Gas relief comes not from a bottle, but from the pumps. As summer draws to an end, the meter has dropped a few pennies — enough to tempt perhaps one more asphalt adventure. And, with Labor Day weekend upon us, what better way to spend your time than the open roads?

“Road trips” buzz usually peaks in April, dips in June and starts to rise again in July through September. Searches for the American tradition of mobile trekking showed a steady decline in the past two years and online interest has dropped off 11% compared to last summer. Still, there are those who can’t resist the appeal of the “family road trip” or “college road trip.”

So, if you’re packing up your car for a Labor Day Asphalt adventure to the sunny beaches of California in Santa Barbara or maybe San Diego, for example, check out the routes the Yahoo! Buzz caravan has been searching before you go:

1. “Road Trip Planners.” A good trip requires planning. Even if you’re last minute on your trip-planning adventures, look for “tips” and “maps.”

2. “Road Trip Games.” A DVD player just doesn’t compare to a rousing car game. Smart parents look for “printable road trip games.” An impolitic few either seek to entertain passengers or prepare for the worst with “mother-in-law” traveling tales. That oughtta make a short trip seem long, especially if said relative is in the car.

3. “Road Trip Songs.” Playing radio tower roulette can be serendipitous, but long bouts of static don’t encourage grooving. Instead, travelers trick out the car into a mobile karaoke station with a music mix, from movies or simply the best songs for the road.

4. “Road Trip Ideas.” Unlike spring or summer, the need for inspiration isn’t so keen. People know their general routes, such as California, Texas, the United Kingdom, or Norway. Not surprisingly, the vehicle can determine the type of trip, whether it be a motorcycle, an RV or a Honda Element.

5. “Packing Food for a Road Trip.” Homemade snacks save travelers from impulse buys at the convenience mart. Then again, some people plan their entire venture around food. What better than a BBQ road trip for Labor Day?

However you plan to spend your weekend away, have fun, relax and happy travels!

Vera Chan
Senior Buzz Team Editor
Yahoo! Search

Heading into the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in San Jose last week, I’d been at Yahoo! just over a week. The four-day summer event was a welcome respite to my new gig and certainly to some of my colleagues who were beginning to feel a little stuffed in their cubes and meeting rooms. We all headed down to the San Jose Convention Center to connect with our users, share the hot trends in the industry and learn a thing or two from the experts in the field. My first SES experience was pretty successful overall, so I thought I’d share a few takeaways for those who couldn’t make it…

Memorable Delivery
Mikkel deMib Svendsen is a resident authority on advanced problems with frames, dynamic pages, Flash, cloaking, etc., but it was his wry humor and flamboyant delivery of search engine fundamentals (content, link and spiders) that roused even the most avid snoozers at the “Fun with Dynamic Web Sites” panel on Tuesday.

Trend That Piqued My Interest
Personalization and Web 2.0
P10n will change the way search engines rank the results and users look at them.

• Jonathan Mendez’s visual research data in “Personalization, User Data & Search” on Monday showed user scanning is more scattered with personalized results and varies with chunking. Also, link popularity and the emergence of thematic “buzz” sites greatly extend the role of links in SEO. Check out Online Marketing Blog for more details.
• Vanessa Fox and Amit Kumar in the Web 2.0 session on Wednesday revealed that, while the user generated content and community sharing are the hallmarks of Web 2.0, AJAX (link sharing problem) or content design frameworks like CSS may not always be the right choice as they can be search engine unfriendly.

Standout Sessions
Sessions like “Organic Listings” and “Meet the Crawlers” moderated by Danny Sullivan, aimed to brainstorm the unresolved questions in the SEO community: copyright recognition, content copying, crawl frequency, and duplicate content problem. While there is no clear panacea in the continuously evolving world of search engines and web technologies, there are some common ways to troubleshoot these problems: reviewing Robots.txt regularly and using Site Explorer, Sitemap and the Dynamic Urls tab in Site Explorer.

Overall, the conference was quite the experience for a Yahoo! first-timer. I had the chance to meet several of you as we flitted across the main hall and hung around the various coffee tables and long restroom queues. I’d like to keep the conversation going, so hope to see you at another industry event soon.

