearchMonkey travels to next.

Nick Cox
Senior Product Manager
Yahoo! Search

Making Social Bookmarking a bit more Delicious

Today, our teammates across the way rolled out the newest version of the social bookmarking site Delicious (formerly known as del.icio.us), which offers enhanced performance and search capabilities along with a brand new user interface.

The Delicious team has detailed the changes on their blog, but here's a quick look at what's new:

Improved Performance -- With a new more scalable infrastructure, Delicious can better keep up with the growing traffic while still providing you with the same reliability and responsiveness.

Powering Up Search -- By packing more power into the search engine, the overall performance has improved, delivering search results much more quickly. You can now also search within one of your tags, another user's public bookmarks, or your social network.

New Design -- Since a picture is worth a thousand words, we'll just show you...

Yahoo! has flipped the switch and we expect all users will be able to experience the new Delicious by this afternoon. Once you've had a chance to play around with the new site, visit the also-new discussion forum and let them know how things are working for you.

Yahoo! Search Blog team

New home page helps you explore more on the Web

Today we're releasing an update to the Live Search home page that received positive feedback from customers in trials last month. The new design features background images that will change frequently, augmented with what we call "hotspots." These interactive areas highlight parts of the image and help you explore search results related to the highlighted area. Users who have tested this new home page have found it both engaging and a great place to start a search.

New images and hotspots

In our release last spring we laid the foundation for this page. In this home page release we've added background home page images that we'll change regularly and hotspots that click through to great search results. Hotspots gleam to the user when the page first loads then fade into the image. Users can discover them again by moving their mouse over them, revealing details about the image and a link to a related search result. To ensure that users can start a search immediately, our base page loads first with the images and hotspots loading quickly afterward. Users on a broadband connection may not notice the two steps. Today we're releasing the new home page in the U.S. only, with more markets to follow in the future.

A great place to start a search

Our goal for the home page is to find the best way to enhance users' sense of discovery, surprise, and delight while balancing engineering realities for a great user experience.

Extensive user research and exploration of many concepts with our customers pointed us in the direction for this design. We want the page to be a great place to start a search and also to intrigue and inform as well. We think hotspots will help users discover parts of Live Search they might not know while not distracting from the core purpose of the page — searching.

We think the new design is a great start, but there's more to come, with lots of interesting directions that we'll be exploring in our next releases of the home page.

Chris Rayner, Senior Product Manager, and Zach Gutt, Senior Program Manager
Live Search User Experience team

The Latest Cool SearchMonkey Apps

The Monkey has been out for a couple months and, since then, we've named the Developer Challenge winners and seen thousands of applications built -- more than 50 of which we've added to the Yahoo! Search Gallery. In the spirit of acknowledging developers' hard work, we want to share a few of our favorites. Remember, you need to click the "Add" button in the Search Gallery in order to see these in your Yahoo! Search results.

The enhancement
ShoppingNotes.com Combo

How it works
This Infobar was created by ShoppingNotes.com, a site that combines bookmarking with price alerts. The app covers a wide variety of shopping sites and allows users to set price watches that will send them an email if the price drops.

Add it
Add it, then try it out with: 'Canon SD1000' or 'KitchenAid mixer'

The enhancement
Java Documentation

How it works
This Enhanced Result is useful for developers because it gives you quick access to the Java docs for the version of Java you're using.

Add it
Add it, then try it out with: 'java HashMap'

The enhancement
eHow Application

How it works
eHow, a site with clear how-to instructions for nearly everything, built an Enhanced Result that integrates photos and descriptions.

Add it
Add it, then try it out with: 'red wine stain' or 'how to train a dog'

The enhancement
Merriam-Webster Definition

How it works
Developer Challenge grand prize winner, Marco Vitanza, developed an Infobar for Merriam-Webster that gives users definitions and pronunciations right on the Search Results page.

