Starting today, you can see relevant photos, videos, and tweets about a breaking news story on the Yahoo! News Shortcut. Many of you are already familiar with the existing Yahoo! News Shortcut, which displays headlines on our Web search results page when you look for news stories. The enhanced shortcut with these new tabs will now display for many breaking or major news searches.

For example, if you searched Space Shuttle Atlantis just after it was launched this week, you would have seen news, photo, video, and Twitter tabs in the news shortcut:

If you are interested in visual information about your query, check out the photos and videos tabs, which pull information from Yahoo! News. You can scroll to see more photos and videos from within the new shortcut.

Here is an example of the photos tab:

And the videos tab:

If you want more immediate, user-generated content, check out the Twitter tab. There, you will find recent tweets and related videos that have been shared on Twitter.

This is our first integration of fresh, social content like Twitter into Web search, and we are planning to continue along these lines. In the future, we will enhance your search experience with more real-time content so you can find all the information you need about an unfolding news event in one place.
Try it out and let us know what you think in the comments section.

Ivan Davtchev and Nitzan Achsaf

Yahoo! Search

We know that many of you come to Yahoo! Video search to find entertainment-related information. Our video search traffic also shows us that many of those queries have an exploratory intent, including digging for great work from your favorite music artists.

Starting today, you can easily dive into albums and songs by your favorite music artist in Yahoo! Video Search. We have hooked into the “Web of Things” to intelligently extract the most popular albums and songs for artist or band queries. This feature lets you explore music artists intuitively and easily.

For instance, say you are looking for music videos from U2. The new video search music refiner on the left rail shows popular albums, such as The Joshua Tree, and top songs, such as “Beautiful Day.”

Click on an album or song, and Yahoo! Video Search shows videos for the album or song in an overlay page.

For example, when you click on The Joshua Tree on the left rail, you will see videos of the album’s tops songs, including “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and “With or Without You.”

This is a great way to watch popular song videos from an album without losing the context of your original query.

For the video search music refiner, we tapped further into the Web of Things to give you a more personally relevant search experience. You’ve seen the image search travel refiner and the celebrity refiner – now you can give the video search music refiner a try.

Manish Sharma and Ishwar Sridharan

Yahoo! Video Search

Music is an integral part of everyday life. Since launching a partnership with Rhapsody in September 2008 and launching the FoxyPlayer last year, music has been an integral part of the Yahoo! Search experience as well.

We have found that nearly 6 percent of all Yahoo! searches are music-related. Given the massive number of things people search for, we think it is pretty significant.  With enhancements that we’ve made to the search experience, we are seeing a 38 percent increase in Rhapsody enhanced results served in our SERP since July.

We’ve made it easier to find music videos, artist information, and play full length songs from within the search results page. This is just one of the many ways Yahoo! is enhancing the search experience for music lovers. With Search Assist, Search Monkey, and Yahoo! Shortcuts, you can discover even more relevant information about your favorite artist. Wonder what U2 is up to these days? Search for U2 and you’ll see images and videos, and hear full-length songs all in one place.

At Yahoo! Search, our goal is to give you a more personally relevant search experience.  We are also continuing our investment in structuring the Web to allow you to explore a “Web of things,” more than just a Web of pages. That includes helping you find and explore everything there is to know about your favorite music artists.  Whether you like to rock out to The Killers, dance it up to Beyonce, or secretly sing along to Miley Cyrus, you can find relevant information about these artists and explore their music right at your fingertips on Yahoo! Search.

Larry Cornett

Vice President, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search

The Yahoo! Site Explorer team has created some great new features for site owners that provide you with even more information about your site. Experienced Site Explorer users will notice that we now have much more detailed page-level and site-level dashboard information for verified site owners.

At the page level, you can now see your SearchMonkey object statistics. This means that if you’ve marked up your pages or provided us a feed that matches one of our existing SearchMonkey templates, your page will display all of the SearchMonkey objects we’ve indexed on that page.

We’ve also included Yahoo! Search keyterms and Delicious bookmark information for this page. Site Explorer gives you a great way to explore all sorts of metadata about your pages, whether it comes from SearchMonkey, Delicious, or our term extraction code.

