Over the last few days, we’ve been rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. While we expect the update will be completed soon, as you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.

We appreciate your feedback on this, so please keep it coming.

Priyank Garg
Yahoo! Search

Recently, some of you noticed changes in counts for Site Explorer results, where the counts were different for logged-in users versus logged-out users.

While the counts have been incorrect in some cases, the actual returned results have been correct. However, we did roll out a product fix yesterday and will be rolling out a couple more over the next few days to resolve this difference in counts some of you have observed.

Please disregard any counts for inlinks reported by Site Explorer from October 11 through next week. Thank you for raising this issue.

Priyank Garg
Yahoo! Search

When it comes to the Web, there’s nothing wrong with cutting a few corners. That’s why we decided to focus today’s post on some time-saving tips for your next search. Some may seem obvious; others you may already know and use. But we hope a few will help you cut through the chase. You can find a full list of shortcuts and search tips here.

1. Square Brackets, “inurl,” “originurlextension,” and Site Restriction
To get a more targeted search, try these tricks out:

• Words within square brackets — adding square brackets to your search makes the keyword match order dependent. So typing in ‘[Jack Black]‘ will return results such as ‘jack with black’ but not ‘black jack.’
• “inurl” — if you want to be sure that a specific term will appear in the site’s URL, use the “inurl:[query]” operator. For example: ‘inurl:iPod.’
• Site restriction — to restrict your search to pages within a specific domain, use the “site:[domain]” operator, followed by your query. For instance: ‘Site:Apple.com iPod.’
• “orginurlextension” — to search on specific file types, add ‘originurlextension:[file format]‘ after your search query. For example: ‘nanotechnology originurlextension:swf‘ OR ‘nanotechnology originurlextension:pdf.’

2. Package Tracking
Did you know that you can track your packages right in Yahoo! Search? Here’s How it works:

• For UPS packages, simply type in your tracking number
• For FedEx or the U.S. Postal Service, just add the name before the tracking number. For example: ‘FedEx [tracking number]‘ or ‘USPS [tracking number]‘

3. Definitions & Synonyms
To look up the definition of a word, try adding “define” or “definition” to your search term. For example: ‘quixotic definition,’ ‘definition of globalization‘ or ‘define ergonomics.’ Or, if you’re looking for a synonym, try adding “synonym” to your search term. For example: ‘humorous synonym.’

4. Exclude Terms, Either/Or and Exact Phrase Match
This one’s been around for a while, but a few simple operators can be a huge time-saver:

• Exclude terms — if you want a term to be excluded from your results, use a minus sign before it. ‘Simpsons -movie‘ returns results for “The Simpsons” TV show, books, games, etc., but not the movie.
• Either/or — by default, all of the words you use in a search are included in the results. If you want to be more flexible, try adding “OR” (note the capitalization) between two terms. For example: ‘Sony laptops OR notebooks‘ gives you results containing either “Sony laptops” or “Sony notebooks.”
• Exact phrase match — if you want results to contain an exact phrase, put quotation marks around it: “Queen Elizabeth I”.

You can also combine these tricks for even more refined searches. Try: ‘“Sony VAIO” laptops OR notebooks.’

5. Travel
With the holidays approaching, many of us have travel on our minds. Here are a few shortcuts to get you to your destination even faster:

• Flight tracker — search for the airline and flight number and you’ll get a shortcut to the flight’s status. Try: ‘American 83‘ or ‘Lufthansa 421.’
• Traffic — if you’re driving instead of flying, you can search for traffic before you leave. Example: ‘traffic Los Angeles.’ Click on the shortcut and you’ll get a map with traffic alerts.
• Maps — try searching for the exact address: ‘1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC.’ Don’t have the address? No problem. Add “map” before the city: ‘map San Francisco.’ You can also search for the zip code by itself: ‘20502.’

You can go here to check out more handy travel shortcuts.

6. Yahoo! Services
If you’re looking for a Yahoo! site, simply add an exclamation point after the site name and voila! Try it out with ‘Mail!,’ ‘News!,’ ‘Sports!,’ or ‘Finance!‘

7. Yahoo! Open Shortcuts
Yahoo! Open Shortcuts are the ultimate time-saving search feature. Add an exclamation point to the front of certain terms to instantly navigate to a URL, search a site, recall a favorite Yahoo! search, or start an application.

