Misc Blog Posts

What do the birthplace of Kool-Aid and green living have in common? More than you think.

Back in April, we announced Yahoo!'s "Be a Better ____" challenge to encourage people to use Yahoo! tools to become better fanatics, advertisers, entrepreneurs, best friends, gardeners... however they want to become "better." Part of this program included Yahoo!'s "Be a Better Planet" Greenest City in America Challenge to see how communities across the country can take action against climate change and use Yahoo! tools to become better planetarians.

Today, the winner of the "Be a Better Planet" Greenest City in America Challenge was revealed and we want to give a shout out to the nation's green leader. The competition started with more than 350 cities across the country, and the winner is the home of Kool-Aid itself -- Hastings, Nebraska! In addition to their grand prize of $250,000 for city greening projects, Hastings and the top five finalist cities will receive a slew of other green prizes.

Hastings secured the top spot by rallying together a good portion of its residents to earn participation credits on Yahoo! Green through pledging to reduce carbon diets, Yahoo! Answers through answering green questions and Yahoo! oneSearch through conducting eco-friendly mobile searches. And now the city's mayor is tapping into the Answers community to solicit thoughts and advice for how to invest the $250,000 prize. If you have some great green ideas, don't hesitate to share.

Here's a bit more information on Hastings' contribution to the challenge and what they did to stand out. Congrats, Hastings.

Yahoo! Search Blog team

Yahoo! is joining the herd of web and Internet marketing professionals at the Searchnomics 2007 Conference on Wednesday in Santa Clara to share some insights on best practices and trends in SEO.

Amit Kumar, senior engineering manager for the Yahoo! Search team, is presenting on the SEO and Web 2.0 panel to address problems Web 2.0 companies often face -- lack of indexability caused by less editorial control and various structural issues. He'll offer up ideas for how to overcome the obstacles to achieve high visibility in search results.

Day/Time: Wednesday, June 27 @ 4-5p.m.
Panel: SEO for Web 2.0: Achieving High Visibility in Search Results

If you're heading to the Convention Center this week, we hope to see you there. And, if you haven't met Amit before, keep an eye out for him and tell him we sent you.

The Yahoo! Search Blog team

There's, no doubt, a plethora of knowledge-sharing at this week's ETech Conference, with a solid line-up of sessions to spark creative thinking and introduce new ideas for building successful technologies. If you're lucky enough to attend this year's event, we encourage you to attend a session led by Yahoo!'s Joshua Schachter who is sharing lessons learned in scaling and building social systems. Here are the details:

Track: Products & Services
Date: Thursday, March 29
Time: 11:00am - 11:45am
Location: Gallery

If you've never heard Joshua speak before, you are in for a treat. Basically, Joshua took his hobby to a whole new level when he launched del.icio.us in 2003 (and undoubtedly learned a few lessons along the way). He'll share some of those lessons and detail how to build, develop and scale social Web applications. With a strong focus on community, Joshua will talk about the power technology has in enabling the organization, recollection and sharing of information found on the Web.

Swing by and tell Joshua we sent you!

Yahoo! Search Blog Team

Anyone who has seen their web server logs, has seen the Yahoo! crawler come by and leave its mark. It identifies itself as 'Yahoo! Slurp' and its domain is inktomisearch.com. For those of you who follow the search space, you can easily guess that this is one of the last historic remnants from our acquisition of Inktomi a few years ago. Well, the crawler finally decided to move and find a new home. We are moving our crawler from inktomisearch.com to crawl.yahoo.net.

The user-agent will continue to be Yahoo! Slurp, hence you do not need to make any changes to your robots.txt file. Nor are we changing the actual IP addresses of the crawler infrastructure during this transition. However, if you do any reverse DNS checks for the crawler identity or have any network access rules to allow inktomisearch.com, please also update them to allow for crawl.yahoo.net.

The crawlers will be switched over in phases starting immediately. You'll see an increasing number of Yahoo! Slurp visits from crawl.yahoo.net and fewer and fewer from inktomisearch.com during the transition, which will take a few weeks.

Keep an eye on this space and the Yahoo! Search Blog for more details on when the migration is complete and details on bot verification with the new domain name.

Priyank Garg
Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

Long-time readers of the Yahoo! Search blog have seen the acronym FUSE a few times already. FUSE comes from our vision for search: Find, Use, Share, and Expand all human knowledge.

As I watched the 20 minute video of Richard Baraniuk's presentation at TED 2006, I realized that the Connexions project he spoke of (and his larger vision for how technology can improve education) is a fantastic example of FUSE in the world of education.

If you have 20 minutes to spare, check out the video. Starting with Apple's "Create, Rip, Mix, and Burn" slogan, he paints a compelling vision for the future of education and open technology.

