Normally our posts on the Yahoo! Search blog include new product launches, Yahoo! Search weather reports and feature the occasional guest blogger. But today we wanted to tip our cap to our brand marketing team, who just launched a new Yahoo! advertising campaign, “Be a Better _____.” Over the next few weeks you’ll see some TV spots highlighting how Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! oneSearch (our new mobile search offering) can help you be a better whatever you want to be. Last fall our brand marketing team’s “Garden” spot was rated the third funniest commercial in the U.S. We here at the search blog and Greg Sterling over at Search Engine Land seem to think this year’s batch is pretty funny as well.

So if you want a quick break from a Monday morning, check out the ads and hopefully you’ll get a quick laugh before you get back to Outlook / PowerPoint / Excel or whatever a Monday morning brings to you.

Raj Gossain
Yahoo! Search

No idea is a bad idea. Ok, I don’t believe that either. But if you think you’ve got a good one for Yahoo! Toolbar, please share it on our new Toolbar Suggestion Board.

You can also visit the forum to read and rate other people’s suggestions. The more votes a suggestion receives, the more likely it’ll attract our attention. And who knows, you may even bump into real folks from the Toolbar team who will chat with you about the suggestions.

So, if you’d like to participate and help make Yahoo! Toolbar better, please join our party and give us your feedback.

Thanks!

/duke

Earlier this week at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Jeff Weiner met up with John Battelle. Jeff is the new head of the Yahoo! Network Division and in his conversation he touched on a variety of items including search, Yahoo!’s media and partnership strategies, and the competitive landscape.

CNET has a great clip of that chat we thought you might enjoy.

Yahoo! Search

Today we’d like to announce the next progression of Upcoming.org, Upcoming.yahoo.com.

Yep, it’s official, we have moved into our new home inside Yahoo!, so from this point forward you’ll be able to login to your account with your Yahoo! ID. For you Upcoming old-schoolers, please don’t fret, all of your friends and settings are saved.

We also used this transition as an opportunity to implement several new ideas and enhancements that Upcoming users have shared with us over the last few months:

• Our redesigned home page highlights popular local events and surfaces the community’s picks for the best happenings in your backyard each day. It also shows your friends’ events and recommends conferences, meetings, parties, and such, just for you.
• The homepage, event pages and venue pages feature event photos from Flickr — so you can see what happened and who showed up, or share your own photos for the world to see.
• You demanded better support for locations around the world, so we’ve delivered that. It’s powered by the same geographical database used by Flickr and Yahoo! Search Marketing. It supports local neighborhoods, too.
• We’ve added more events from our growing community of musicians, artists, freaks, and geeks, combined with the depth of Yahoo! Local’s events coverage.

We haven’t forgotten about our amazing users, the community that makes Upcoming great. Not only will you get an old school badge to represent you on Upcoming, but we’re throwing in a t-shirt, too. For old school users, we’re giving away hundreds of tees to celebrate our new home, so tell us your size and we’ll get one off to you (while supplies last).

In the meantime, check out this Upcoming post for additional details, give it a try and please continue to send us your ideas and thoughts for ways we can make Upcoming better.

The Upcoming Team

I tend to use the same online shops over and over again for convenience. I don’t like having to enter my shipping, billing and credit card information multiple times, and using the same shops means I have fewer passwords to remember. Additionally, there’s peace of mind knowing my credit card info isn’t being scattered across multiple merchants. The downside of this behavior is pretty obvious: I rarely get the lowest price on things and I often have to wait longer to receive an item when my go-to merchant is out of stock.

For these reasons, today I’m personally very happy to announce that we have formed a partnership with PayPal, the most widely accepted checkout service on the web. We are integrating PayPal into Yahoo! Search, enabling people to checkout faster and with greater security when they make online purchases. Beginning today, when you search for a product on Yahoo! Search you will see little blue shopping cart icons next to some of our merchant listings. Those shopping carts identify merchants that accept PayPal:

The ability to quickly locate PayPal merchants will save you some time because the PayPal checkout system remembers all of your personal information, providing you (and me) with the convenience of a single username and password, as well as a consolidated look at your transaction history so you can view all of your purchases and track each items’ shipping progress.

The Yahoo! Search Marketing blog has a great post up today about what this partnership means for advertisers and web merchants. We hope the PayPal integration makes your shopping experience faster, safer and more convenient on Yahoo! Search.

Tim Mayer
Yahoo! Search

The AIIM Conference & Expo, one of the largest annual gatherings of information management professionals, is taking place next week in Boston and we’ll be there! The Yahoo! Search team, along with IBM, will be co-leading a SuperSession presentation entitled “Beyond Traditional Search: Unlocking Value from Web and Enterprise Information.”

With search functioning as the dominant method for finding and accessing information today, it was inevitable that web search and enterprise search would join forces. We’ll be discussing some new developments in the search space that enable companies to extract more value from their business data.

Specifically, we’ll be talking about how web search can be used on top of enterprise content management to increase relevancy, and how tagging, collaboration and social networking can add value by leveraging expertise inside and outside the organization.

Panel Details:
IBM/Yahoo! SuperSession
Beyond Traditional Search: Unlocking Value from Web and Enterprise Information
Tuesday April 17, 2007
4:00 PM – 5:00 PM ET
Boston Conference and Exhibition Center, Room 52A/B

Stop by and visit Ariel Seidman from Yahoo! Search if you have any questions. Hope to see you there!

Yahoo! Search

Since working with Google and Microsoft to support a single format for submission with Sitemaps, we have continued to discuss further enhancements to make it easy for webmasters to get their content to all search engines quickly.

