We spend a lot of time listening to our users, and I am happy to say we’ve gotten better at it. We’ve been using feedback forms and message boards, and finally at the Chicago SES last December, we launched our new Site Explorer Suggestion Board. This is a new user based ranking feedback tool, which was first introduced at an internal Yahoo! Hack day and is currently being deployed across the Yahoo! network. It allows you to make suggestions for the product, vote for existing suggestions or simply comment on them.

Today, we launched a new version of Site Explorer that addresses some of the Top Rated suggestions from our users. The key features are:

‘ Site Authentication using META tags: For those of you who cannot upload an authentication file to your site, such as a blog, you will now be able to authenticate your site in Site Explorer by including an authentication key as part of a META tag on the home page of your site. This is in addition to the existing mechanism of putting a file on your site home directory.

‘ Detailed Authentication Errors: We now provide detailed errors on authentication failures, making it much easier to diagnose possible problems.

‘ Delete URLs: For your authenticated sites, you can now delete any URLs from the index. Simply locate the URL in Site Explorer and click on the ‘Delete URL’ button. The URL and all its subpaths will be deleted shortly thereafter. This is meant to work in conjunction with the robots.txt file while providing greater responsiveness. Please continue to use the robots.txt protocol to ensure that our crawler does not crawl pages you want to keep out of our index.

‘ Site Explorer Badge: Get a Site Explorer badge for your Website and retrieve the count of live links from the whole web. Go ahead, watch as your site becomes more popular, and show off your link wealth to your visitors.

These features address some of the most popular suggestions that we received on our new board. The full list of suggestions we will be able to address with this release is:
a) Allow removal of invalid or malformed URLs
b) Verification for blogs
c) Authentication Problem
d) More than 25 sitemaps
e) better labeling of TSV files
f) Site explorer should identify itself in the user agent string
g) https / ssl
h) Wait 1 day? (Speed of authentication)

Hope you’ll enjoy the improvements. Please share with us your experience using these features and continue to send us your feedback. It’s very valuable to us!

Priyank Garg, Amit Kumar, Apostolos ‘Lakis’ Karmirantzos, Di Chang, Judy Johnson
Yahoo! Search

In December, Yahoo! Answers reached 96% of the Q&A site market share, according to Hitwise. While the real power of the community lies with the sheer number of people on the site – 17.9 million users, says comScore – it’s also exciting that those ranks include celebrities, noted experts, and even world leaders.

Recently, Indian President Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam asked the Answers community for thoughts on creating a safer place for everyone to live, one of the many leaders who have already asked, and answered questions within the Yahoo! community. And now, with the 2008 US Presidential campaign beginning to heat up, potential candidates are eager to listen to online communities and teach them about their platforms. Regardless of party affiliation, the Web represents a very active and engaged public and a potent way to reach out to people.

Today, Hillary Clinton, — who just announced she’s formed a commission to explore joining the 2008 presidential race, — returns to Yahoo! Answers to ask the community, “Based on your own family’s experience, what do you think we should do to improve health care in America?”

As the race heats up, we hope additional candidates will look to Yahoo! Answers as a way to gauge what’s on the minds of Americans. Answers is an open exchange of information, knowledge and ideas, and is a non-partisan community forum.

Please go to Yahoo! Answers to respond to Hillary Clinton’s question. You can also continue the discussion over on the Yahoo! Answers blog.

Patrick Crane
Yahoo! Search

Have you ever considered moving to a new home and found yourself wondering which neighborhoods would have the best schools for your children? We’ve all asked our real estate agents, friends, or coworkers what they’ve thought about the schools in a particular neighborhood.
Yahoo! Real Estate is happy to announce that you can now search for schools in your area (or the area you plan to move into) and evaluate which schools are the best fit for your kids, based on detailed school information, statistics, and parent reviews. Now that’s useful!
Here’s how to start:
-Go to Yahoo! Real Estate
-Click on the “Research Schools” tab

-Enter the city and state or ZIP code for the area that you’re researching in the search box and click “Search.”
-Now you’ll be able to view this region’s schools on the map and in the list. You can refine your search by school district, school level (elementary, middle, and high schools), and school type (public, private, and charter schools) on the left bar.

-Click on a school to get parent reviews and information about its enrollment, student/teacher ratio, and contact details. A neighborhood map shows you the nearest grocery stores, parks, restaurants, or gas stations.