More videos from TED 2006 are being posed on the TED Blog and on TED Talks.

Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Developer Network

I'd be lying if I told you that the mood in the blogher-sphere following the second annual BlogHer conference was one of love, consensus, and kumbaya. This past week, coverage of the two-day event has run the gamut: complimentary, contentious, provocative, bitchy, grumpy, high-minded, strident, creative, insightful, defensive, forward-looking, apologetic, apoplectic, chaotic, well-reasoned, thoughtful, tolerant, intolerant, inconsistent and impassioned.

Personally, I think the noisy aftermath is a testimonial to the extraordinary range of people who participated -- their skills, goals, lifestyles, origins, gender, politics, and professions -- and their commitment to conversation as a vehicle for personal change and social action.

The scaling problems and other growing pains have been acknowledged. Blogher's founders Elisa Camahort , Jory des Jardins, and Lisa Stone, have responded frankly on their blogs to the criticisms and complaints. That in itself is unique and commendable. Fact is, three "chicks with credit cards" launched a grassroots conference in 2005, and in 2006 turned it into a remarkably affordable and inspiring two-day event for over 700 women and men, from Europe; Asia; Australia, and North America ( including attendees from 41 U.S. states).

I have no doubt that this year's BlogHer theme (How is your blog changing your world?) will continue to engage women and men, technologists, activists, and diarists of all orientations. I have no doubt that wireless connectivity at BlogHer will be better next year. I suspect that social media-savvy sponsors from inside and outside the tech industry will be back. And people will blog their way, I hope, to a better understanding of each other's points of view.

It was Yahoo!'s second year as a sponsor, and once again, we were happy to be there. We applaud Blogher's mission: "To create opportunities for women bloggers to pursue exposure, education and community." Yahoo! slipped a purple pen and notebook into the schwag bag. We dressed the pool deck in purple and served plenty of our famous Yahootinis at the closing night cocktail party. "Divine lemony goodness with purple sugar," wrote blogger Tiffany B. Brown.

Yahoo! employees participated on a variety of panels. Others, like longtime blogger Susan Mernit, posted their observations. We were there as ourselves, sharing knowledge and experience:

• Heather Champ, Flickr community manager, and photoblogger extraordinaire, did a workshop on digital photography for blog publishers.
• Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake joined Marnie Webb, and Pyra Labs (home of Blogger) co-founder Meg Hourihan to talk about Web 2.0 and what's next in tech.
• danah boyd moderated a panel discussion titled " Outreach Blogging is not for the faint-hearted." Panelists discussed blogging sensitive topics like mental illness, eating disorders, and addiction. They explored issues of secrecy and honesty, and described listening and responding to cries for help from readers they'd never met.
• Mecca Ibrahim is a UK-based product manager for Yahoo! 360, who blogs pseudonymously as Annie Mole on the London Underground. On a panel about growing and changing as a blogger called "Next Level Naked," Mecca talked about techniques and workarounds for burnout, and described how the London underground bombings of July 2005 connected her with her readers in unexpected ways.

I've been trying to articulate some of the changes since last year's conference, which felt more tech-centric, and included passionate discussion about the visibility of women bloggers, and why there were so few females among the "A-list bloggers." This year, the A-list seems altogether less important, less invincible, as blogging becomes more mainstream and pervasive.

So much attention is moving toward what Technorati's Dave Sifry calls "'The Magic Middle' of the attention curve" -- a place on the long tail of content where "interesting and influential bloggers and publishers are ... writing about topics that are topical or niche ... and in some cases are radically changing the economics of trade publishing."

But, it's not just, as Robert Scoble notes, that women talk about those things like "mothering, cooking, sewing, and soft stuff like feelings, sex, relationships, along with broader things like books and movies... "--more than guys do at tech conferences. It's that women across the blogosphere are doing more than finding their niche and monetizing it. Much like teenagers and young adults in new online social superspaces, they are also pioneering new community structures built on changing fundamentals of time, space, presence, and ubiquity.

Women bloggers and the communities they form are developing and inhabiting spaces where many-to-many conversation can flourish, where safety and solace can be found. Ideas are transmitted, experiment is tolerated, and new genres of exchange can be explored.

Havi Hoffman
Yahoo!

Firefox and Yahoo! fans take note. Mozilla.org released Firefox 1.5 last November and is gaining converts faster than ever. The Yahoo! Firefox Toolbar 1.0 worked well with Firefox 1.5, and since that release launched, we�ve been working hard to fix a few things and add some Yahoo! features to the menu. You�ll see them when you click your right mouse button.

No matter where you are on the Web, with that mouse click you can:

• Search for information using Yahoo! Search
• Share information via Email, Messenger, and 360�
• Save what you�re seeing to My Web or Yahoo! Bookmarks
• And more

Download Yahoo! Toolbar 1.1 for Mozilla Firefox, take it for a spin, and tell us what you think.

