First, thank you to those who are using Yahoo! Site Explorer to keep tabs on how your site is indexed by us, and especially to the folks who are using the forum to ask questions and suggest new features. Your feedback helps us prioritize features as well as come up with new features to add to the roadmap. One of these requests was for the ability to authenticate Yahoo! Stores in Site Explorer, which we have just introduced. Basically, that means you now you have the ability to add your Site Explorer key to your Small Business site. For more, please head on over to the Yahoo! Store Blog for the complete rundown.

As always, please send us your feedback on Site Explorer, or visit our forum to share your thoughts with other users.

Thank you!
Priyank Garg
Product Manager, Yahoo! Site Explorer

Last winter, we released a beta of Open Shortcuts, a way to create your own custom keywords that take you directly to a site, a search, or start a task right from the search box. As Open Shortcuts increases in popularity, we’re increasing the number of Open Shortcuts per user to 60.

To catch up, Open Shortcuts fans have been creating and using lots of shortcuts. Of note, last month, Steve Rubel wrote a great post on Open Shortcuts, and even included a handy list of Open Shortcuts to share, conveniently linked to make them easy to add to your own shortcuts list.

We didn’t get around to thanking Steve at the time, so now seems good. So, here’s an Open Shortcut to Steve’s blog!

! rubel

Steve addresses an important question – how do I share my shortcuts with folks? The same conversation occurred recently on one of our internal developer lists, with people sending out their list of Open Shortcuts for people to share. So here’s a quick review of Open Shortcuts – how to use ‘em, and how to share ‘em.

Using Open Shortcuts
We created a number of shortcuts to get you started, such as navigating to Craigslist: !clist; searching on Flickr: !flickr; or starting an application such as Notepad: !note. For a quick refresher, the Open Shortcuts FAQ has a couple of questions that’ll get you started.

Creating Your Own Open Shortcuts
There are a couple ways to create more shortcuts – directly from the search box by typing !set shortcut_name URL, for example, and the other by using a form we provide. In both cases, you are prompted to confirm you’d like to set these up, and that URL can be used to share shortcuts with folks (like the new shortcut for Steve, above). We have a FAQ that explains this.

As a reminder, you can use the following keywords to view and edit shortcuts:

• !list Lists all your personal shortcuts and defaults
• !unset Removes shortcut_name from your list of shortcuts
• !help Displays Open Shortcuts Help page

That’s it for now. If you’d like to share your Open Shortcuts, please consider posting them to our forum, or drop us a note below.

Thanks again, and please stay tuned for more updates coming soon!

Don Chennavasin
Yahoo! Search Product Manager

We’re here to introduce the new beta versions of the Yahoo! Toolbar (for IE) and Yahoo! Bookmarks.

Bookmarks first appeared on the Yahoo! Toolbar in 1999. Back then, the big virtues of online bookmarks were backup and portability – Yahoo! Bookmarks allowed people to store their favorites from across the web and get to them from any computer connected to the Internet. Fast forward to 2006, and our experiences with next-generation bookmarking have convinced us that it was time to bring Yahoo! Bookmarks users onto a new and better product.

Here’s a quick rundown of the new features on both products. Long-time users of Yahoo! Toolbar and Yahoo! Bookmarks should find that this combined release delivers a lot of what they’ve been waiting for (and we’ll be the first to admit, its about #@*! time)

New Yahoo! Toolbar Features:

• Toolbar integration with the new Yahoo! Bookmarks
• Type-ahead bookmark suggestions from the toolbar search box
• The ability to create and use new buttons, even when you aren’t signed in

And for Yahoo! Bookmarks:

• Advanced search functionality
• Thumbnails for quickly recognizing sites
• Convenient drag-and-drop management
• Organize bookmarks with folders and tags
• Ability to save page content along with the URL
• Editing abilities when saving
• An end to the 1000 bookmark limit

The all new Yahoo! Bookmarks will focus on personal saving, organization, and recovery while our comrades at Delicious will concentrate on meeting your social bookmarking and sharing needs. For users of MyWeb, your bookmarks are safe, and in a few months you’ll be able to roll over to either Yahoo! Bookmarks or Delicious. We’ll explain this process more thoroughly in future posts.