Add it
Add it, then try it out with: 'onomastics definition'

These are just a few of the interesting apps already available in the Yahoo! Search Gallery. Stay tuned for more highlights to come...

Yahoo! Search Blog team

Stan Lee and Breaking News in Yahoo! Search

Yahoo! Search recently made some significant enhancements for queries related to breaking news. The goal was to improve the freshness and recency of Search and show breaking news articles faster than before.

Here's how we improved things:

Based on the newsworthiness of each query, we're now displaying the News Direct Display (DD) in the most relevant position(s) on SERP

We're also better able to detect queries that are newsworthy, which means we're showing more fresh News DDs than before

This improves the user experience in a few ways. First, because we're better able to detect when a query is about a breaking news topic, we're able to deliver fresher results when it matters most. Second, by displaying News DDs in multiple positions, we can deliver a more relevant search experience for users. For example, if you're an X-Men fan and you search for Stan Lee, you'll find the latest news about his cameo in the upcoming flick. But there's a good chance you might just be looking for background on the superhero comic book creator, so putting the News DD at a slightly lower position makes more sense.

Give it a try by searching for a news topic that's top of mind for you and let us know your thoughts.

Paul Yiu, Product Management, Yahoo! Search
Jean-Francois Crespo, R&D, Yahoo! Search

Paving the way to Semantic Search

If you've been frequenting the Yahoo! Search Blog, you've certainly read about our initiatives for a more open ecosystem. Complimentary to that, we've discussed semantic web standards and how Yahoo! Search is supporting this technology. Just last week, Yahoo!'s Peter Mika dug a little deeper into the semantic web and explored how it's helping to shape the next generation of search -- transitioning from syntactical search to semantic search.

The article first looks at the current limitations in a syntax-based search engine before paving the way for semantic search. Peter outlines the two roads to achieving semantic search as Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology and semantic web technology and highlights the common denominator in both as access to metadata. The fundamental difference is the way in which content is obtained -- implicit metadata extracted from text (NLP) versus explicit metadata provided by publishers (semantic web). Sharing his view on the similarities, Peter suggests the best way to get to semantic search is a blended approach using both NLP and semantic web.

And, as an integral member of the Yahoo! SearchMonkey team, Peter refers to the benefits that SearchMonkey is experiencing with the semantic web and calls out the opportunities to integrate with both NLP and semantic web technologies.

It's an interesting read, so take a look. If you have any questions for Peter, feel free to drop them in the comments below.

Yahoo! Search Blog team

SMX Local & Mobile, Yahoo! Local Sneak Peek

Danny Sullivan's SMX Local & Mobile event starts Thursday, July 24, in San Francisco. We're peppering the show with a keynote from Yahoo! Local and a panel presentation from Yahoo! Connected Life.

Kicking off the festivities, Frazier Miller, Yahoo! Local's General Manager, will focus on Yahoo!'s vision for weaving local information into users' primary Web starting points in his keynote address on Thursday at 9:15 a.m.

Following, Michael Bayle, Yahoo! Connected Life's General Manager of Global Monetization, will participate in the "Mobile Advertising Opportunities & Tactics" panel on Friday at 9 a.m.

And to give you a better sense of what you can expect from Frazier, the Yahoo! Search Blog team asked him some questions to give you a sneak peek.

Yahoo! Search Blog team

Yahoo! Search Blog (YSB): Can you give us a sneak peek into what you plan to talk about at the show?

Frazier Miller (FM): For the last several years, we've spoken about how expansive the local search market opportunity is, so I'm going to lay out how much progress we've made in fully realizing the market potential and where the industry is at large. I'll walk through which usage cases have caught fire with people, how we're doing in terms of monetizing on PC and mobile devices, and -- probably most interesting -- what it's going to take to get to the next level.

YSB: What are you most focused on for Yahoo! Local today?