Jon Granrose
Product Manager, Yahoo! Toolbar

P.S. - If you haven�t already tried it, take a look at the del.icio.us Firefox extension that lets you manage your del.icio.us account from anywhere on the web.

Over on the Unofficial Yahoo Weblog, Joe poses a thought provoking question: Is search really the future for Yahoo! (or anyone else for that matter)?

You bet it is. As we've said in the past, search is one of Yahoo's "pillars" along with community, content, and personalization. It's a big part of our future, both as a stand-alone service, and (as Joe astutely suggests) as an "engine" that will power much broader functionality.

Yesterday evening, we conducted the interview with Andrei Broder and we talked with him briefly about the future of search. In that discussion (which you'll get to read soon), Andrei discussed some of the ways search will evolve in the future. Similarly, in his post, Joe says:

Search as we know it today, is that loud two-stroke engine. But soon it will be the foundation for much more efficient and productive services as it becomes reinvented in a multitude of ways.

While true, it will still be built on that search foundation and we may still refer to it as search. There will always be a need for a service anyone can query and get back the information they're seeking. Before search engines, we had librarians (and still do!), directory assistance, paper maps, and how-to books. They're not going away and neither is the web search box.

Andrei also talked a bit about searching "without a search box" in the not too distant future. Information may arrive on you screen (computer, television, cellular phone, etc) as you need it�without having to ask. It's one of the many ways search will be reinvented. Those of you using RSS aggregators and news alert services have seen just faintest glimpse of what's going to be possible.

And then there's Yahoo! Answers, one of our growing "social search" offerings. It's available today and helps surface answers to questions that web search often can't tackle. We're all experts in something and Yahoo! Answers is one way to get more of that expertise on the web and make it searchable. As a nice byproduct, experts themselves may become easier to find.

As time goes on, the vision for search continues to broaden and our expectations of how search works in other contexts increase.

What's your vision for the future of search, at Yahoo and elsewhere?

Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Search

There's been a lot of conjecture and confusion today about Yahoo!'s commitment to being the world's best search engine-talk which anyone who's been following the evolution of Yahoo! Search would have realized is� just plain wrong.

While some people immediately realized this, we thought it made sense to briefly recap how focused we are in search and our passion to be the world's leading search engine:

(1) Less than two years ago we launched our own search engine. At the time nobody thought it could be done, but here we are. Whether it's a single blogger switching to Yahoo!, or the results of a "Coke vs. Pepsi" challenge, it's become clear that despite the "Google myth", we've caught up and every day are improving search relevance and making search easier to use and more accessible for users.

(2) The people working on Yahoo! Search are some of the smartest you'll find anywhere and are dedicated to the single purpose of building the world's best search engine. Many of us have worked in search for more than a decade and invented much of the technology modern search engines are based on. In addition to the thousands of engineers and hundreds of PhDs, the list includes pioneers and experts like Andrei Broder, Prabhakar Ragavan, Jan Pedersen and Ricardo Baeza-Yates. They're recognized technology leaders who live and breathe search. They all chose Yahoo! as the place where they can make their vision come true.

(3) We're continuously innovating and finding new ways to help people connect to information and knowledge - part of our vision to help them find, use, share and expand all human knowledge. We're working on literally hundreds of projects to improve search, and some of the most visible examples include My Web, Yahoo! Answers, and Open Shortcuts. We have also brought in some of the most innovative companies like Flickr and del.icio.us, to help bring the promise of social search and tagging to the rest of the world and advancing search beyond what it is today.

(4) Finally, we've turned Yahoo! Search into an open platform for innovative third-party developers -- we've built the most comprehensive set of Web Services, allowing a new generation of applications to be built such as Rollyo and Eurekster and many others.

This commitment to being the best should be crystal clear from our investments in talented people, research, innovation and new products. Believe it or not, we are still in the early days of search. As all of us at Yahoo! agree, we're in it for the long haul, and we're in it to win.

Qi Lu, VP Engineering, Search
Eckart Walther, VP Products, Search

Hi, I'm Joel Toledano. I was invited to speak on a panel at Caltech last month called Opportunities for Innovators: Venturing in Online Search, Advertising & Sales last month and met many great entrepreneurs at the event.

As these things sometimes go, the topic was perfectly timed in light of several recent acquisitions in the search arena (Brainboost acquired by Answers.com and Del.icio.us acquired by Yahoo!, to name just two in the last few weeks) and the heightened media coverage of search acquisitions in general.

I gave a presentation on how to properly position your company for a commercial partnership with a large company such as Yahoo!, which is often a great way for a small company to build their business. Several of you asked for a copy of the presentation, so here it is -- hopefully you enjoyed the panel discussion and the presentation's advice is helpful. Look forward to seeing you at the next panel!

