There’s, no doubt, a plethora of knowledge-sharing at this week’s ETech Conference, with a solid line-up of sessions to spark creative thinking and introduce new ideas for building successful technologies. If you’re lucky enough to attend this year’s event, we encourage you to attend a session led by Yahoo!’s Joshua Schachter who is sharing lessons learned in scaling and building social systems. Here are the details:

Track: Products & Services
Date: Thursday, March 29
Time: 11:00am – 11:45am
Location: Gallery

If you’ve never heard Joshua speak before, you are in for a treat. Basically, Joshua took his hobby to a whole new level when he launched Delicious in 2003 (and undoubtedly learned a few lessons along the way). He’ll share some of those lessons and detail how to build, develop and scale social Web applications. With a strong focus on community, Joshua will talk about the power technology has in enabling the organization, recollection and sharing of information found on the Web.

Swing by and tell Joshua we sent you!

Yahoo! Search Blog Team

Anyone who has seen their web server logs, has seen the Yahoo! crawler come by and leave its mark. It identifies itself as ‘Yahoo! Slurp’ and its domain is inktomisearch.com. For those of you who follow the search space, you can easily guess that this is one of the last historic remnants from our acquisition of Inktomi a few years ago. Well, the crawler finally decided to move and find a new home. We are moving our crawler from inktomisearch.com to crawl.yahoo.net.

The user-agent will continue to be Yahoo! Slurp, hence you do not need to make any changes to your robots.txt file. Nor are we changing the actual IP addresses of the crawler infrastructure during this transition. However, if you do any reverse DNS checks for the crawler identity or have any network access rules to allow inktomisearch.com, please also update them to allow for crawl.yahoo.net.

The crawlers will be switched over in phases starting immediately. You’ll see an increasing number of Yahoo! Slurp visits from crawl.yahoo.net and fewer and fewer from inktomisearch.com during the transition, which will take a few weeks.

Keep an eye on this space and the Yahoo! Search Blog for more details on when the migration is complete and details on bot verification with the new domain name.

Priyank Garg
Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

My phone is more like a body part than it is a device – it’s with me everywhere I go. And now, with easy accessibility to the Internet, it’s more like a go-go-gadget-arm. Finding a phone number to a restaurant, a quick check on my favorite game scores or movie show times on my phone makes it that much more indispensable.

I work with the Yahoo! Mobile group and back in January we announced that our new Yahoo! oneSearch service would be available on Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0. Today we announced that Yahoo! oneSearch is available on more than 85% of phones, providing greater access to the mobile web. The service is designed to give mobile searchers answers to their queries, not just a list of links. It’s about making search on your mobile device as quick and as easy as possible, by providing relevant results right on the page.

Try it out for yourself. Search for a company like “Apple” and check out, not only the great search results, but the really incredible amount of information you get if you click on the stock quote. Or, if you’re hungry, search for “pizza” and check out the user ratings for local pizza places, or grab the phone number to place your order.

Find out how to take full advantage of the service here or take a look at the screencast on Richard MacManus’ blog. Best of all, send your search query via SMS to 92466 (which spells “yahoo”).

We hope you’ll find it useful!

Lee Ott, Product Manager
Yahoo! Mobile

It’s that time of the year again where office pools make their rounds in the spirit of friendly competition and folks everywhere partake in the madness of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. With sixty five teams competing within three weeks for the top slot, it’s no wonder this tournament has so many inspired nicknames. For fans (and for those of you with skin in the game), we added a new shortcut to Yahoo! Search that provides a quick and easy way to stay on top of the games. Search for March Madness and get to where you want to go in one click. Check it out:

We’ve included seed numbers, game times, and when the games are in play, real-time scores. If you prefer, you can use our existing score shortcuts to get updates on a particular team. For example, try Gators score, UCLA score and Duke score.

For those of you who are a novice in a pool, Yahoo! Sports can help you get ready for tip off. We have some more sport shortcuts in the works to add to our growing list of shortcuts, so let us know if you’ve got any ideas and thoughts for others.

Carlos Teran
Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

After two and half years, the Yahoo! Search Blog team thought it was time for a little pick-me-up, so we went under the html knife and added a couple of new features to help you navigate through the site better. Okay, so it’s not exactly a traditional facelift, but it’s a refresh and we hope you like it. A couple new things we added include:  MyBlogLog, one-click links to save a post to Yahoo! Bookmarks, Delicious and digg, a new archive dropdown to quickly get to past posts and category search.

We’d love to know what you think, both about the design and how we can improve the blog to be more interesting, more informative, and more useful to you.

Raj Gossain
Yahoo! Search

Have a suggestion to make Yahoo! Local or Maps better? Use our new Local Suggestion Board to pitch ideas, vote and comment on others, and get notified if we use your idea.

Votinghelps usquickly discover what’s most important to users. In addition to reading feedback from other users, you’ll find responses from Yahoo! employees about the issues. Product teams regularly read and take action on feedback. Though we aren’t always going to be able to act on your input, it’s incredibly helpful to us in making the best sites we can… and we’ve even been known to reward great ideas on occasion with awesome prizes.

