Yahoo! Search logs gave a revealing picture of what the King of Pop evokes for people as they mourned his passing today. Starting last night, searches for his legendary music surged. “Thriller,” “Man in the Mirror,” and “Billie Jean” were among the top lyrics, songs, and videos that people looked for on Yahoo! Search. As details of Jackson’s death emerge, searchers are looking for details on prescription drugs including Demerol, the hospital Jackson was taken to after he collapsed (UCLA Medical Center), and other lingering questions (”why did Michael Jackson die”).

Details of Jackson’s controversial and sometimes disturbing life emerged again in Yahoo! search data as we saw searches for “Michael Jackson plastic surgery”, photos of the singer, and “was Michael Jackson abused as a child.”

Jackson’s death set multiple records across Yahoo!. Our front page story “Michael Jackson Rushed to Hospital” was the highest clicked story in our history, and Yahoo! News saw an all-time record in unique visitors yesterday. Yodel Anecdotal’s post on losing Michael Jackson captures even more details on how the online world reacted to his death.

As fans continue to flood the Internet with questions, we’ll keep being the source for memories, pictures, and news about the untimely death of the King of Pop.

Yahoo! Search

An enthusiastic group of data geeks and Semantic Web enthusiasts met last week at our Sunnyvale headquarters where we hosted the latest edition of VoCamp. VoCamps are a series of informal events that provide a small setting where the Semantic Web community can discuss issues related to semantic interoperability and creating, managing, and publishing vocabularies.

The format of VoCamp was conceived by Talis’ Tom Heath and Yahoo!’s Peter Mika, with the first installment organized in Oxford, England, in September, 2008. Since then, VoCamps have grown into a real movement, with events organized in Galway, Ireland; Austin, Texas.; Ibiza, Spain; and Washington, D.C., with more planned in New York and Bristol, England.

In Sunnyvale, we spent the first afternoon discussing three broad issues: ways of finding vocabularies on the Semantic Web, tools for mapping vocabularies and executing data transformations, and methods for lifting relational databases into the RDF world. Over pastries and pizza the next day, the campers worked in small groups on more specialized topics, including creating methodologies for vocabulary development, and developing a microformat for code documentation. (Many thanks to the microformat admins Tantek Çelik, Kevin Marks, and Ben Ward for bringing their perspectives to this discussion.) Other topics discussed included the Common Tag format and vocabulary visualization.

As Yahoo! Search moves toward a Web of Objects, we know that the developer community will be a critical component for creating a more robust Semantic Web. We were proud to play host to VoCamp Sunnyvale and look forward to future VoCamp gatherings.

Yahoo! Search

Today, we are announcing two updates that make it easier for site owners and developers to share and use structured data within Yahoo! Search:  new enhanced results and the support of Google Base formatting for structured data feeds. Let’s take a look at these two updates.

New Enhanced Results - Products, Events, News and More

Back in March 2009, we announced a simple way for site owners to embed video, games, and documents in Yahoo! Search results. Starting today, we are expanding this capability by giving site owners the power to display enhanced results for product pages, local information, events, news, and discussions.

If your site’s data falls into one of these categories, add a few lines of markup to your pages, and SearchMonkey will do the rest of the work. After we recrawl your page, we’ll extract the structured data and use it to display your data as an enhanced result.

For example, a retail website could add a few lines of code so that its product pages display as an enhanced result that includes the overall rating, price, reviews, and product photo directly on the search results page. Let’s say we have a fictional store called Sytore.com and the site owners have added the following code to their product pages:

<div typeof="product:Product"
xmlns:product="http://search.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/product/"
xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#">

<span property="product:listPrice">49.99</span>
<span property="product:salePrice">39.99</span>
<span property="product:currency" content="USD" />

<span property="rdfs:label">Pinball Maven : Video Games : Electronics</span>

<span rel="rdfs:seeAlso media:image">
<img src="http://www.sytore.com/product.jpg"/>
</span>

<div rel="review:hasReview">
<span typeof="review:Review">
<span property="review:rating">4</span>
<span property="review:totalRatings">17</span>
</span>
</div>
</div>

Sytore.com’s product pages (such as its product page for “Pinball Maven”) would then display as an enhanced result:

(*Example only)

Enhanced results bring users the information they need while helping site owners stand out on the search results page. You can add code to display local information as enhanced results with phone numbers and addresses. You can also display location and date for festivals, concerts, and other events.

A news website can take advantage of the SearchMonkey news object type and add code to enhance how their pages display in search. For example, a news website such as the (fictional) Thenewsy.com could add a few lines of code to its news article pages to display a photo and publication date. A query on “Obama Iraq” could display an enhanced result from Thenewsy.com:

(*Example only)

If your site contains a forum, blog, or other types of online discussion, you can add some markup to display the number of comments and thread date.  You can learn about how to get started with each of these object types on our overview page.

Enhanced results for these new data types will appear in Yahoo! Search results a few weeks after you add the markup, and after we’ve crawled your pages to extract the necessary structured data. There is no sign-up process, so we encourage you to begin adding markup to your sites now so that your results can be visible to users.

From the beginning, SearchMonkey has been powered by open formats, which is why we are continuing to support the use of RDFa, microformats, and now NewsML for these additional object types.  With the help of site owners and developers, we are moving more rapidly towards structuring the Web and enabling new search experiences.  As we mentioned a few weeks ago, RDFa structured data collected by SearchMonkey has increased by 413% since October 2008. With the release of these new object types, we look forward to seeing that figure continue to climb.