Joel's Caltech/MIT Preso

Joel Toledano
Director, Business Development
Yahoo! Search

Roughly a month ago, a couple hundred search geeks and onlookers packed into Yahoo's classroom 5 for an evening session of the SDForum Search SIG. The topic of the evening was Audio Search and Podcasting and featured Doug Kaye of IT Conversations leading a panel discussion with Evan Williams of Odeo, David Marks of Loomia, Eric Rice of Audioblog, and Jeff Karnes from our Media Search group.

Thanks to Doug and the great folks at IT Conversations, you can now listen to over an hour of audio from that evening.

Enjoy, and we hope to see you at the next SDForum Search SIG meeting.

Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Search

The inaugural meeting of the Silicon Valley Search SIG was titled, "Audio Search: Selling Picks & Shovels at the Podcast Gold Rush." It was hosted at Yahoo! Sunnyvale, on Wed. 9/14, by SD Forum.

Don't' worry if you missed it. Very soon you'll be able to download the audio and listen to it at your leisure, using some of the tools we saw.

Here's an excerpt from the Search SIG's mission statement:

"�to offer a communication and collaboration platform to the Search ecosystem: search engines, marketers/advertisers, users and developers. Through a series of monthly events, the SIG will cover a large diversity of topics: from the latest developments in search to the needs of brands and advertisers, through the issues and key learnings of starting, funding, building, and exiting a search company."

For the opening session, venture capitalist and consummate Frenchman Jeff Clavier and Dave McClure, of simplyhired.com introduced the poderator. Elder statesman Doug Kaye of ITConversations was assisted by a cufflinked and well-coifed John Furrier of podtech.net, and the InfoTalk podcast. Doug was producing and freely distributing great niche audio content (interviews and discussion among technology thought leaders), long before the word podcast had even popped off the vine and onto the lips of entrepreneurs, long before the 2005 podcaster's summer of love, launched by iTunes 4.9 in late June.

Folks in the audience were keenly aware of the ascent of podcasting, the flow of funding to young companies, the rising flood of content. Many in the crowd were seeing familiar faces from past conferences or previous companies.

David Marks spoke about Loomia.com, his podcast and videocast startup where you can find good stuff via search, recommendations, and personalization--with a little help from a community of users who are building a metadata layer of tags and ratings.

Eric Rice, CEO of Audioblog.com, described his subscription publishing service that offers to help you "become a� Blogger. Pundit. Podcaster. Rockstar. In 5 Minutes. " For about $5 a month. In humorous enclosures tagged with sarcasm, Eric Rice's irreverent fervor for the podcast frontier reminded me of the spirit of the Onion mixed with a pinch of GeoCities.

Fashionably black-clad Ev Williams showed a working demo of Odeo, in beta, of course. Odeo makes it easy (and cool) to listen, sync, and create -- and explore the world of audio content via MP3. The Blogger.com founder is well-positioned to take his vision of publishing of, by, and for people to the ears of his peers.

Jeff Karnes of Yahoo! Search discussed the Yahoo! Audio Search beta , which indexes a vast range of audio content on the Internet, including obscure or hard-to-find music, podcasts, interviews, speeches, e-books, and more. Yahoo! Search continues to build on its FUSE mantra: find, use, share, expand. You can personalize your preferences and focus results on the audio service provider of your choice (e.g., garageband.com, iTunes, or Yahoo! Music Unlimited).

The after-panel questions from the audience were wide-ranging and thought-provoking, and the evening ended with a vocal and varied announcement session, in which people pitched their products and services.

P.S. You can find several online accounts of the event from guests and participants. Thanks to Jeff Clavier's Software Only blog for collecting them. Read more about it from Mike "Bitsplitter" Rowehl, Elisa Camahort, Ho John Lee, Miss Rogue (aka Tara Hunt), and Dorrian Porter.

Special thanks To Miss Rogue of HorsePigCow for aggregating the URLs of the 30-second spots.: StanleyMusic.org, YorZ.com, Podornot.com, VoiceIndigo.com, Truveo.com, and Feedblog.org. If we missed your media search or podcast-related announcement, please feel to add it here in a comment.

Havi Hoffman

In our quest for video nirvana, we've performed a major update to our Video Search index to bring you even more video content, and increased reach for video content worldwide. So now you'll be able to find even more relevant international results in your video searches.

In addition, we've branched out with the types of content that video search covers, and tonight we've added support for searching Macromedia Flash animation! (Tip: if you want to limit your video search results to just Flash animation, you can use Advanced Video Search to target your search.) This means that now all your favorite Flash sites like JibJab and HomestarRunner (my personal favorite) will now appear in your Video Search results. Because Flash is interactive, you're not just limited to watching the content you find, you can also find interactive Flash games as well.