New ideas are already starting to flow-in! Perhaps you want to vote for user-enhanced driving directions or GPS Aware mobile search, or maybe you’d like to submit a new idea. Either way, we want to hear from you, so Tell Us What You Think and help us improve Yahoo! Local for you and millions of others.

The Yahoo! Local Team

You’ve got a burning question and you know someone out there has got the answer. We’ve all been in this situation and for over 90 million people worldwide, spanning 20 countries, and 9 languages, Yahoo! Answers has been the answer. The topics are varied – food & drink, relationships, pets, tattoos, baseball, consumer electronics, and everything in between – but the experience is the same. Ask your question and get an answer from the Answers community. And with over 250 million answers so far, this community has managed to help a lot of people.

But even with all that knowledge being shared, one of the biggest pieces of feedback we’ve gotten from our users is to make Answers "smarter", enabling them to get even better answers to their questions and connect to the smart people they know in (and out of) Answers. Well today, we think Yahoo! Answers just got a little bit smarter.

We just added a new capability to Answers, the Yahoo! Answers Network – currently in beta, which enables you to build your own personal knowledge network. So what exactly is a knowledge network? Simply put, it enables you to directly connect with people whose knowledge you value so you can easily share knowledge and discover interesting information on topics you care about.

More specifically, the Yahoo! Answers Network enables you to see if any of your contacts have asked a question, provided a great answer, or simply "starred" a question they found interesting. Here’s a screenshot of the Answers homepage for a user that has built out their Network:

By adding people to your network, Answers becomes a more personal, productive, and interesting experience, enabling you to tap into the knowledge of your network. There are two easy ways to build your network: 1) add anyone you find interesting in Answers simply by clicking "Add to My Contacts" – just mouse over their picture or go to their profile page; 2) invite your friends to join you on Answers. The bigger your network, the more likely you are to receive useful, timely answers to your questions from people who you know have the answers. In the end, Answers gets smarter for you because you"ll get smarter answers.

For details on how it works click here, and for even more information check out the Answers blog. And as the Yahoo! Answers Network is currently in beta, we look forward to your feedback. In just over a year, Yahoo! Answers has grown into a global community. The knowledge, expertise, wisdom, opinions, and personal experiences that are shared are truly astounding and unique to the Web, and we like to think, to Yahoo!. We hope that the addition of the Answers Network will allow our users to create lasting connections with one another and improve their lives and their communities.

The Answers Network is completely optional, so if you want to opt out you have that option. But, we hope you’ll come build your personal knowledge network and grow what you know.

Elizabeth Douglas
Yahoo! Answers

Since Yahoo! Search is the most commonly used feature on the Yahoo! Toolbar, I thought it would be helpful to share a handful of search-based productivity hacks our toolbar team uses to help squeeze a little more juice out of the toolbar’s search box:

Yahoo! Toolbar for IE:

• When using IE, press Alt-S to put the cursor directly into the Yahoo! Toolbar search box.
• Once the cursor is in the search box, you can use the arrow keys to traverse the buttons and menus.
• Right-click any button or menu to open its link automatically in a new window (instead of in the current browser window).
• With Smart Tools  enabled (Toolbar Options under Settings menu), you can select text on the web page, by tabbing over the desired content.  A little Y! icon appears to help you easily search the web, look up in the dictionary and translate, in addition to other options as well.
• Right-click on a web page to easily Bookmark it or send it to a friend.

Yahoo! Toolbar for Firefox:

• Search Suggest: As you type in Yahoo! Toolbar, you will see suggestions of other common searches.
• Yahoo! menu: Yahoo! Toolbar puts a Yahoo! menu in the Firefox browser that duplicates all the links from the Toolbar (enabled in Toolbar Options under Settings menu). This is primarily to provide access to people with special computing needs, so that they can get to all the links on their Yahoo! Toolbar should they not be able to use a mouse or other device to point on the toolbar. But it’s also an additional convenient way for anyone to get to their favorite links.

Yahoo! Toolbar, both IE and Firefox:

• In newer versions, you can click and grab the little arrows near the right of the search box to drag and change the search box width.
• All Search Shortcuts work from Yahoo! Toolbar search box (i.e. Local Weather: [city] weather)
• Translate button: Under the Add/Edit buttons from the Settings menu, you can add a Translate button. This button will translate web pages to English, and has menu links to Babel Fish to translate words and bodies of text too.

Try ‘em out and let me know what you think in the comments.

Duke Fan
Yahoo! Toolbar Team

It wasn’t our intention Rand, but we appreciate the humor (and awkwardness) of your situation. So please accept our apology and our peace offering – an olive branch:

But in all seriousness, given the recent, well publicized changes to Yahoo! Search and our search advertising platform, we appreciate that many of you are sharing your stories. We are listening and your feedback continues to influence our product development efforts.

Now Rand, about this photo…

Raj Gossain
Yahoo! Search