Please drop us a comment below or visit the forums for feedback on the betas.

Thanks!
The Yahoo! Toolbar & Bookmarks Teams

PS ? Tom Chi produced this helpful screencast that walks you through the new functionality. Enjoy!

We strive to show the most useful information in search results. We look at multiple sources for titles and abstracts, including page content, anchor text in the links to a page, Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project (ODP); and we pick the best based on our algorithms. You might have seen some of the features that we have implemented with this approach, such as quick links for Wikipedia, and local business data. However, some webmasters have had issues with titles and abstracts in ODP and have adopted the ‘NOODP’ META tag to indicate to search engines not to use them. As Tim Mayer promised a few days earlier talking to Barry Schwartz on The Pulse, we are launching support for this tag in tonight’s weather update.

We will recognize the following META tags on your pages:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”>

or

<META NAME=”Slurp” CONTENT=”NOODP”>

If we find any of these tags on your page, we will not consider ODP titles or abstracts as candidates for your URL in search results. We are reindexing content on the web to launch this change. This will be accompanied by the usual ranking changes and page shuffling in the index that are typical of weather updates.

If you have any questions or concerns, please visit the Site Explorer forum or refer to our webmaster resources page.

Thanks!

Priyank Garg
Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

Ricardo Baeza-Yates is the Director of the Yahoo! Research Labs in Barcelona, Spain and Santiago, Chile. Prior to joining Yahoo! Research, Ricardo was the Director of the Center for Web Research at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Chile; and ICREA Professor at the Department of Technology of the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He maintains ties with both universities as a part-time professor, leveraging his affiliations with both to collaborate on joint research. We sat down with Ricardo to discuss his role in starting Yahoo! Research Labs in Spain and Chile and his thoughts on today?s web search.

On Joining Yahoo!
Q. What is the most exciting part of expanding research offices in new regions for Yahoo!?
A. There are a couple of things that have made my role at Yahoo! especially exciting. The first has been to build a lab from scratch ? to start something from nothing. The second part is building the lab with many different people from around the world that want to be a part of creating new ideas. The research being explored in Europe and South America can be very different from that of the U.S. and it?s been impressive to see talent coming from different backgrounds and regions.

Q. How does your affiliation with the Center for Web Research complement your research endeavors at Yahoo!?
A. I founded the Center for Web Research almost five years ago at the University of Chile in Santiago through a large Millennium Program grant from the Chilean Planning Ministry, and served as the first director of the program. I continue to be associated with the Center for Web Research to create a synergistic relationship with Yahoo! Research. Although both centers are completely separate ventures, we collaborate on joint research. A similar symbiosis happens in Barcelona.

Q: What are your top three goals for incorporating web search and web data mining into Yahoo!?s research?
A: Web search and web data mining is successfully practiced already among Yahoo! research experts in the U.S., but I hope to add new knowledge, particularly in the latter field. The main three goals for me are to explore the potential of all web-related information ? to improve current systems, find new ideas for products or services, and discover new ways to analyze information ? for many, many different purposes. Also, to leverage the different backgrounds and expertise here at the Yahoo! Research Center in order to obtain a fresh look, a new perspective and a different angle that will allow us to come up with new breakthroughs around existing problems. And finally, I think utilizing our location as a tie-in to strengthen European search will be important ? for example search in non-English languages.

Q: Looking back over the last 9 months, what has been your most exciting professional challenge?
A: The most exciting and rewarding part of developing the Yahoo! Research Center in Spain and Chile has been establishing the research group and I think we have finished the initial stage. We have various researchers that span across several different countries, including Belgium, Brazil, Chile, France, Greece, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands and U.K. These folks have an excellent research background and ultimately had an interest in participating in our research adventure. I think we have a pretty good mix of people, not only technically, but that also people that bring in a positive attitude and open minds.