My favorite pick for videos that came out of testing this feature: Strongbad and his new Lappy 486 laptop computer. And yes, I do love this job. ;)

Andy Volk
Product Manager, Yahoo! Video Search

My Web 2.0 is just over a week old now and, despite the limited number of beta testers we're working with, there's already 37,231 saved pages tagged with 14,098 tags! It�s really been a lot of fun to watch as interesting tags and pages pop up. Check out the tag this week in houseblogging--fascinating. Makes me wish I could afford a house out here in San Francisco sometime this decade.

With all the tagging going on, some folks are wondering about those classic issues of spam. Steve Rubel just posted about there being potential tag spam on My Web 2.0. I�m not so sure. It looks like one of our users is really just tagging stuff the way they want, enthusiastically I might add. I might not understand that tag (nor even like it), but if they find it useful I say go ahead and tag away.

Why can I say that? Well remember folks, My Web 2.0 is a social search engine where your community shares their insights with you. While the web can sometimes seem like the Wild Wild West, the trusted web is a place where you decide who you want to listen to. If I like the stuff that someone saves and the tags that they�re using, I�ll connect to them! If I don�t�well, you know.

Chung-Man Tam
My Web Product Manager

My oh my, we had no idea how much discussion, both pro and con, the launch of our social search engine would generate! We've got a few thoughts of our own on the topic and would love to hear what you think. Just a reminder...we created a separate blog for the My Web community, highlighting the people, thoughts and technologies that make it all possible. We hope you'll join the conversation.

The My Web 2.0 team

Curiosity is natural, whether it's online or off. In fact, curiosity fuels many of the searches we perform. We all love to know what the people around us are doing and thinking. On a daily basis, we examine these little bits of knowledge through the powerful prism of search. We bring them to you in a number of ways -- Yahoo! Buzz keeps an eye on trends in the world of search, while popular video and image searches reflect what's hot amid rapidly growing content available on the Web. Well, now we've brought the world of popular search to what's known as "The Crossroads of the World" -- Times Square in New York City.

Earlier this month we launched our Top Search Challenge on the Reuters Sign in Times Square. We're showcasing live query streams from cities around the country while challenging visitors and passers-by to test their knowledge of top searches. While standing in Times Square gawking at the 23-story presence of Yahoo! Search, you can dial in from your mobile phone to go head-to-head with the enormous electronic billboard.

If you happen to be in the Big Apple, head on over to Times Square and take a shot at our search-based challenge. This Tuesday, we narrow the focus of the challenge to questions on the subject of New York City top searches for one day only. If you think you're an NYC know-it-all, come check it out at noon. We know you're curious.

Erik Gunther

Yahoo! Buzz Index Editor

So you're an avid image searcher. On Yahoo! Image Search, you caught a glimpse of Michael Jackson's trial, dreamt of your summer Yosemite camping trip, and scoped out the latest playstation psp to see what the craze is all about.

Ever wonder what other people are searching for on Image Search?

Wonder no more: You can now peek into the hearts and minds of fellow searchers on the image search homepage. In our "Popular Image Searches" module, you'll find image search terms that are commanding the most attention, topics that are likely to strike your fancy as well. Think of it as the TV guide for image search-look up recent favorites, including batman comic, land art, and fushigi. (You can try this also on video search.)

As an aside, the size/color toggle that a number of you had previously requested is now up on the image results page. Check it out, and keep the great feedback coming!

Kaigene J. Jau
Product Manager, Image Search

Just a quick reminder... The deadline for entering the Y!Q Challenge is just around the corner--Thursday evening, in fact. Can you say "$5,000 spending money for the Summer"?

Seriously. Play with HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and maybe win some cash. What's not to like about that?

Anyway, there's still time left... but not much. So get on it.

Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Search

Ever since the Yahoo! Search Developer Network (YSDN) launched a few months ago, we've been keeping an eye out for trinkets, toys, and hacks that folks are building with our publicly accessible application programming interfaces (APIs). Open APIs make it possible for developers to create new applications based on Yahoo! Search content (types of data) and services (ways of sharing data).

Developers are busy writing plug-ins, smart utilities, Flash-based widgets, and a host of cool apps in their favorite web programming languages, using Yahoo!'s open web services, which include several flavors of web search as well as local search, image search, news search, and more. You'll find many of these interesting applications listed on the YSDN Wiki.