Check it out and let us know what you think!
Brian Rothenberg
Product Manager, Yahoo! Real Estate

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 last night and should be complete very soon.

Keep the feedback coming!

Priyank Garg
Yahoo! Search

Buying a house is all about location, and proximity to good schools is one of the big factors in choosing where to live. Today we launched nationwide schools search on Yahoo! Real Estate. Users can search and browse local schools via an interactive map interface, and refine and sort their search by school district, distance, grade level, or school type (e.g. public, private, charter).

We partnered with leading non-profit, GreatSchools.net, for detailed school information, statistics, parent reviews, and links to test scores and related content.

Each school detail page also features a neighborhood map that leverages the Yahoo! Local API to plot nearby grocery stores, parks, restaurants and other local businesses with user ratings and reviews to help users get a better feel for the neighborhood.

Please let us know what you think by leaving a comment below.

Thanks!
Brian Rothenberg, Yahoo! Real Estate

We just rolled out our most recent product update on Yahoo! Answers. Among the enhancements, the team introduced a new way for users to share questions that they find interesting on Yahoo! Answers, called “stars”.

When you star a question, we add that question to your Answers profile page where you can see all your activity, points, questions, answers, etc.

This activity, along with all the other ways users tell us what they like (and don’t like) on Yahoo! Answers, we use to help surface the most interesting questions and answers for the rest of the Yahoo! community ‘ much like Flickr Interestingness and Delicious Popular.

For the complete story, please see Elizabeth’s post on the Yahoo! Answers blog.

Tara Kirchner
Yahoo! Search

If you’ve been following the news from CES 2007, you may have heard about the new Yahoo! mobile search on Yahoo! Go 2.0. What’s so new about mobile search, you might ask? I’m here to break it down for you.

First things first. The new search is called “oneSearch” and its so named because we’ve taken a radically different tack toward returning and displaying results on mobile devices, while leveraging a common search technology platform. The mobile device has very different requirements. With limited bandwidth, screen size and time, this service puts information all right in front of you without having to click on multiple links and then find your way back through a convoluted navigation process, as you might have to do on a more conventional mobile search service. Have a look at this example search for “49ers”.

With one search from your mobile device, you can now easily get to a wide variety of 49ers results ‘ scores, team web sites, photos, news articles, and more.

Our goal with this release is to provide a rich set of relevant content for a given query from a number of different categories of results. The new display therefore demonstrates significant vertical integration on the mobile search result page to bring back more direct results. We’re already doing this on the web search results pages. For example, you see a shortcut for news or images in addition to web results where it is likely you would be interested in seeing those items.

In addition to providing relevant links to web and mobile web sites, the new mobile search provides immediate answers for business listings, movies, sports, news, events, celebrity gossip, stock/finance information, and so on, all from a single search. If the query term is “ipod”, the top of the result page includes results from Yahoo! Shopping, with prices and reviews, which could help the user who’s considering a purchase. A search for “San Francisco” will return weather, traffic information, and local news.

In a way, we have merged all the tabs above the search box and do our best to determine the most relevant pieces of information without asking the user to pick a specific vertical.

To get the new mobile search, you’ll need to download Yahoo! Go for your phone. We would love to hear what you think of the new service, so please drop us a comment below!

Thanks!
Paul Yiu, Yahoo! Search

PS. Opera has also selected Yahoo! Search as the exclusive search for its millions of Web browsers for mobile phones, Opera Mini’ and Opera Mobile worldwide.

It’s time to announce a new feature on Yahoo! Local which empowers you to add your favorite new local business, alert others when an old favorite has closed, and add or change business info quickly. Now you can truly be our eyes and ears in your community!
To quickly add a new favorite business, please fill out this short form:

• In 24 hours it’ll be up on Local for everyone to see. Here’s an example of a recently added business in Redwood City, CA:

If you run across a business which has closed, needs a correction, or which is missing some important info like its web site, please click the “Edit This Business” link beneath the rating to tell us about it.

We’ll add an alert to the listing ASAP and show your proposed changes to other Locals in a pop-up window like this:

That’s it! Quick and easy. And of course, if you happen to know about a business that has been edited by someone in your community, you’ll be able to confirm that the changes are valid by clicking on ‘Yes’ in the pop-up window above.

As always, let us know what you think!

Brian, Ganesh, & The Local Team