We now also provide a site-level dashboard that displays additional information, including the number of SearchMonkey feeds you submitted and a history of any custom actions you have requested for your site (such as defining URL query parameters that you want us to ignore).

Finally, we’ve improved some of our backend logic for SearchMonkey feeds so that you can validate small test feeds much faster than before. This enables site owners to iteratively develop their SearchMonkey feeds without having to wait for the batch process to return.

Please try out these new features and let us know what you think!

Yahoo! Site Explorer Team

SearchMonkey and the structured Web

We’ve just announced an all-new Yahoo! Search experience, with many new features powered by SearchMonkey data.  Since launching our open developer platform in May 2008, Yahoo! Search has enabled thousands of developers to shape the search experience for millions of Yahoo! users. If you are interested in building semantic applications similar to what we’ve come up with at Yahoo! Search, here are some details to get you started.

What structured objects are available?

All of the objects listed on the SearchMonkey homepage are available to you. With the new feature “object refiners,” users can now restrict the search results to specific object types. Site owners contribute data of these objects by marking up their pages with RDF or microformats, or by providing dataRSS feeds. If you’re interested in the actual data of these objects, use the Yahoo! Search BOSS API to request the SearchMonkey data as part of the search request.

How can I access these structured objects?

The SearchMonkey team has been encouraging developers to use our structured data to build semantic Web applications ever since we partnered with BOSS.  Using the BOSS API, you can access SearchMonkey structured objects.

To restrict the result set to pages with SearchMonkey objects, just add “searchmonkey:<objectType>” to your query. The result set from BOSS will only contain URLs that have objects of that type.

For example, the following query returns all of the documents in the Yahoo! Web index that has the words “Sunnyvale” and “pizza” – about 3 million pages.

http://boss.yahooapis.com/ysearch/web/v1/sunnyvale+pizza?appid=wX7OZ3zV34Fy2Y4W4in_vsjFmRhruQNgCxdxn6RUke2c2JVDZdw6bfc1rcEjVnw-&format=xml

But if you only want pages with local business objects on them, you can add “searchmonkey:local” to the query:

http://boss.yahooapis.com/ysearch/web/v1/sunnyvale+pizza+searchmonkey:local?appid=wX7OZ3zV34Fy2Y4W4in_vsjFmRhruQNgCxdxn6RUke2c2JVDZdw6bfc1rcEjVnw-&format=xml

This query returns about 25,000 pages.

Yes, we’ve just thrown out over 90 percent of the result set – but we are after the most relevant results, not simply the greatest number of results. Our new object refiners use SearchMonkey’s structured data to narrow your query from “pizza+Sunnyvale” to actual local business listings within those results. You can use BOSS to retrieve the same structured data and construct any presentation you like.

You can take it a step further and add any of these terms to the query:

• searchmonkey:video – restricts the result set to videos.
• searchmonkey:product – restricts the result set to products.
• searchmonkey:local – restricts the result set to local businesses.
• searchmonkey:event – restricts the result set to events.
• searchmonkey:document – restricts the result set to presentations, spreadsheets, and similar document formats.
• searchmonkey:discussion – restricts the result set to blogs and forums.
• searchmonkey:game – restricts the result set to Flash games.

What don’t I get?

Not all structured data we’ve collected is part of the BOSS API.  For example, some third parties who provide us with feeds have elected to keep that data outside of BOSS. Structured data annotations from technologies built by Yahoo! Research are also not available to third party developers via BOSS. However, we aim to include all data we find embedded in web pages that deploy microformats or RDFa.

Our goal is a successful semantic Web where we extract the semantics as we process Web content. Every page marked up with semantic data makes that much easier for us to extract meaning from that page. And it’s not just us! Google Video Search has recently adopted the same video markup (RDFa and Facebook Share) that SearchMonkey supports.

What’s next?

We will make many more object types available to you soon. In the mean time, you can learn more about SearchMonkey and how we acquire structured data annotations from this new from this post on the YDN Blog.

Kevin Haas

Senior engineering manager, Yahoo! SearchMonkey

Every day thousands of developers drive Yahoo! Search BOSS traffic, serving millions of queries a day. Many of these developers have requested the ability to access Yahoo! Sponsored Search ads to monetize their BOSS innovations. Starting today, in partnership with Domain Development Corp (DDC), our first approved Yahoo! Search BOSS syndication partner, developers can get global access to Yahoo! Sponsored Search results and benefit from revenue generated by their BOSS-powered products.