FM: Over the last 12 months, we've focused heavily on making the site more social in eliciting user feedback and comments. We've introduced features that allow users to connect with each other by making comments on ratings/reviews and added the ability to subscribe to favorite reviewers. Also, earlier this month, we announced updates to Upcoming that include a new interface and greatly increased number of hyper-local events on the site to make it easier for new users to find things to do while maintaining the community aspects that regular users know and love.

YSB: What kind of innovation do you see happening in local search today? What are some of your favorite up-and-coming sites?

FM: I'm trying to be "greener" these days, so some of the sites that have really caught my eye fall into that category. Walkscore.com is a cool site that analyzes how well your community is laid-out for walking, rather than driving. Greenopia is one that rates businesses and services based on their environmental responsibility.

There's a ton happening in the Mobile space too. Fire eagle is a project sponsored by Yahoo!, which enables users to register their location and share it with a number of other apps and services. There's going to be a lot happening on this front in the coming months.

YSB: What about the local search market do you think offers solid potential?

FM: I can't overstate the upcoming importance and growth of local search enough. For example, by 2010, mobile phones are expected to outpace PCs by three times and local info is the most sought after on mobile devices. We have a perfect storm brewing between user demand, advertising desire for targeting and mobile evolution that's going to make this an incredibly rich arena for the next few years.

BOSS Developers: Check out the Daylife Developer Challenge

Last week we launched our new search web services platform, Yahoo! Search BOSS, and pointed to a few folks that already started using BOSS. We mentioned that Daylife is integrating the BOSS API as part of the Daylife To-Go customization wizard. They're also encouraging participants in their DayPI Developer Challenge to integrate the BOSS API in their mashups.

The challenge awards developers who build the most interesting, original and innovative applications using the Daylife API. As part of the challenge, Daylife will be also be awarding a bonus prize of $2,000 for the best BOSS / Daylife Mashup.

If you have an idea to share, sign up for a Daylife account, build an app and submit your mashup. Make sure you tag your entry with 'boss' and 'contest08' to be eligible for both the Yahoo! BOSS-DayPI mashup prize and the Developer Challenge.

The challenge ends on July 25th, so get your entries in quick!

Yahoo! Search Blog team

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Powerset joins Live Search

We're excited to announce that we've reached an agreement to acquire Powerset, a San Francisco-based search and natural language company.

Powerset will join our core Search Relevance team, remaining intact in San Francisco. Powerset brings with it natural language technology that nicely complements other natural language processing technologies we have in Microsoft Research.

More importantly, Powerset brings to Live Search a set of talented engineers and computational linguists in downtown San Francisco. This is a great team with a wide range of experience from other search engines and research organizations like PARC (formerly Xerox PARC).

We're buying Powerset first and foremost because we're impressed with the people there. Powerset CTO and cofounder Barney Pell is a visionary and incredible evangelist. When he introduced our senior engineers to some of the most senior people at Powerset — Search engineers and computational linguists like Tim Converse, Chad Walters, Scott Prevost, Lorenzo Thione, and Ron Kaplan — we came away impressed by their smarts, their experience, their passion for search, and a shared vision.

That shared vision is to take Search to the next level by adding understanding of the intent and meaning behind the words in searches and webpages.

We know today that roughly a third of searches don't get answered on the first search and first click. Usually searchers find the information they want eventually, but that often requires multiple searches or clicks on multiple search results. Two specific problems are the most common reasons for this:

Differences in phrasing or context between a user's search and the way the same information is expressed on webpages. Search engines don't understand today that "shrub" and "tree" are similar concepts. We don't understand that "cancer" sometimes refers to a disease and sometimes refers to a horoscope and when a query or a webpage refers to which.
Lack of clarity in the descriptions for each webpage in the search results. Sometimes a result looks relevant from its short description on the results page but turns out to be not so relevant when you visit the actual page. As a result, searchers frequently click results and then rapidly click back when they realize they aren't what they're looking for.