Sharad Verma
Yahoo! Search

For the past few weeks, Major League Baseball has been the only game in town — and the only Sports Shortcut on Yahoo! Search. But all that has changed. The National Football League is on the horizon, putting an end to the preseason speculation, the glory of last year’s Fantasy Football championships and the “Who’s now” segments on SportsCenter. To celebrate, we’re launching the NFL Sports Shortcuts at Yahoo! Search. For instance, searching for Randy Moss (happy to be a Patriot) or Steven Jackson (sporting a decent pirate mustache) will display the same vital information and quick links you’ve come to expect. I plan on using the shortcuts to do some quick checks on this year’s “sleepers” — players who surprise everyone with unexpectedly good performances. My pick is…

… D.J. Hackett. He isn’t an unknown by any means, but I think he’ll do better than his #90 Yahoo! Fantasy suggests.

Please try the NFL Sports Shortcut for yourself and let me know what you think. We have shortcuts for nearly all NFL players and you’ll also see a News shortcut when appropriate (is it Tom Brady’s kid or not?!).

What’s next for Sports shortcuts on Yahoo! Search? I’ll give you a hint… it’s a chant that has been heard at the Detroit Lions’ home games: “LET’S GO RED-WINGS!!!”

Ya-Bing Chu
Yahoo! Search

More than you think, because we’ve expanded upon the popular narrowing options for restaurants and hotels (try San Diego restaurants or San Diego hotels). Now searches for popular queries around electronics, medical conditions and medications also display narrowing shortcuts on Yahoo! Search.

If you happen to be contemplating your next electronics purchase, I can tell you first-hand that it can be a research-intensive exercise. I was recently tasked with helping select a laptop for my sister who’s starting college in the next few weeks. I plugged in the search term ‘laptops‘ and got the bulk of my research underway.

After reading some user reviews and comparing model specs, my sister and I agreed that a MacBook was the best choice for her. She loves it! If you have some back-to-school shopping as well, or just crave a new toy, try searching for ‘digital cameras,’ ‘cell phones‘ or ‘mp3 players.’

Looking to do some research on a medical condition or medications? I recently had a close friend diagnosed with hypothyroidism. I used the narrower to educate myself about the condition and gather helpful information.

I now have a better understanding of common symptoms and treatments after reading up on the latest clinical trials on MedlinePlus. I also found a Yahoo! Group that she can join to connect with others living with the condition. And to get more detailed, I did a search for ‘levothyroxine,’ a common medication used to treat hypothyroidism, to learn about the possible side effects.

Try searching for ‘breast cancer,’ ‘ALS,’ ‘Lexapro,’ or ‘vitamin E‘ to see more shortcut examples.

We plan to introduce more shortcuts and create more displays like these, so we welcome your ideas. Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Carlos Teran
Yahoo! Search

If you haven’t been busy at SES in our neck of the woods this week, you might have noticed we’ve been rolling out fresh updates to our crawl, index and ranking systems — ones that are relatively significant for webmasters.

In response to feedback from the community, we’re reducing our crawling machines by a significant amount with this update, so you might have observed a significant reduction in crawl load from us along with fewer machine IP addresses hitting you over the last few days.

The new crawler continues to improve comprehensiveness and freshness of coverage while also enhancing crawl efficiency, which reduces spurious load on websites.

We had a brief bout of increased crawl load while testing and rolling out updates, like support for ‘Dynamic URL Rewriting’ in Site Explorer, announced yesterday. Don’t fret, though, if you’re concerned about seeing an increased load. We’ve initiated efforts and established policies internally to ensure this doesn’t happen, even temporarily, in the future.

Thanks and keep the feedback coming.

Priyank Garg
Yahoo! Search

Please excuse the dramatic start to this post. Between the anticipation of rolling this out and my incessant Harry Potter reading, I couldn’t resist.

Once upon a time, on the World Wide Web, all URLs were fixed strings — static in form. The idea of URL parameters then came along, allowing for database driven sites and session ids in URLs to create personalized experiences for users. At that time, the Web was alive with rich data and experiences. Then came the crawlers, which made it easier for users to navigate through the Web; however, they inevitably battled with dynamic URL parameters and every webmaster had to choose between a dynamic site and search traffic.

