New Y!Q Features for Publishers and Developers

Since we href="http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000074.html">launched
Y!Q several weeks ago, we’ve heard a lot of questions and
interesting suggestions. Since then we’ve revamped the Y!Q
site and beefed up the href="http://yq.search.yahoo.com/publisher/faq.html">Y!Q FAQ quite
a bit. Many of you asked us if we could add a new feature or two. So
we sifted through the requests and have implemented several of them.
You can now use all of them in href="http://yq.search.yahoo.com/splash/start.html">Y!Q
deployments on your own web site.

Briefly, they are:

1. Default search. You can supply a “p” parameter
   that supplies a specific query for the initial Y!Q click in addition
   to the context.
2. Site context. It’s now possible to supply
   additional context (a few words, a description, a sentence) behind the
   scenes. This context isn’t readily visible to the user but may help
   refine results even more.
3. Module order customization. You have control over
   the order in which modules appear in the Y!Q overlay. If you’d rather
   have the search box at the bottom, simply provide a “source order”
   parameter.
4. Static content insertion. Y!Q has a mechanism for
   providing content (text or HTML) that you’d like inserted into the
   overlay. This could be a message to your users, a branding logo, etc.
   In addition, you can use CSS to style it in any way you like.

Full details are availale in the href="http://yq.search.yahoo.com/splash/embed.html">Y!Q publisher
documentation.

In addition to the overlay, there’s a new href="http://yq.search.yahoo.com/splash/start.html#web">Y!Q
DemoBar. Many of you wanted to customize the appearance of the
Demobar. The updated version now has a “mini-mode” that is very space
efficient and is fully customizable, but still allows you to quickly
capture text and Y!Q it.

Finally, if you’re intrigued by the idea of adding contextual
search to an application, check our the href="http://developer.yahoo.net/web/V1/contextSearch.html">Contextual
Search API available on href="http://developer.yahoo.net/">YSDN.

Volunteers Needed

We have some interesting new features availabe for the next Y!Q
release. If you’re the adventurous type and would like to help test
them on your web site, please leave a comment with your e-mail address
or send me email.

Jeremy Zawodny

Yahoo! Search