We invite you to apply to qualify for this program to have Yahoo! Sponsored Search ads appear on your sites. You will need to provide details about your product, including information about your traffic sources, UI framework, and implementation.  Once your product is approved, you will have access to and support for Yahoo! Sponsored Search ads, and you will earn a revenue share.  You can apply at our partner’s site: www.ddc.com.

Please note that in signing up for this Sponsored Search ad program, you will be entering into a contract with a third party, not Yahoo!, and the third party will be providing support and sending you your earnings.  Other Yahoo! Search BOSS Ad partners may be online in the future, so stay tuned for updates.

By now most of you are aware of the Yahoo!-Microsoft search deal, which is still undergoing regulatory review.  While no decisions about BOSS have been made at this point, we will let you know as soon as we figure out the details. These key services will continue to operate for a period of time after we complete migrating our services and technology.

We are proud of the rich community of developers and entrepreneurs who share our enthusiasm for opening search and who continue to amaze us with innovative BOSS implementations. Thank you for your support.

Ashim Chhabra

The Yahoo! Search BOSS Team

Search Marketing Expo East kicks off in New York City on Monday, with many Yahoos on various panels to talk about important issues in the SEO and SEM community. We hope you’ll stop by SMX East and check out what we’re up to!

Monday, October 5, 2009

Time: 10:45 a.m. -12 p.m.
Panel: Duplicate Content Issues: The Search Engine Edition
Speaker: Cris Pierry, Senior Director, Search, Yahoo! Search

Time: 3:45 p.m. – 5 p.m.
Panel: Maps, Maps, Maps!
Speaker: Atif Rafiq, Director, Product Marketing, Yahoo! Local, Yahoo!

Time: 3:45 p.m. – 5 p.m.
Panel: Trademarks & Paid Search: How Have Things Changed
Speaker: Laura Covington, Associate General Counsel, Global Brand and Trademarks, Yahoo!

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Time: 12 p.m. -1:30 p.m.
Panel: Ask The Search Engines: Best Practices Edition
Speaker: Cris Pierry, Senior Director, Search, Yahoo

Time: 4:45 p.m. – 6 p.m.
Panel: Universal & Blended Search Opportunities
Speaker: Larry Cornett, Vice President of Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Time: 9 a.m. -10:15 a.m.
Panel: Search Meet Display; Display Meet Search
Speaker: Antony Taylor, VP, Display Platforms, Yahoo!

Time: 11:45 a.m. -12:45 p.m.
Panel: Managing Search Across Business Units
Speaker: David Roth, Director of Search Marketing, Yahoo!

Time: 2 p.m. – 3 p.m.
Panel: Ask The Paid Search Reps
Speaker: David Miller, Director, Sponsored Search Product Management, Yahoo! Inc.

See the complete list of panelists and location.

Today, we are launching an all-new Yahoo! Search experience that makes search more personally relevant. We tested the changes in August with a percentage of users, and now the new page is available to everyone. The new page is designed to help you easily find and explore the things that matter most to you. The Yahoo! Search team is delighted to demonstrate our commitment to innovate in search technology and deliver an amazing user experience.

Yahoo! has also just launched a number of major changes to our core products, which include a new Yahoo! homepage, improved Yahoo! Mail, high-quality video calling in Yahoo! Messenger, and a suite of new Yahoo! Mobile experiences. The new Yahoo! Search page design aligns the experience between our new homepage, mail, and the search results page. This delivers a dynamic, compelling, and integrated experience that better understands what you are looking for so you can get things done quickly on the Web.

Most importantly, we designed this new page framework so that we can introduce and experiment with new search applications and features faster than before. Today’s launch is just the beginning of innovations to come.