On Today?s Web Search
Q: Do you find search usage patterns different in the various parts of the world?
A: In my experience the main usage patterns within search are not really different. The language changes, but the statistics are very similar. The purpose of the search may be a little bit different but currently there are no studies of the categories of search ? i.e. entertainment, e-commerce, etc. Perhaps this is a study we look to do in the future.

I think usage patterns change according to the devices being used ? going from a PC to a mobile device will change the patterns, and this could be influenced by regional locality or different cultural issues.

Q: How is the growth of social media, such as blogs, vlogs and social networks, impacting and challenging web search?
A: Social media implies user generated content – that is, people doing things like tagging content or media, commenting on pictures and text, etc. However, it also could imply other user actions, like clicking on links or asking queries. This contributed explicit and implicit knowledge can be used, for example, to improve search. The collective knowledge of all of these contributors is more then the knowledge of any expert on any topic. It?s the collection that makes up what?s called the wisdom of the crowds. Hence, social media provides the knowledge of many, many people that is encoded and we only have to decode it to be able to utilize the knowledge to strengthen search. So the main challenge is basically how to decode this information to better understand the Web, not as individual users, but as a collective aggregation of all of them.

On Other Things
Q: What Chilean dish should be added to URLs, the Yahoo! cafeteria in Sunnyvale?
A: Ah, two of my three favorite things to talk about ? food and wine. I don?t know if I can narrow it down to one favorite dish. If it?s okay, I?ll tell you a few. My favorites would probably be ceviche in either Peruvian or Chilean style, but don?t put ketchup on it like in North America? it ruins it! I also favor Pastel de Choclo, which is like a meat, chicken and corn baked pie, and of course, Chilean Empanadas ? probably filled with seafood is my favorite.

Q: Napa Valley wine or Chilean wine?
A: That?s an easy answer. Chilean wine, specifically a Carmenere grape, which can only be found in Chile. You get one of the best price/quality ratios in the wine world.

Q: Anything else you?d like to share?
A: Sure – I love old maps and in general geography. I love applied geography – traveling. In my office I have an upside-down map of the world to remind people that there is always another valid point of view, something that a researcher should never forget.

Ricardo will be traveling for invited talks to the Czech Republic in January for the Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Computer Science Conference, off to Istanbul, Turkey in April for the International Conference on Data Engineering, and to Warsaw, Poland in September for the European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases. You can also catch him at the World Wide Web Conference (coming to Banff, Canada, in May) and the ACM SIGIR Conference (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in July).

Thanks, Ricardo!

- Yahoo! Search blog team

As readers of this blog know, we recently welcomed JumpCut to our family, and we’re back to tell you about our first project together.

We’re working with Frito-Lay to invite people to create their own Doritos commercials – and the winning ad will be aired during the next Super Bowl. Yep. That is correct. Thirty seconds of snacky, salty video could get you one of the most coveted spots in broadcast advertising, recognition of your brilliance, $10,000 bucks, and a trip to Miami. We are talking about an estimate 48 million viewers during Super Bowl XLI on February 4th, 2007.

The place to go to is Crash the Super Bowl. You get a variety of great assets to use, and please see the official rules for creative assignment and content guidelines ? this is family entertainment after all. No Janet moments, please.

People can submit their videos from October 11th through December 4th (you’ll need to sign in to post your video), and all approved submissions will be viewable for everyone to vote and comment on. Then Frito-Lay and its agencies will pick five finalists by January 2, 2007. Each of the five finalists will receive $10,000 and a weekend trip to Miami. The winner will be determined by open voting and the winning ad will be unveiled during the Super Bowl broadcast.