These problems exist because search engines today primarily match words in a search to words on a webpage. We can solve these problems by working to understand the intent behind each search and the concepts and meaning embedded in a webpage. Doing so, we can innovate in the quality of the search results, in the flexibility with which searchers can phrase their queries, and in the search user experience. We will use knowledge extracted from webpages to improve the result descriptions and provide new tools to help customers search better.

Working with our existing Search team and other Microsoft teams that focus on natural language, Powerset will help us address all of those problems and opportunities.

We're looking to add even more talented engineers to the San Francisco team to accelerate our shared progress. If you're interested in joining the team, drop us a line.

We'll have more to say about the things we're doing in understanding searches and webpages through natural language technology in the coming months. In the meantime, please join me in welcoming Powerset to Microsoft!

Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President, Search, Portal, and Advertising

Ask.com Makes More Moves on Privacy

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Live Search cashback now live on eBay

Now all of eBay's "Buy it Now" offers will be eligible for cashback rewards. With eBay's expansive catalog of products, from jewelry to electronics, you'll start to see more cashback ads appearing in our search results. That means more ways for you to save.

You'll see three primary differences between this user experience and other cashback user experiences:

There's an eBay ad with a cashback gleam (the cashback icon in the image here).
Instead of going into the Live Search cashback experience, you now go directly to the advertiser's website, which in this case is eBay.
The cashback gleam follows you throughout your eBay shopping experience. This is good continuity for the consumer and something we want to do more of, but it takes a bit of work on the advertiser side to enable this.

We want to learn from two experiences in the cashback program. Depending on customer and advertiser feedback, we'll make the necessary changes to deliver the best user experience over time.

Destination site experience This is the experience that went live last month. Consumers research a product category on Live Search and then click a Live Search cashback ad to head over to cashback for the best deal. We've had a lot of feedback that we should do a better job integrating our product research capabilities with our cashback experience. So we'll work hard to do that over the next few releases.

Direct-to-merchant experience The other experience we envisioned for cashback would integrate directly with advertisers from the search results page. In this experience, advertiser's ads will appear with a cashback gleam. When shoppers click the gleam in the ad, they head directly to the advertiser's site. Obviously, this streamlines a bit of the purchasing process but requires some custom development on the partner website to enable it. We took this approach with eBay and are exploring it with other advertisers as well.

We're excited to offer consumers more money-saving cashback rewards with eBay and look forward to hearing from you on how best to implement new features and functionality to the cashback experience.

Paul Dillon, Director, Commercial Search

Helping you Search AND Give

One of the most exciting developments we've had in the last year was the success of our inaugural Search and Give program where your queries helped to raise more than $250,000 for local schools and non-profits. Over the course of the year the program generated cash donations for more than 20,000 organizations ranging from schools to non-profits such as Doctors Without Borders and ASPCA (The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals). Today we've launched the latest version of the program that includes a new, easy-to-use design with enhanced features and more flexible donation capabilities.

Here's how it works

By signing up at http://www.searchandgive.com/, consumers can start donating one cent per search to more than 100,000 schools and 900,000 non-profit organizations worldwide every time they use the Live Search to find whatever interests them. People can also convert tickets they've earned playing games on Microsoft's Live Search Club, at http://www.club.live.com/, into donations for those same schools or charities.

What's new

More money donated You can earn one cent per search for your designated charity by just looking for things online — up to 500 searches per person per month.
More than 1 million organizations We've grown our list of eligible organizations to more than one million. We've also made it easier to find them with a new UI that allows for faster lookup by name or non-profit ID number.
Watch your community grow Track your donations, total donations, and total number of contributors for your chosen organization.
Tell a friend Search and Give brings communities together around causes that are important to them. People can now send instant emails to friends and family from within the tool letting them know how they too can make a difference.

We need your help

This program is powered by people through word-of-mouth or viral distribution. We're asking for your help to make this program an even greater success by sharing this information with your friends and family and recruiting them to start searching at http://www.searchandgive.com. If one person can earn $60 per year for their favorite charity just by searching the Web with Search and Give, imagine the power of 10 people = $600 per year; imagine the power of 25 people = $1,500 per year; imagine the power of 100 people = $6000 per year. Together, we can make every search count.

