The Yahoo! Search team was in San Jose last week at Search Engine Strategies, and in addition to participating in panel discussions on semantic search, shopping search tactics and searcher behavior, we also took part in the SES Awards.

The awards honor 15 search marketers and search engines, and the mission is to inspire innovation and encourage new ideas. Judges look at four key areas across all award categories: innovation in methodology and execution, achieving measurable success goals, excellence in tactical execution, and overall approach and category relevance. Yahoo! Search was evaluated in the "Search Engine with the Most Relevant Results" category by a panel of industry experts and the SES Awards editorial staff. We're happy to report that Yahoo! took home the top prize. We firmly believe that opening up our search ecosystem with platforms like SearchMonkey and BOSS, and adding features like Search Assist, will continue to enable us to focus on creating the best and most relevant search experience on the Web for users. But, a pat on the back is always nice!

As many know, foosball has long been a tradition here at Yahoo!. So, when we learned that there would be a foosball competition at SES, we knew our pride was on the line. On Wednesday night, Yahoo!'s Jake Rosenberg and Daniel Wong dueled with the major search engines to take home the Foosball title. Jake's snake shot was what secured the victory. Congrats Jake and Daniel!

Overall, it was a memorable event. For more on the foosball competition, check out Yodel Anecdotal and Google's Webmaster Central Blog.

Yahoo! Search Blog team