Whether you’re a Final Cut Pro master, or just getting your feet wet with online video editing products like JumpCut, the time has come to call upon your fondest Doritos memories ? and turn your addiction to the orange nacho cheese flavor into digital genius. In fact, folks are already submitting their work, like cbisher and JStocco. And there’s also a healthy string of comments and lots of viewer ratings.

Greatness awaits you!

I’m thinking about submitting something myself. My cat eats Doritos…

Tara Kirchner
Yahoo! Search Blog

Welcome to our first weather report of the fall season. We are rolling out an index update tonight. As usual, you’ll see some changes in ranking along with shuffling of the pages that are included in the index.

To share your thoughts with other Yahoo! Search users, please visit the Site Explorer forum. For other feedback or support issues, please refer to our webmaster resources page. We read all your feedback.

Thanks!

Priyank Garg
Product Manager
Yahoo! Search

We have had phenomenal response to the new version of Yahoo! Site Explorer we launched two months ago. Thanks to the many of you who have come by and used the new interface, authenticated your site, and asked us questions on the forum. We have been answering many questions on the board, and there are a few common themes that we want to respond to in more detail.

• Many of you have noted that the authentication filename is too long. We are changing the prefix we use so that the full filename is much shorter, 27 characters only, within the limits for filenames that we came across.
• For those who are unable to upload our authentication key as a text file, we have updated our key file to be HTML with a .html extension.
• Note that these changes are backward compatible, so if you have the old authentication file name, you don’t need to change or re-authenticate. We will look for both key files.

A few other tips we wanted to share regarding authentication:

• Do not remove the authentication key after the first site authentication. We periodically check for the presence of the key and your site will be unauthenticated if we can’t find the file.
• Authenticate at the level at which you have control over the content. For example, if you have a site on geocities, say http://www.geocities.com/my_site, authenticate within your site directory. To do this, add your site’s root path: http://www.geocities.com/my_site – not the site root (http://www.geocities.com). So your key file would be available at the path: http://www.geocities.com/my_site/y_key_abyahooauthkeyyz.html.

We have also made other minor updates to the interface designed to make Site Explorer easier to use.

We appreciate your feedback and are doing our best to address it. One of our goals is to make Site Explorer even more easy to use. So please let us know if our tweaks help make the tool a bit more webmaster friendly and continue to share your thoughts with us!

Priyank Garg, Amit Kumar, Apostolos ‘Lakis’ Karmirantzos, Di Chang
Site Explorer Team

The winners of Yahoo!’s first open Hack Day were Black Box Nation, fashion designers and hardware hackers Diana Eng (who you might recognize ? she was on Project Runway) and Emily Albinski from NYC, along with their good friend Audrey Roy.

They created a blogging purse by hacking fashion (handbag and fabric), hardware (Nokia 6682, pedometer, GPS device, custom stamp, breadboard, wires, soldering iron) and software (CSS, APIs) in less than 24 hours to produce a working prototype. The custom-designed handbag is rigged with a pedometer and a Nokia 6682. Every 10 steps (this is programmable), the pedometers triggers the 6682 to take a photo. The 6682 then uses Yahoo! Research Berkeley’s Zonetag mobile client to geotag the photos and upload the photos to Flickr.

You can follow the purse’s adventures at Blogging in Motion from the first few pics, to its journey back to New York. And there are some great photos of the purse being created along with Black Box’s recent fashion show at Maker Faire on Flickr.

Around here, FUSE is the acronym for our Search team?s vision to help people find, use, share and expand human knowledge. And with open APIs, the Yahoo! Developer Network is helping people fuse together wholly new applications with our own. That?s cool, but what?s really cool is that Black Box actually uses fuses and other bits to create new fashions based on technology. Like this necklace made of slow-blow fuses.

Now *that* is FUSE in action!

Jeannie Yang, Yahoo! Research Berkeley
Tara Kirchner, Yahoo!

PS – For more on Hack Day including Beck’s Hack Day Video, visit the Yodel Anecdotal.