In the end, we hope this program will grow exponentially so we can redistribute more of the dollars coming into search to the local schools and charities that YOU are passionate about supporting. We hope you enjoy the new features and stay tuned as we start showcasing some of the best "Search and Give" campaigns you all have created!

Christine Andrews, Product Manager, Search and Give

Managing search engine access to your content

We at Live Search are pleased to announce another collaboration with Yahoo and Google aimed at making webmasters' lives easier. Webmasters have long used the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) to control how search engines access and display their content. The REP offers an easy and efficient way to communicate with search engines, and is currently used by millions of publishers worldwide.

Over the past few years, we have been working with Yahoo and Google to agree on common ways for webmasters to communicate with search engines. Our previous efforts include support for the Sitemaps protocol (see autodiscovery directive and cross-host sitemap submissions for more info). While most search engines already comply with the REP, this is the first time the three major search engines have come together to detail how we actually implement the protocol. This effort makes it easier for webmasters to know how REP directives will be handled by search providers.

You can view the details of how we implement the REP at Documentation for the Robots Exclusion Protocol.

If you are a publisher with feedback or suggestions for future enhancements to the REP, feel free to contact me at nbuggia@microsoft.com. We value your feedback as we continue to evolve Live Search.

Nathan Buggia, Live Search Webmaster team

Finding the "page not found"

Has this ever happened to you? You search online for information and click a promising link only to get an error page staring back at you:

These generic 404 error pages leave you stranded, with no option but to click the back button and start over, or just give up altogether — not very helpful.

We thought about this problem and realized that we had all the pieces to offer something much more useful. We could help website owners create error pages that actually suggest help even if the exact page you're looking for isn't available.

The Web Page Error Toolkit is a customizable Web application that extracts keywords from your search and gives you relevant search results in a custom error page.

So while you may not get the page you were originally looking for, maybe you'll find something even better.

You can find more details, including information on how to download the Toolkit, at Customize your 404 error pages with the Web Page Error Toolkit.

Go find the page not found!

Alessandro Catorcini, Lead PM for the Live Search API, and Amy Michaels, Group Product Manager for Live Search

Live Search…coming to a toolbar near you

With today’s HP announcement and the recent MSN toolbar release, I want to discuss our recent moves in the toolbar space. Overall, these distribution deals come down to three things:

1. Live Search is ready for primetime

These types of deals require a search engine that can stand on its own, as we all know how easy it is to switch to another search engine. Sure, Live Search has room to improve, but we’re confident that when consumers now try Live Search they’ll get relevant results, differentiated experiences, and a unique value proposition (see cashback).

2. Distribution can help with awareness and preference

We’re building a stronger consumer connection that starts with awareness and ends with preference. To be successful, we not only need to care about traditional consumer marketing campaigns to drive awareness. We also need to care about how other channels can help spread the word. We recognize that awareness for Live Search is low and that to crack into the consumer’s consciousness we need to be in front of them in more ways than one. Case in point: check out our new Search Share Facebook app.

3. Enabling partners is good for everyone

We need to provide publishers and our partners, like HP, with great tools and platforms to help them distribute content and reach their customers in new ways. The toolbar platform we have created exemplifies how we’re looking to extend customer service, brands, and content through great new experiences. With this platform we will be able to quickly build a branded feature and content-rich toolbar for HP’s entire line of US-based consumer PCs with just a few easy customizations. When the toolbar is released, HP will offer easy access to their online services like Snapfish and customer support, and bring their brand to life through Silverlight. Now imagine that type of customization for anyone and everyone on the Internet.

The HP toolbar highlights our excitement about the new developments we’re working on. Let us know what you think of the new toolbars.