John Herren's Yahoo! News Tag Soup was definitely this past week's hot app on campus. Tag Soup is inspired by the growing popularity of tags for describing information. Herren's application riffs on rising interest in folksonomy or social tagging: a collaborative, non-hierarchical way to organize and display information by assigning freely chosen keywords to web sites, photos and digital images, blog posts, URLs, you name it. A self-described PHP fan, Herren spent a few hours over a recent weekend coding Tag Soup because he "thought it would be fun to see what happens when you automate the [tagging] process."

One notable by-product of tagging is a new mode of displaying weighted lists of keywords. This visual representation, referred to as a tag map or tag cloud is turning up in many unexpected places. A tag cloud shows importance or frequency of word occurrences by font size and/or bolding. Usually tags are displayed in alphabetical order, sprawling fluidly across a squarish chunk of the page. Perhaps you've seen this horizontal list metaphor on Flickr, Technorati, or 43 Things.

For his Tag Soup recipe, Herren uses Yahoo!'s content analysis web service to extract significant words and phrases. (This type of term extraction also powers Y!Q, our contextual "embedded" search. Y!Q analyzes the content of the web page you're on or the text you select to provide results "at the point of inspiration.")

Next, Herren grabs a collection of Yahoo! News RSS feeds, massages them into a database to eliminate duplicate stories, and extracts the key ingredient (his tags) from the article headlines and summaries. Finally, he uses a simple scaling function to display the most popular and frequently occurring terms. Last time we looked, President Bush was far and away the biggest and boldest tag, followed by: United States, In Iraq, United Nations, and Microsoft. Go figure.

When tagging is practiced by a community of users in a social context--not just as a personal system for labeling information--network effects begin to take place. This is part of the enchantment of Flickr, where inventive tags like squaredcircle, longline, and lenstagged acquire a life and momentum of their own. Tags become a medium of ideas, connecting people, starting conversations, and transmitting ideas. This is already happening with Herren's Tag Soup.

While writing this post, we spotted Justin Flavin's tag hacks, inspired by Herren's work and the launch of BBC Backstage. (The Backstage motto is: Use our stuff to build your stuff.) Flavin, an Irish developer based in the UK, is fetching business and tech news RSS feeds from multiple news sources, and running them through Yahoo!'s content analysis (term extraction) service to generate his keywords. He's working on a similar hack for entertainment news.

John Herren describes his project as "a proof of concept to show the kind of cool stuff that can happen when folks, in this case Yahoo! opens up content and services for a developer to use." Justin Flavin's pages prove that cool stuff is catchy.

Meantime, we're keeping the Yahoo! News Tag Soup concept on a low simmer and giving it an occasional stir, because we believe its flavors can only improve over time and nourish other promising innovations. What do you think?

Havi Hoffman
Yahoo! Editorial

Speaking of Mac OS X "Tiger", blogs have been buzzing with talk of Safari's new RSS capabilities, performance improvements, Spotlight (Apple's own "desktop search"), and Dashboard.

Dashboard is a framework for building lightweight "widgets" which pull in data from a variety of sources and display them in interesting ways on your desktop. We worked with Apple to build a Yahoo! Local Traffic Widget that's currently featured on their dashboard site. That motivated me to finally upgrade my Powerbook to Tiger this weekend.

It didn't take long for folks to dig behind the scenes and realize that it's powered by an RSS feed. It was on the O'Reilly Radar before we knew it.

It's great to see Apple putting more Web 2.0 tools on all those desktops and laptops.

Remix away!

Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Search

With Apple's recent release of OS X Tiger, I wanted to check out the buzz on the latest iteration of OS X. I'll spare you any lame Tiger roaring references, but if you want the dirt on hackneyed headlines, I highly recommend Jason Kottke's compilation of where the pack mentality went wrong.

While searches on Apple are up 11% for the week, Tiger hasn't truly dented the buzz to the extent I expected. The latest OS just can't compare to the glamour of the iPod. Witness the top Apple searches over the last week:

1. Apple iPod
2. Apple Store
3. Apple iPod Mini
4. Apple Quicktime
5. Apple Laptops

Perhaps the searches on the Apple Store are from those looking to upgrade to Tiger, but given the buzz, we'd guess most shoppers are ending up with those oh-so-distinctive earbuds.

In looking at searches on the word "tiger," we had to keep in mind that while some of the interest was Apple-related, the bulk of those looking for tigers were probably looking for the striped variety. In any event, queries on "tiger" were up 19% for the week, a nice boost either way. Pressing on, I delved deeper into tiger-related terms to come up with these top OS X related searches from the last week:

1. Apple Tiger
2. Mac Tiger
3. Tiger OS
4. OSX Tiger
5. Tiger Widgets

Buzz on operating systems doesn't exactly measure up to the Britney and Idol buzz I'm used to researching, but I'm always open to checking in with columns on other tech-related search trends. Please feel free to let me know what sorts of buzz you're curious about.