All search crawlers recognize robots.txt, so it seemed like a good idea to use that mechanism to allow webmasters to share their Sitemaps. You agreed and encouraged us to allow robots.txt discovery of Sitemaps on our suggestion board. We took the idea to Google and Microsoft and are happy to announce today that you can now find your sitemaps in a uniform way across all participating engines. To do this, simply add the following line to your robots.txt file:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Please provide the complete URL for your Sitemap on this line. We will pick it up wherever you put it in your robots.txt file. This directive is not specific to user-agent. If you have multiple Sitemaps, you can point to your Sitemap index file on this line. Details about the Sitemaps protocol including this addition are available on the protocol website — http://www.sitemaps.org.

If you prefer, you can continue to issue Sitemaps to Yahoo! Search by simply inputting the URL for your Sitemap and submitting. Or add feeds to a site you are already managing under ‘My Sites’ in Site Explorer. This also allows us to provide more feedback to you about what we are doing with the sitemap.

We’re also happy to have some east coasters, Ask and IBM, announce their support for Sitemaps. The more the merrier!

We’ll also be sharing more this week at SES NY.

If you have other thoughts about how we can collaborate with other search engines on standards such as robots.txt, we’d love to hear from you — visit our suggestion board.

Priyank Garg
Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

It’s been nearly two years since we first made Site Explorer available . How time flies! Since its inception, we’ve added a number of new features to Site Explorer, including Feed Submission, Site Authentication and more data for webmasters. And today, we’ve got a few more additions to share with our users.

Site Explorer offers Mobile Submit
Enhancing our Mobile Site Submit feature, publishers can now submit mobile sites and feeds to Site Explorer, which enables them to get their mobile sites into Yahoo! oneSearch and gain access to Yahoo!’s mobile user base. Our mobile crawler will consume these feeds to help it find new pages. The feeds can be:

• RSS 0.9, 1.0 and 2.0, such as CNN Top Stories

• Sitemaps
• Atom 0.3 and Atom 1.0 such as, Yahoo! Search Blog
• A text file with a list of URLs, each URL at the start of a new line
• A single webpage

Site Explorer is out of Beta
A while back we added the Delete URL feature to provide more direct control to webmasters. This was a critical stage for Site Explorer and after having successfully crossed that milestone, today we’re taking it out of beta. Over the last few months, webmasters have tried out the various features and provided their feedback, which we’re addressing in this release:

• Input URLs for Delete — You now have more flexibility. You can modify the URL or path you want to delete on the confirmation page.

• Delete more than five invalid URLs — Your limit has increased from five. Remember, as before, each delete can rid a whole path of URLs.

Report Spam
We’ve heard from a number of webmasters who are looking for ways to address spam, so we’re trying out a new feature. Now when exploring your authenticated site, if you find a suspicious inlink, such as an off-topic link or a suspected linkfarm, just click on the ‘Report Spam‘ button and submit a spam report.

We hope you find these updates useful. And as always, keep the feedback coming!

Yahoo! Site Explorer and Mobile Search teams

I’ve always had success finding the information I was looking for on the Web. The challenging part was finding a way to bring this information with me once I left my computer. It usually involved scrounging for a piece of paper, jotting down my addresses, directions or whatever I was searching for and just hoping not to lose it.

Working with the mobile team, I realized that a lot of our users experience the same pain. With this in mind, we’ve enabled a new way for popular searches (e.g., local info, weather, stock quotes, sports scores and movies in theaters) to be easily sent to a mobile phone.

When you’re on the move and have a limited amount of time, it’s important to get all the information you need in a single search. oneSearch gets you all this information on your mobile phone because it understands the type of search you’re doing and optimizes the results accordingly.

On the Yahoo! Search results page, simply click on the link right below the Yahoo! Shortcut and enter the mobile phone number. You’ll then immediately receive a text message with a link to the results.

You can also navigate the search box directly via your mobile phone or SMS — a capability we’ve had for local and driving directions since 2005. Simply launch your web browser on your cell and type in http://m.yahoo.com. Or, if you want search results via your SMS, simply send a text message to YAHOO (92466) and type in search shortcuts in the message. We’ll then send you the results back via SMS message.

We hope you find this handy. Give it a try and let us know what you think in the comments section.

Christina Lee
Yahoo! Search

Based on a lot of user input, the latest update we’ve made to the Broadband version of Yahoo! Maps is to the Driving Directions print page. The new format of the “Printable Version” allows for an interactive experience that simply put, makes them more useful and easier to read.

Here are some of the coolest new features of the interactive printable maps:

• Click on the title of the print page or in the “notes” box to personalize it. Instead of “Directions to Sunnyvale, CA” you can change it to “Mike’s Surprise Birthday” or add in useful information like a phone number.
• Change the font size of the driving directions between Small, Medium, or Large — one font size does not always fit all!
• Choose among Map & Directions, Map Only, or Directions only to save space and ink, and you can remove the summary and notes for a more compact set of directions.
• Remove individual steps in your directions, like how to get from your house to the freeway, if they’re not important to you.
• Clicking “Show Cumulative Distance” will allow you to get a cumulative mile-post for each maneuver, great for people who use their odometer. Just set it at the beginning of your journey.
• Change your included map layout from one to three panels, including total route, the start point, and the end point.

While we can’t do much to make sure people don’t forget their printed directions before hopping in their car, we can make them more useful to those who do remember! We hope you like the changes, and your feedback is very important to us. Please keep it up and don’t forget to use our Yahoo! Local and Maps suggestion board!

Mike Lawless, Product Manager, and the Yahoo! Maps Team