Google Base

Since its launch in late 2005, there has been a growing community of tools and partners for Google Base, Google’s online repository for user-contributed structured data. Today, Yahoo! Search will accept five popular Google Base feed item types: Event, Product, Review, Job, and Personals.

Why is this important?  First, site owners who have Google Base feeds containing Event and Product information can now automatically have their enhanced results displayed in Yahoo! Search by submitting their existing feed through Yahoo! Site Explorer.

In addition, for all five item types, it’s now easier to use your Google Base feed within Yahoo! Search.  Site Explorer will convert your existing feed to DataRSS XML, allowing your data to be stored within Yahoo! and accessible to developers through BOSS for building third party search engines and the SearchMonkey Developer Tool for building applications.

For detailed instructions, refer to the full documentation within the Yahoo! Developer Network site.  For information about how to build your Google Base feed, refer to the Google Base feed documentation.

Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.  We welcome your feedback.

Yahoo! Search

The new Yahoo! Toolbar, already available on Internet Explorer, is now available on Firefox (beta) to make it easier for you to keep on top of your online world. You can get helpful suggestions in the search box in the Yahoo! Toolbar and jump right to search results on sites like Flickr, Wikipedia, and more. You can also preview sites and customize the toolbar with cool apps.

To get started using the Yahoo! Toolbar, download it at toolbar.yahoo.com. Check out today’s post on Yodel Anecdotal to see more details.

Yahoo! Search

Today we are announcing our support of Common Tag, a new semantic tagging format for Web pages. Developed jointly by a group of Web companies including Zemanta, Metaweb, and Yahoo!, the Common Tag format adds semantic meaning to tags, making Web content more discoverable and enabling the community to create more useful applications for aggregating, searching, and browsing the Web.

At Yahoo! Search, we’re proponents of open formats that accelerate the structuring of the Web and that improve the community’s overall ability to understand the Web. You can read more about this new format, which just launched today, on the Common Tag Website.

Yahoo! Search

Starting today you will see some subtle changes we’ve made in Sitemaps, partnering with Microsoft and Google.

First, we have updated the xsd files with the XML schemas for Sitemap or Siteindex files. The updated xsd files allow better extensibility of the Sitemaps protocol. All your existing Sitemaps will continue to validate so you don’t need to make any changes.

Second, the protocol will now allow 50,000 Sitemaps per Siteindex, up from the previous limit of 1000 Sitemaps. The file size limit will stay at 10MB.

We hope these changes will make it easier for you to use Sitemaps and submit them to Site Explorer for Yahoo! to index.

Priyank Garg
Yahoo! Search

Over the next few weeks, Yahoo! Search will be at Search Engine Strategies (SES) in Toronto and the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose, CA. Come by and hear more about what we have up our sleeves.

SES Toronto
Monday, June 8
2:30pm-3:45pm
Panel: Universal and Blended Search: Comprehensive Visibility Challenges
Nick Cox, Senior Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

Semantic Technology Conference
Wednesday, June 17
8:30am - 09:45am
Executive Round Table: Semantic Search
Andrew Tompkins, Chief Scientist, Yahoo! Search

11:45am - 12:15pm
SearchMonkey and the Semantic Web
Kevin Haas, Senior Engineering Manager – SearchMonkey, Yahoo! Search

2:30pm - 3:30pm
Year of the Monkey: Lessons from the first year of SearchMonkey
Peter Mika, Researcher, Yahoo! Research

Hope to see you there.

Yahoo! Search

We’re rolling out some updates to our crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms 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

Today we welcome Yoelle Maarek to Yahoo! as Senior Director of Yahoo! Research. She will be leading the Yahoo! Lab in Haifa, Israel along with Ronny Lempel. Their teams help further Yahoo!’s commitment to discovering new technologies that deliver compelling experiences on the Web.

You might know Yoelle as the former engineering director at the Google Haifa Engineering Center, which she founded in 2006. Her team launched features such as Google Suggest, Searching Ads, and Interactive Annotations on YouTube. Prior to Google, Yoelle was with IBM Research, where she held series of technical and management positions, first at T.J. Watson Research in New York, and then at the IBM Haifa Research Lab in Israel. You can go to Yoelle’s website to read all about her impressive research experience in information retrieval, Web applications, and collaborative technologies.

Prabhakar Raghavan
Head of Yahoo! Labs and Yahoo! Search Strategy

Working on the new Yahoo! Search sports team shortcut has made me a new sports fan (I’m still mourning over the Celtics’ loss). Being a new fan, I’ve also learned how hectic it can be to follow your favorite professional and college sports teams. That’s exactly why we developed the new sports team shortcut.

Starting today, when you search for your favorite major league or college sports team on Yahoo! Search, a new shortcut appears with the real time score, the last game’s score, and the date and time of the next game. You’ll also find quick links to the team’s page, as well as news, scores, schedules, stats, and photos. Instead of having to click through search results a couple of times a day, you can use the shortcut to follow tonight’s pivotal game when the Nuggets take on the Los Angeles Lakers.

If you can’t make it to the New York Yankees’ new ballpark in person, follow them with the sports team shortcut:

You can also try searching for “NBA playoffs” to see a snapshot of today’s NBA playoffs schedule and scores.

Or try searching for “French Open.”

The sports team shortcut covers the NFL, MLB, NHL, and NBA, and college sports leagues including the NCAAF and NCAAB.

Whether you’re a new sports fan like me or a lifelong diehard fanatic, we hope you’ll find it easier to follow your favorite teams with this new shortcut. Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

Yuko Kamae
Yahoo! Search