Today comes a new wave for search engines with the first-ever Beta launch of ‘Dynamic URL Rewriting’ in Site Explorer. The new feature provides the ability for site owners to alert Yahoo! of the dynamic parameters in URLs that they’d like Yahoo! to ignore, which we’ll then automatically rewrite accordingly. Try this out for all the cases where you’d want to use parameters in your URLs that don’t affect the content of your page, but that have other important uses.

How to get there?

• Login to Site Explorer from Yahoo! Search.
• Add to My Sites and then authenticate any sites that you own or manage.
• For any sites that you have authenticated, you’ll see a ‘Dynamic URLs’ tab.
• On this tab you can enter parameters you want us to either remove from URLs or always crawl with a specific value.
• Once you enter the parameter, we’ll show you the # of URLs we estimate will be affected.
• After you confirm the action, we’ll modify our crawler such that every time we see a URL from your site with that parameter, we’ll automatically rewrite it within our system as per your instruction.

So you might wonder what the feature really gives you. Utilizing the ‘Dynamic URL Rewriting’ feature enables:

• A more efficient crawl of your site, with fewer duplicate URLs being crawled.
• Better and deeper site coverage, as we’ll be able to use our crawler capacity to find and index more new content on your site.
• More unique content discovered, as we’ll handle more dynamic parameters in your URLs (if you remove the content-neutral dynamic parameters).
• Fewer chances of crawler traps, or web page sets that can cause an infinite number of requests or a poorly constructed crawler to crash.
• Cleaner and easier-to-read URLs displayed in the search results.
• Better site ranking due to reduced fragmentation of links and anchor text to your site’s pages.

Looking for more details on when to use URL parameters? Visit the Site Explorer Help page for additional background on the Beta feature to help define and omit what dynamic URLs Yahoo! should ignore.

We’re here to address any questions/ needs that you have, so let us know how it works for you.

Priyank Garg
for Lakis, Amit B., Amit S., Jay, Judy, Srikanth, Zheng
Yahoo! Search

When was the last time you suddenly remembered a favorite song and craved to hear a piece of it right away? If you’re like me, it happens pretty often.

Now on Yahoo! Audio Search you can play samples of millions of songs. The new inline player provides instant playback right next to the search results. There are no intrusive pop-ups or multiple browser windows to manage — only a 30-second, uninterrupted instant audio experience. And, there’s also a ‘Select Preferred Audio Service’ feature that helps you link to your favorite audio provider directly from the results page.

From Cliff Richard to Norah Jones, search for your favorite songs, artists, albums, and lyrics and listen to the sample playback instantly. All you need to do is click on the ‘Play Sample’ button next to the track you want to hear.

For example, you can listen to back-to-back samples of Shakira’s most popular songs or all the 2007 Grammy nominees’ tracks right from the search results page.

Or perhaps get nostalgic by listening to John Denver’s voice or sampling through tracks of ABBA’s popular album Voulez-Vous.

You can access Yahoo! Audio Search from www.yahoo.com by selecting the ‘Audio’ option from the ‘more’ drop down menu.

This is just the beginning. Over time, we plan to roll out more features on Yahoo! Audio Search and additional song samples, so stay tuned. Try it out and let us know what you think.

Sweta Raghavan
Yahoo! Search, Product Manager

There’s a sense of anticipation in the San Jose air. It’s summertime and what’s hotter than the Fahrenheit (or Celsius) in the Silicon Valley city this time of year? Perhaps it’s the influx of high-tech and Internet companies gearing up to attend Search Engine Strategies(SES) at the San Jose Convention Center. August 20th won’t just be another Manic Monday, but instead it marks the onset of this four-day conference where attendees will learn the latest in search and search marketing developments and solutions.

Between Yahoo!’s Search and Search Marketing teams, we’re participating in a total of 16 panels throughout the four-day event, spanning topics like universal search, personalization, traffic quality, and ad targeting.

Here’s where the Yahoo! Search clan will be, but don’t forget to refer to your conference agenda to help you maneuver your way through the masses of marketers and seasoned SES alum who’ll be there.