Mikko Ollila, Product Manager, Live Search Partner Ecosystem

Wikipedia gets big

Check it out:

We realize that often you just need to get a sense of what your query is about. Wikipedia is great for that — you can learn enough from the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article to start you out on the right path.

For Wikipedia results, we now show a good portion of the first paragraph and a few links from the table of contents. You can see more about the topic right there and see what else the article offers.

We hope you learn more, faster with our expanded Wikipedia descriptions. Let us know what you think.

Kemp Peterson, Program Manager, Live Search

Book search winding down

Today we informed our partners that we are ending the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects and that both sites will be taken down next week. Books and scholarly publications will continue to be integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes.

This also means that we are winding down our digitization initiatives, including our library scanning and our in-copyright book programs. We recognize that this decision comes as disappointing news to our partners, the publishing and academic communities, and Live Search users.

Given the evolution of the Web and our strategy, we believe the next generation of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer, and content partner. For example, this past Wednesday we announced our strategy to focus on verticals with high commercial intent, such as travel, and offer users cash back on their purchases from our advertisers. With Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, we digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles. Based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries. With our investments, the technology to create these repositories is now available at lower costs for those with the commercial interest or public mandate to digitize book content. We will continue to track the evolution of the industry and evaluate future opportunities.

As we wind down Live Search Books, we are reaching out to participating publishers and libraries. We are encouraging libraries to build on the platform we developed with Kirtas, the Internet Archive, CCS, and others to create digital archives available to library users and search engines.

In partnership with Ingram Digital Group, we are also reaching out to participating publishers with information about new marketing and sales opportunities designed to help them derive ongoing benefits from their participation in the Live Search Books Publisher Program.

We have learned a tremendous amount from our experience and believe this decision, while a hard one, can serve as a catalyst for more sustainable strategies. To that end, we intend to provide publishers with digital copies of their scanned books. We are also removing our contractual restrictions placed on the digitized library content and making the scanning equipment available to our digitization partners and libraries to continue digitization programs. We hope that our investments will help increase the discoverability of all the valuable content that resides in the world of books and scholarly publications.

Satya Nadella
Senior vice president search, portal and advertising

You talk. We listen.

In our last release of Live Search for Windows Mobile we snuck in a little feature that allows users to send feedback directly to the engineering team. Since then, we've received tons of messages from users, many of which have been requests for new functionality. So what's the moral of the story? Ask, and you shall receive. Here's the list of some of the cool stuff we've built in response to user feedback.

Weather By far the most often-requested feature: get current weather conditions and a four-day forecast by clicking the Weather icon.

Web search Search the Web, news, images, and more just by clicking the Web icon.

Increased traffic coverage Piggy-backing on great work done by Live Search Maps, view up-to-the-minute traffic info for more cities, like Dallas, Indianapolis, and Baltimore.

Bluetooth headset support Now you can use the speech recognition feature with your Bluetooth headset (available on select devices).

Map a contact Open up a contact, press Menu, and then press Show On Map to view the contact on a map.

Delete a recent location Simple, yet effective. Click the label showing your current location to display the list of recent locations, scroll to the item you want to delete, press Menu, and then press Delete.

These were the most common asks, but there were also a lot of requests for custom, personalized content. And since the customer is always right, we’ve built a way for you to access the content you care about when you’re on the go.

Collections Looking for pubs that offer WiFi in Seattle? Want to find a dog park in San Francisco? We can help! Search community-generated content such as Virtual Earth Collections and Google KML and find what you're looking for.

And we’re still listening. Send us more feedback at lsmobile@microsoft.com.

Gary Voronel, Program Manager, Live Search for mobile

More than a pretty face

Along with the release of our new search experience, we'd like to give some background into the design team and process that went into all the changes you see. You might not immediately think of design as being a critical part of a search product, but we think it is, and we have a growing team of designers, researchers, and developers who believe it, too. We have a growing, pro-design community here at Microsoft as well (only fitting to plug Microsoft Design).

