There’s been some discussion of late on search APIs. For those of you who might be looking for a Search API provider, may we offer you our complete set of Yahoo! Search Web Services for your programming pleasure?

With Yahoo! Search Web Services you can write programs using data from Local Search, News Search, Video Search and Web Search, among others. Our search APIs offer generous rate limits and are based on the REST specification. REST is relatively easy to get up to speed on and to use, no SOAP programming required.

Also, with our Site Explorer APIs, you can keep tabs on traffic and usage by querying for the pages in the Yahoo! index and the sites linking into a site. Additionally, we’ve recently added updateNotification, which you can use to update us of changes to your site.

If you have any questions or comments about our search APIs, please leave us a comment below, or better, suggest them at our Suggestion Board!

Amit Kumar
Yahoo! Search

The Yahoo! elves have been hard at work in their toy shop for the Holiday season to bring you a nice little integration of Maps, Local, Mail and Search.

Users of Yahoo! Mail (classic version only at this time) can now do more with the content in their email. When mousing over any address or location (including international cities) a quick click on the purple underlined terms will bring up an instant map or satellite image, business information, driving directions and a slew of other options relating to that location. The new Shortcuts lets you do all this without ever having to leave your message or open a new browser window.

It’s a very handy new trick for those that don’t like to do a lot of cutting and pasting.

This not only works for addresses, but there is also additional information available for a variety of other items in the messages (phone numbers, key phrases, email addresses…etc). You can also disable this… but why would you want to?

Happy Holidays

The Yahoo! elves and Jeremy Kreitler

Delicious has just released a new badge called the “Tagometer”. The tagometer is like the save to Delicious widget, but with more stuff:

From the Delicious blog, deusx writes:

The Tagometer opens things up from there – using a JSON data feed from Delicious, the Tagometer includes an up-to-date count of others who’ve already bookmarked the page, as well as a fresh list of the top tags applied.

Visitors can click on the count to see more detail on who bookmarked your page, when they did it, and how they tagged it. The list of tags shows visitors why your page is interesting, and clicking on a tag takes them to similar sites on Delicious.

Head over to Delicious for the full story, or to get your new Tagometer.

Happy bookmarking!

Tara Kirchner

Yep – it’s Yahoo! Answers’ first birthday – and we feel smarter already! We wanted to give a big thank you to the people who make Yahoo! Answers a resource to answer any question, and a repository of the world’s knowledge. To celebrate, we’re thanking some of our 16.6 million Yahoo! Answers users (comScore, November 2006) who lead the community in sharing thoughtful, high-quality knowledge and life experience with others.

• Gifts! Lots of ‘em. If you’re a Level Two and up, you can sign up to receive a thank you gift for sharing your knowledge with the world. Hats, mugs, fleeces, keychains, and stickers.
• Best of Answers. With millions of questions and answers, our team selected a few favorites that showcase how much we all know. As James Surowieki notes, many are smarter than a few.
• We’re also having a party tonight here in California for local Yahoo! Answers users, and we’ve flown in 25 special guests ? resourceful and knowledgeable users who’ve distinguished themselves through their extraordinary performance on Yahoo! Answers, including category leaders, featured users, and more.

This is a picture of some of our answers users who’ve joined us in California for our birthday party!

To keep pace with our users, we’ve been busy enhancing the product. Since it’s launch a year ago, Yahoo! Answers has really grown. We also camped out in New York City’s Times Square and launched Yahoo! Answers worldwide. We drank our own Kool-Aid by developing a Yahoo! Answers area for Yahoo! products, integrated into search and into our own help pages. And there’s more to come.

Happy holidays to everyone who helps make the Web a great place!

Patrick Crane
Yahoo!, VP Marketing

Earlier this year Yahoo! and IBM got together to ask a simple question — how can we make enterprise search easier to install, use, and maintain. The result of that question is IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition which we believe will enable employees, partners or customers to find answers that they know are sitting on their file-systems, their intranet, or their public website. And because an answer to your question may be on the Web, we have integrated Yahoo! Search directly into the search results. So, if you are searching the enterprise, the Web, or looking for a local business you can do that in one unified experience.

Beyond creating a product that was super easy to use we don?t believe that small and mid-sized businesses (or even large enterprises!) should need to spend $1,995 or more to get a reliable and robust enterprise search solution. Anybody can install and use the IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition product and get access to a wide set of features for no charge. For those who are curious, here are a few of the many features worth mentioning:

? Indexes up to 500,000 documents and over 200 file types in 30 different languages.
? Customizable search results interface I.e. it doesn?t need to look like the screenshot above. But it is not just about changing the background color, you can also hide certain features.
? Add new synonyms. Companies big and small love acronyms and shorthand speak so you can use these features to handle your common and not so common acronyms?. Hmmm?. what did TFBO stand for again
? Create your own featured links. Yahoo! Search includes many useful shortcuts, but within your company there are likely some high use applications and content that you may want to provide one-click access for. For example, a search on ?expense reports? may include a featured link directly to your Expense Report system.

You can learn more (http://omnifind.ibm.yahoo.com) about the product, but we would encourage you to install it and give it a try.

Making enterprise search simple and accessible is something we are very excited about here at Yahoo! and IBM, so let us know what you think by leaving a comment below.

Ariel Seidman ? Yahoo! Search Product Management
Sean Johnson – IBM OmniFind Product Management

Ahoy, Yahoo! Search Blog readers!

An update from the search marketing side of the house. Today, the newYahoo! Sponsored Search advertising platform, which has carried the code name “Panama,” is available to all U.S. marketers who open new accounts with us.

To apply, go to Yahoo! Sponsored Search.

Sponsored search has long been one of the most effective ways to advertise online. But in case you’re not sure what it is, what we’re talking about a form of search engine marketing that lets you create ads that run alongside search results on Yahoo!, and on other sites in the Yahoo! distribution network. Like so:

In other words, Yahoo! Sponsored Search helps you get your site, your business and your products noticed by consumers who are looking for them.

For the full story, go to the Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog.

Michael Mattis
Blog Editor, Yahoo!

We are in the process of rolling out some changes to our search results. As usual, you may be seeing some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index throughout this process. This update began on Sunday night and should be complete by tomorrow morning.

Keep the feedback coming!

Tim Mayer
Yahoo! Search

It’s that time again, when we like to kick back with a festive beverage and reflect on the year that was. Today, Yahoo! released the 6th annual Top Searches of the Year, which shows what the world was searching for in 2006 across news, sports and entertainment.

Some things haven’t changed much since we released our first list in 2001. Take Britney Spears, for instance. Back then, she topped our list of celebrity searches. Fast forward to 2006, and, well, she’s topped our list of celebrity searches again making it five of the six years. You just can’t hold back talent, people.

Many things have changed, however. News stories that grabbed our attention this year included the Danish cartoon protests, Dick Cheney shooting his hunting partner, and the U.S. elections. The biggest news story of the year, however, was the shocking death of Australian naturalist Steve Irwin, as people searched to find out the circumstances of his death, what a stingray was, and how tribute would be paid to the international star. Also big this year was the World Cup, with Brazilian Ronaldinho topping searches for France?s Zinedine Zidane, despite the ?head butt heard ’round the world’.

But that’s not all that’s new this year. In a nod to the brilliant, thoughtful, thought-provoking, crazy, and creative content that Yahoo! users create and share, we’ve also included videos on Yahoo! Video, pictures from Flickr, and the best questions and answers on Yahoo! Answers.

If you’re curious, scroll month by month through the year that was in searches, pictures, video, and dialogue.

Happy Holidays!

Lesley Beatty
Yahoo! Buzz