• ‘!wiki queen elizabeth‘ takes you directly to the Wikipedia page for Queen Elizabeth.
• ‘!wsf‘ gives you the Yahoo! Search results for “weather San Francisco.”
• ‘!clist‘ takes you to Craigslist.
• ‘!ebay lamps‘ searches eBay for lamps.

Search for ‘!list‘ to see a bunch more. Those examples have already been set up for everyone to use, but the real power is that YOU can create your own customized shortcuts.

Have new ideas or suggestions for us? Let us know in the comments below. We’re always looking for ways to make Yahoo! Search more efficient for you.

Michael Chu
Yahoo! Search

Like any consumer-focused tech company, Yahoo! spends a lot of time conducting various kinds of customer research. We have a dedicated research team that takes this on to understand our customers and improve our products. But last week, we wanted to do something different and have the rest of the team go deeper as well. We invited members of the Yahoo! Search product, marketing, design, and engineering teams to get out of their cubes and into the “shoes” of our customers for a day. The goal of these customer visits was simple — have every team member understand at a very personal level how their customers use search in their daily lives.

After forming small teams and hanging with financial analysts, stay-at-home moms, Yahoo! loyalists, customers who use competing products, teachers, and students alike, the day culminated with a Customer Poster competition where Yahoo! teams shared and reflected on what they learned.

By observing our customers where they actually search, we saw how they chose a search engine for different tasks, scanned a results page and what they expected to see — whether it was a hedge fund analyst doing company research, a teacher building a lesson plan or, in my case, a parent researching images of Peter Pan for a blog she was creating for the local elementary school’s play.

While only a few team members received awards for their Customer Posters, we all felt pretty victorious because our customers had inspired some great ideas that will help us build more useful products to better serve them.

If you’ve got any big ideas on how we can make search a better experience for everyday users, we’re all ears.

Michael Kronthal
Customer Insights Team, Yahoo! Search

I’m not one of those natural-born puzzle solvers that can complete the Sunday New York Times Crossword in under three minutes. Quite frankly, I have enough trouble completing the Monday Crossword.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been working with the gurus at the New York Times on an experiment to help people like me. What would happen if we combined the puzzle-writing genius of the New York Times with some of the recently-launched Search Assist features of Yahoo! Search? You’d get this.

We’ve learned a great deal from Will Shortz and his crew of cruciverbalists (including the meaning of that 15-letter word). For example, I never stopped to consider the fact that crossword developers generally abide by a rigid set of rules guiding construction, including:

1. Diagonal symmetry: The pattern of black squares should look the same when rotated 180 degrees.

2. All-over interlock: The black squares do not cut up the puzzle into separate, distinct sections.

3. No two-letter words.

4. No unchecked letters: Every square appears in two words, across and down.

5. No more than 16 percent of the grid can be black squares.

As far as I know, there’s really no complementary set of rules for puzzle solvers. As a result, we thought it might be fun to connect one of Will’s infamous puzzles to hints from the recently re-launched Yahoo! Search. This puzzle is made for those of us who didn’t come into this world with the natural “crossword gene.” And to up the ante a bit, if you complete it by October 26th, you’ll be in the running to win one of five trips to Hawaii.

Give it a try and let us know what you think. Extra credit if you solve it in under three minutes…

Chris Thun
Yahoo! Search

A search company’s mandate is clear: help people find exactly what they’re looking for as quickly as possible. For well over a decade, search companies have taken the approach of focusing almost all of their efforts on making their engines smarter, with better indexes, better ranking and faster servers.

While these are all hugely important efforts, making the engine smarter is only half of the equation. The other half of the search equation is making the query smarter — and this was our focus in the design and development of Yahoo! Search Assist.

Recent research conducted by Harris Interactive* indicates that consumers are suffering from “Web Search fatigue.” The study revealed that while the vast majority of the population uses a search engine to find information on the Internet, only 15 percent of people find what they’re looking for with their first search. Typically, people need to conduct three to four searches to find the right result.