Monday, August 20

11:00 a.m. — 12:30 p.m.
Universal & Blended Vertical Search: Tim Mayer, VP of Product Management

2:00 — 3:30 p.m.
Personalization, User Data & Search: Tim Mayer, VP of Product Management

Tuesday, August 21

1:30 — 2:45 p.m.
Images & Search Engines: Cris Pierry, Director of Web Search and Multi-media Search

4:45 — 6:00 p.m.
Meet The Video Search Engines: Cris Pierry, Director of Web Search and Multi-media Search

Wednesday, August 22

1:30 — 2:45 p.m.
Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues: Priyank Garg, Director of Product Management

3:15 — 4:30 p.m.
CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines: Amit Kumar, Sr. Engineering Manager

4:45 — 6:00 p.m.
Search Engine Q&A on Links: Sean Suchter, Director of Yahoo! Search Technology

Thursday, August 23

10:45 am — 12:00 p.m.
Meet The Crawlers: Sean Suchter, Director of Yahoo! Search Technology

There’ll be a number of discussions going on, so don’t hesitate to stop by. And check out the YSM Blog for additional panels from the YSM team.

Sean Suchter
Yahoo! Search

Remember the old adage “you reap what you sow?” Well, it’s nowhere more true than in the neighborhoods in which we live. If you’re like me, perhaps you’re tired of seeing your favorite small businesses close due to competitive pressure from a chain store. Who knows, maybe you could’ve helped save that fave if you gave that merchant some kudos and told your neighbors about your great experience.

Well, now Yahoo! Local will help you do just that. We’ve completely overhauled the site to make it easier to contribute your opinion and through a new, updated algorithm, we’re making sure that search results take your ratings and reviews into account. We want to make sure that people’s contributions to Yahoo! Local count in more ways than one.

An example of this in action is the “pizza” in Chicago, IL results which better reflect what the community says is the best pizza in Chicago (obviously a hotly contested debate, we’re not sure we want to get involved in…):

In addition to the improved accuracy of our search results, some of the other new features we’re rolling-out today focus on more ways for you to find what’s best and closest to you:

• Commenting on User Reviews – No longer will it feel like shouting into the wind when you write a review. Now the people who benefit from your tips can reply back. You’ll also be able to track comments on your reviews from your My Local page.
• Weekender – Offers a weekly selection of events, movies (including show times and reviews), dining picks, and more to help you plan your weekend.
• More “Local Buzz” – Shows the top-moving search terms in your hometown with a new search cloud and exposes the most recent reviews of businesses in your area to see what people are buzzing about.
• Best Local Events – Taps into the Upcoming social events database to surface the best events in your hometown.
• Most Popular – Highlights the best of a city in the key categories of Restaurants, Health & Beauty, and Home & Garden.
• My Local Improvements – A new “save for later” feature so you can quickly archive those hidden gems you uncover along with your recent reviews, tags, and collections.

So, make sure to update your profile with a picture or avatar, look up some local favorites, write a few reviews, and comment back on some helpful reviews you discovered along the way.

Got a great idea for what you’d like to see next? Tell us about it on our new suggestion board.

Thanks!

- Brian Gil, Sr. Product Manager, Yahoo! Local

The team here at Yahoo! Local, the source behind the shortcuts that appear at the top of the search results page when you do searches like “New York, NY restaurants,” rolled out some new features today. We’ve been working on some changes to our Local search capabilities to better utilize the millions of user ratings, reviews and other user-generated content from our community, to ensure their voices are heard loud and clear in your search results. For example, a search for “Romantic French Restaurant, SF,” will deliver the following leader board:

There are also new opportunities to offer up your opinion and experiences with people in your community with the new Yahoo! Local. In particular, you can now comment on user reviews in addition to reading other people’s and be a part of a vocal and active user community. We hope that the additional opinions and reviews will help make everyday decisions like picking a florist, finding a great day spa and zeroing in on the nearest Starbucks that much easier for you.

You can check out more details on the new features — ranging from new ways to learn about events to new “My Local” functionality — over at the Yahoo! Local Blog so head there for more detail.

Try it out yourself, update your Yahoo! Local profile and tell us what you think at the Yahoo! Local Suggestion Board.

Brian Gil
Product Manager, Yahoo! Local