Simple and powerful. Human. Fast. These were our guiding principles for this latest version of Live Search.

Here's the nickel tour:

Simple and powerful is about getting just enough, having information and tools when you need them, and revealing functionality without being overwhelmed.
Being human reminds us that all good products speak to people and we should always design for them.
Being fast has particular relevance to search where so much depends on rolling up the world of information to support people's countless other activities and passions.

We wove these principles into our work on Live Search in a process that started with user research, customer feedback, and a myriad of other sources for data and learning. All disciplines got involved in sketching as a shared way to develop our ideas. With informed iteration, sketches turned into the interactions, layouts, and visual designs that fed directly into user testing, giving us a unique opportunity as designers and researchers to make truly "user-centered" decisions.

Here are some of the biggest changes you'll notice that resulted from our product design process:

Search box near results The new Live Search header and search box is slimmed down from a heavy piece of UI into sleeker, simpler elements. Bringing the search box into alignment with the results and into the body moves it closer to where users are looking and flattens out the visual bumps between it and the results.

Room to breathe on the page Something else you'll see on a large screen (lucky you!) is our centered, fixed-width page, allowing for a more thoughtful, predictable experience as richer search content and wider screens become the norm.

Crisp, clean type We've also made changes to our color and typography. Our decision to use Arial and the new color palette was based not only on our desire to improve readability and consistency, but also on rounds of testing to find the right combination.

Intuitive video search For our new video search experience, the team focused on activities and behaviors that make video search different. We focused on simplicity — cutting irrelevant pixels and text — and power — investing in enhanced preview for video — both of which contribute to the overall simple, yet powerful experience.

Health results integrated from many sources You'll see in health search that we've created a way for users to pull together health information from many different sources, digestible all in one place.

Ultimately, we think we've taken a step forward with this new product that we think will improve the overall Live Search experience. As with any design, it will evolve along with our design team, and we'll tell you more as we go. We welcome hearing your thoughts, too.

Evan Malahy, Designer, Live Search

Answering your questions on QnA

We've introduced our "Renaissance" release of Live Search QnA Beta. Our re-birth signifies the beginning of a new set of features that we'll continue to grow.

We had three goals for this release:

Focus on the QnA experience for new users.
Encourage users to discover content and functionality in new ways.
Highlight and award higher quality content by featuring members who are Top Contributors in given areas of expertise.

Find out more about what we've done at the QnA team blog. And remember to submit your own questions and answers to our Live Search QnA beta.

Heather Friedland, Lead Program Manager, Live Search QnA

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Bring the political process to life in your classroom

It's back-to-school season in the U.S. and social studies teachers everywhere are excited about the November elections and all of the ways that politics has evolved since even just four years ago. Technology is advancing. Internet fundraising has brought all kinds of new small donors into the political process, social networking is helping campaigns and citizens organize themselves in new ways, and YouTube, which didn't even exist four years ago, has swept the political dialogue.

With technology producing such dramatic changes in American politics, we want to make sure it's easy for teachers to bring some of the best Internet tools into the classroom to help students get engaged. Working with the National Student/Parent Mock Election, we've pulled together a site called Elections Tools for Teachers where you can find descriptions and suggested learning activities for tools like YouTube, Google Maps, Elections Video Search and Power Readers, which we announced here yesterday.

We want students to walk away from their engagement in this election with a sense of excitement about our democratic process and with the belief that their voices matter. As Gloria Kirshner, president of the Mock Election has said, "In the classrooms of today are the Presidents, Senators, Congress members and, most important, the voters of tomorrow. Whether we are sending these children to the White House or to the polls, we hope to send them with a deep understanding of 'government of the people, by the people, and for the people.'"

Please let us know if you find Elections Tools for Teachers helpful in your teaching, and we hope you'll enroll your students in this year's National Mock Election on October 30th.

Posted by Galen Panger & Cristin Frodella, Google Educators Team