Erik Gunther
Yahoo! Buzz Index Editor

Tuesday, April 12: A capacity crowd filled the hilltop auditorium up at PARC on Coyote Hill Road, overlooking the verdant sprawl of Palo Alto and Silicon Valley. The spring evening was a clear and brilliant blue, and the BayCHI event was free and open to the public. People packed the rows, spilling into the aisles. Latecomers watched the presentation from TV sets quickly deployed in the lobby.

We were there to hear from a handful of industry thought leaders about Recent Innovations in Search and Other Ways of Finding Information. In speaking order, the panel consisted of: Peter Norvig (Google), Ken Norton (Yahoo!) , Mark Fletcher (Bloglines/Ask Jeeves), Udi Manber (A9), and Jakob Nielsen (Nielsen Norman Group), the "guru of usability." Rashmi Sinha (Uzanto Consulting) moderated.

Bay CHI is the local branch of a professional organization for computer-human interaction professionals. Not surprisingly, the crowd was weighted with designers, developers, information architects, students, consultants, and entrepreneurs. Like me, many were employees of the companies represented. Were we expecting a sermonette? A shouting match? New insights tactical or strategic?

What we got was the articulate and intelligent conversation of peers, some anecdotes that resonated and rippled outward. Each panel member had five minutes for show and tell. These presentations have been summarized and posted by better note-takers than I. Jonathan Boutelle's piece hones in on the exuberance and recaps some common themes.

Boutelle's first two points about search tugged at my sleeve: An undocumented command line interface. Mediating between human beings and the desired information objects created by other human beings.

Search is still difficult, but it's getting better in interesting ways. Because the search experience connects two humans, it's as much about facilitating trustworthy communication and clarifying intent as it is about information retrieval between machines. There's a renewed focus on the user experience and social media -- where software meets wetware.

As search escapes the box, and flows into powerful new interfaces for different types of interactions, we should anticipate a flourishing of creativity like that which occurred when personal computing moved from the blinking cursor to the metaphorical desktop.

Will we finally be released from a cramped 18-character-wide rectangle to search like there's nobody looking? Do our camera phones hold more than the promise of an "image mess"?

Ken Norton's walkthrough was a whirlwind tour of year one in the life of Yahoo! Search Technology--the stream of releases and innovations Search Blog readers have come to expect. Ken covered Desktop Search, MyYahooSearch, Creative Commons search, Mobile Search, Local initiatives, RSS integration in Search, Y!Q (search at the point of inspiration), Flickr and the potential of social media.

What's next? Yahoo! Search is committed to creating the tools to find, use, share and expand all human knowledge. Join us in facilitating a bold remix of content, community, information, commerce, and culture, to build a viable metaverse for citizens of the 21st century.

Note: You'll find more excellent notes and detailed summaries of this BayCHI event from Barney Pell , Mike Rowehl, and David Lyons .

Havi Hoffman
Yahoo! Editorial

Last May, the Yahoo! Anti-Spy Community was launched as part of the Yahoo! Toolbar Anti-Spy feature. As the spyware/adware industry has become more profitable, spyware/adware infection has become an increasing threat to unsuspecting web surfers, causing losses in productivity and sometimes ruining our online experience. These pests can slow your computer to a crawl, hijack your web browser, and even spy on your every keystroke.

In the past 11 months, thousands of you have turned to Yahoo!'s Anti-Spy Community for advice on ridding your computers of these unwanted pests. It�s been really gratifying to watch the community grow globally to include people from the U.S., Canada, England, France, El Salvador, the Philippines, and points beyond. A core group of expert members are on hand to offer guidance on how to get rid of unwanted spyware/adware, prevent re-infection and keep our systems running smoothly. Many of these members share knowledge and ideas for no other reason than to help each other.

Because this real-time forum literally never sleeps, information from members often outpaces spyware/adware alerts found in traditional media. A lot of these folks speak from the experience of having been infected by spyware/adware, and their suggestions are tried and tested on their own computers. The experts posting in the Anti-Spy Community gain the trust of others because they've been through similar situations themselves. It's this shared trust that makes the Anti-Spy Community extraordinary.

To help the Anti-Spy Community thrive, we�ve recently made some improvements. Last month we implemented a new message board platform that�s easier to navigate and allows for deeper discussions. We also added message ratings so you can acknowledge helpful posts, as well as message threading which makes it easier to track individual topics. We�ve also added a button to our Anti-Spy application that makes it easier to access the Community once a spyware/adware scan is completed.

If you haven't checked out the Anti-Spy Community, we invite you to come visit and give us your thoughts. We�re looking forward to further growth and more improvements in the near future and your feedback will help make this an even better, more useful destination.