While search engines can and will continue to improve, we think making queries smarter is also part of the solution. While there are a handful of seasoned users and professional searchers out there who employ Boolean operators, site restrict and other advanced techniques, no one (ourselves included) wants to have to think hard about which search terms to use. Our vision was to build a system that helps users confidently construct more sophisticated and targeted queries without slowing them down.

In this first release, we’ve broken the problem into two parts. Part One provides assistance as you type. This has massively reduced the number of misspelled queries being submitted and saves typing time for slower typists. It can also link you deeper into the results space, saving you a step on those quick in-and-out sessions.

Part Two helps you move your searches forward, backward or sideways so you get the results you actually want more quickly. So if you started with a query for ‘Thom Yorke,’ you might get a forward (refining) suggestion for ‘Eraser,’ his most recent album, or a backward (expanding) suggestion for ‘Radiohead,’ the band he’s a member of. You could also get a sideways (or related) suggestion such as ‘solo albums‘ which, when clicking on the term in the left-hand column of Search Assist, will lead you to other lead singers with solo albums like Gwen Stefani or Eddie Vedder.

Now that you know more about the vision behind Search Assist, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts. And if you’re already a Search Assist enthusiast, check out the tips posted by one of our developers for some handy but “hidden” shortcuts.

Larry Cornett and Tom Chi
Yahoo! Search

*Harris Interactive conducted the above online survey from July 12-16, 2007 with 3,588 adults ages 18+

Delicious founder Joshua Schachter and StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp are heading to New York next week for SMX Social Media, where they’ll be diving into a Q&A-style keynote on the trends in social media and where the future may be heading. To kick-off the keynote, Danny Sullivan’s starting the session with some focused questions and he’s tapped his readers at Sphinn for their thoughts. Check out his post and the questions he’s already generated.

If you’ve got any burning social bookmarking questions, share your two cents on Danny’s blog and help drive the discussion on Tuesday.

Yahoo! Search Blog

Sometimes it’s helpful to see how things work in action. Today we launched a site that gives you a quick way to learn how the new Yahoo! Search can help you go from “to-do” to “done.” Check out the video demos and let us know what you think.

Christina Lee
Yahoo! Search

Today we’re integrating Yahoo! Answers content into our mobile search service, oneSearch, and launching it globally in 18+ countries.

We’re rolling this out today to Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, Singapore, Spain, Thailand, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Vietnam.

Yahoo! oneSearch and Yahoo! Answers both offer platforms for searching — oneSearch with instant results to your queries from your mobile phone and Answers with the content of 350 million answers from over 95 million users worldwide. We wanted to integrate these two methods of searching because we know that sometimes you need to tap people who are “in the know” when you’re trying to find a quick answer on the go.

Starting today, when you use oneSearch to conduct queries for advice or reference topics, the search results you’ll receive will include relevant answers from other Yahoo! Answers users all over the world, as well as the usual news headlines, images, business listings, etc. When you search for opinions or recommendations from others, such as ‘What is the best apartment dog?,’ you’ll see a cluster of Yahoo! Answers results. And for factual queries like ‘2008 Summer Olympics,’ your oneSearch results will show content from Wikipedia as well to give you a little something extra to chew on.

The oneSearch team also rolled out flight information search today, so flight status, times, gates, etc. are all accessible from your mobile phone. Here’s how it works: If you search ‘United Airlines 90‘ or ‘UA 90‘ (or any other airline and flight) through oneSearch, you’re presented with a quick snapshot of the flight information. You can try it out here or text the query to 92466 (spells YAHOO) and we’ll return a text message with the same information.

Ultimately, oneSearch’s goal is to get you instant answers from a variety of sources and Yahoo! properties so you have the right information when you’re mobile. By adding sources like Yahoo! Answers, Wikipedia and flight info, we’ll be able to help users find opinions, suggestions and facts quickly and on the go.

Enjoy!

Lawrence Kim
Yahoo! Search

Here are a few photos taken at yesterday’s internal launch party for the new Yahoo! Search. After many sleepless nights, it’s great to see some of the positive reactions from users. Now that we’ve had a few celebratory drinks — the Yahootini was quite popular — we’re back to working on more new features and improvements. Stay tuned and keep sending us your feedback and ideas.

Yahoo! Search team