Key highlights:

• Intelligent Search Results – Allows you to explore results from key sites and narrow results using different types of SearchMonkey structured data. Over the past few months, even more enhanced results for product, local, entertainment, reference, social, and tech sites have been displayed automatically. With the new search page design, we have made it easier to see these riche results from an increasing number of sites.
• Feature-Rich Experience – Provides quick access to search features that make people’s online lives safer and easier, including Search Scan/SafeSearch (which helps protect you from viruses, spyware, and spam while you search) and Search Pad. Now it will be even easier to return to the research documents you have created while searching.
• Search Assist Expansion – With the new design, our powerful query assistance is still available directly below the search box, but we’ve also incorporated it into the left-hand column for quick access lower on the page, even when the Search Assist layer is hidden. You can use this column to easily explore and discover concepts related to your query. We have added Search Assist to the search box on every Yahoo! page in the U.S. with the launch of a new universal header.

Today we are also revamping our image search and video search results pages to present a consistent user experience. In the left-hand column on the image search results page, users can find an extension of the travel refiners that we introduced back in July, as well as celebrity and entertainment categories. When you search for celebs like “Matt Damon” or “Tina Fey,” Yahoo! Image Search will tap into the “web of objects” and present related people, movies, and TV shows in their appropriate categories.

Now, here’s the best part: Rather than building this new experience on top of our existing front-end technology, our talented engineering and design teams rebuilt much of the foundational markup/CSS/JavaScript for the SRP design and core functionality completely from scratch. This allowed us to get rid of old cruft and take advantage of quite a few new techniques and best practices, reducing core page weight and render complexity in the process.

Key points about performance:

• Improved total page load time – Even though the new design includes dozens of additional assistance features and graphical assets, we are seeing faster page loading time and significant speed improvements.
• Improved perceived load time – In addition to reducing the weight of the page, we also greatly reduced the perceived load time by sending the page in three semantically meaningful chunks: first the search box and page header, then the rest of the visible content, and finally JavaScript for rich behavior.
• Inline data URI images – We’re taking advantage of specialized techniques for modern browsers such as inline data URI images, which we use to generate our subtle repeating gradients. This improves perceived and real performance dramatically. For legacy browsers, we provide the same gradients with traditional image sprites.

What does this all mean for you? Quite simply, the new search page is faster because it was built with performance in mind from the start.

We’re thrilled to put the all-new Yahoo! Search results page in your hands today in the U.S., U.K., France, Spain, Mexico, and India. You can learn more by checking out a tour that explains all of the features of this new experience. Please let us know what you think in the comments section below. Over the coming months, we will continue to deliver even more enhancements to this new experience, so be sure to check in often to see what we’re up to!

Larry Cornett

Vice President, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search

We’re rolling out a web index update over the next few days. During this process, you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.

To share your thoughts or check in with other Yahoo! Search users, please visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board.

Dan Rampton
Yahoo! Search

Want a little more SearchMonkey in your Yahoo! search results? Starting today, more enhanced results for product, local, entertainment, reference, social, and tech sites will appear automatically in your results, putting more information and answers right at your fingertips.

First, we’d like to thank everyone who deployed microformats, RDFa, and feeds in response to our blog post in May. Thanks to your efforts, we’ve finished user testing for the new enhanced results templates and have deployed these templates in production. This means that in addition to Video, Documents, and Games, you can now add Products, Local Businesses, Event, Discussions, or News items to your pages. Anyone who provides structured data according to the specified format will automatically gain SearchMonkey default-on status, as long as it adheres to our terms of use.

For example, here are some results you’ll see when you search for products:

Here are some results you’ll see when you search for local businesses:

You can see the ratings, number of reviews, phone number, and address for local businesses right on the search results page. You can also see the ratings, price, and number of reviews for products, helping you decide which page fits your interest most, and find what you’re looking for faster.

In addition to these SearchMonkey templates, we’re also releasing a number of custom SearchMonkey default-on applications. Entertainment buffs will be particularly excited about a few of the Entertainment apps, including RottenTomatoes, Netflix, IMDB, and Yahoo! Movies.

The following are just a couple of examples you’ll see when you search for entertainment-related info:

Beyond entertainment, we’re also automatically turning on results for high performing sites in as the social networking, reference, and download categories. The list includes Friendster, Britannica, and FileHippo.

We laud the efforts that developers everywhere have put into developing the SearchMonkey ecosystem and their contribution toward improving the search experience for users.

Great apps are built every week so look forward to even more SearchMonkey in your search results in the future – we’re looking forward to it, too.

Yi-An Lin and Nick Cox

Senior Product Manager

Yahoo! Search