We have had phenomenal response to the new version of Yahoo! Site Explorer we launched two months ago. Thanks to the many of you who have come by and used the new interface, authenticated your site, and asked us questions on the forum. We have been answering many questions on the board, and there are a few common themes that we want to respond to in more detail.

• Many of you have noted that the authentication filename is too long. We are changing the prefix we use so that the full filename is much shorter, 27 characters only, within the limits for filenames that we came across.
• For those who are unable to upload our authentication key as a text file, we have updated our key file to be HTML with a .html extension.
• Note that these changes are backward compatible, so if you have the old authentication file name, you don't need to change or re-authenticate. We will look for both key files.

A few other tips we wanted to share regarding authentication:

• Do not remove the authentication key after the first site authentication. We periodically check for the presence of the key and your site will be unauthenticated if we can't find the file.
• Authenticate at the level at which you have control over the content. For example, if you have a site on geocities, say http://www.geocities.com/my_site, authenticate within your site directory. To do this, add your site's root path: http://www.geocities.com/my_site - not the site root (http://www.geocities.com). So your key file would be available at the path: http://www.geocities.com/my_site/y_key_abyahooauthkeyyz.html.

We have also made other minor updates to the interface designed to make Site Explorer easier to use.

We appreciate your feedback and are doing our best to address it. One of our goals is to make Site Explorer even more easy to use. So please let us know if our tweaks help make the tool a bit more webmaster friendly and continue to share your thoughts with us!

Priyank Garg, Amit Kumar, Apostolos 'Lakis' Karmirantzos, Di Chang
Site Explorer Team