Carole McManus
Yahoo! Search & Marketplace Communities

My heart jumped with excitement today when I logged on and saw the news. Like other Flickr people, I'd been reading the rumors: Yahoo! might buy Flickr. As a longtime Yahoo, the possibility absolutely thrilled me. Again, we would show the Web that Yahoo! had got its groove back. I watched and waited hopefully.

You see, for the last few months I've been immersed in Flickr--addicted to never-ending discovery, wandering through a landscape of marvelous images from people all over the world. I was weaving my own photographic narrative into the collective tapestry, making contact with folks like me, who also take pictures of rust, rocks, leaves, watery reflections, window scenes.

On Flickr, a pattern language is evolving for visual conversations that are information-rich and unencumbered by barriers of time or space, age or language. I'm certainly not the first person to notice something out of the ordinary. Flickr creates new modes of community and inspires playful innovation, cool extensions, new application software, and ardent devotion. Wow!

The Flickr community has built an ecosystem, a meme pool of images. Flickr APIs are open and also beautiful, as Nate Koechley (another Yahoo) reminds us. Hosting millions of images from hundreds of thousands of users, the Flickr community develops and shares tools and collaborations that generate new utility, original art, inventive information remixes, and ever more user engagement.

By letting Flickr stay Flickr, this unique community can continue to flourish and feed invention across Yahoo! and the Web. Flickr can make us smarter, and help us grow and cultivate a garden of collaborative, user-driven web services. I sense the start of a beautiful friendship, as long as we never forget the incredible lightness that makes Flickr so easy to love.

Havi Hoffman
Yahoo! Editorial

Lately my mom looks at me like she has vastly overestimated my intelligence for all these years. "You work on spelling?" she asks. "It's your generation. Back when I was in school, they taught us how to spell correctly." Stammering to my own defense, I argue that she uses her word processor's spellchecker. She responds smugly, "So why can't you just use something like that and work on something that makes a difference instead?" Sigh.

Most people feel that spelling should be pretty easy--most of the time, people are pretty good at it. Or at least they think they are. The truth is, between 10 and 15% of the queries Yahoo Search receives are misspelled. That means if we didn't do any spell correction, many people wouldn't find what they're looking for. So why can't we just use something like a word processor's spellchecker? Try typing the following into your word processor and seeing if you get the right spelling corrections:

• evanesescence (should be evanescence, but I get no suggestion from my word processor)
• tofurkey (should not be corrected, but I get turkey as a spelling correction)
• sponge bob square pants games (should be spongebob squarepants games, again no suggestion)
• jules holland (should be jools holland, but my word processor fails me again)
• casini (should be cassini, but I get casino from my word processor)
• rims for hyundai sonta (should be rims for hyundai sonata, but I get rims for hyundai santa)

Topics of interest are changing constantly. New company names pop up, new celebrities come into public awareness, and new products are launched. We've got one shot to correct every word in your query and present just one suggestion to you. On top of that, all the words in the query interact with each other. "Brittany Spears" should be corrected to "Britney Spears" but "Brittany Murphy" should stay the same. So we have exactly one chance to correct all the words in the query using an ever-changing vocabulary and keeping in mind the entire query's context to determine which corrections to make. Piece of cake, right?

People find it to be a useful feature because correcting accidental misspellings helps them find results for a query their fingers got in the way of expressing, and let's be honest--unless you're a former national spelling bee champion, there are some words that you simply don't know how to spell in the first place. Here's a quick exercise. Close your eyes and spell the governor of California's name. It's S-c-h-w-a-r-z-e-n-e-g-g-e-r--how'd you do? I know I got it wrong on the first try. Don't tell my mother.

Luckily our spellchecker does a better job than I do on my own. We've taken a great deal of editorial and linguistic input to define what it means to do spelling correction well. Then we did a massive amount of data processing to build a system that embodies those policies. The end result is a system that is better than its creators at spelling. There are still cases it gets wrong, but these cases are getting fewer and fewer with every release. With our latest release, we're giving many more suggestions with higher accuracy than ever before.

So next time your fingers turn to mush and you get a "Did you mean..." on Yahoo! Search, don't feel bad. Spelling is hard and my team and our spellchecker are there to help you. Now I've just got to convince my mom.

Michael Mathieson
Project Lead, Query Spelling Service

Ideas come and ideas go. Sometimes they blaze hot and move fast through media spaces like print, television, movies, and pop music. Or they burst onto the Internet and travel the gossip hotline of the blogosphere. When they acquire an effortless momentum of their own, keen observers talk about memeflow. Look, look, it's the next big thing: portals, page rank, peer-to-peer, blogs, RSS, social software, tags. The beat goes on.

But a meme is more than a passing fancy; it's a self-replicating, widely adopted idea, an idea with legs. Memes are of the moment, but their mission is to evolve and endure.

The notion of memes borrows from the study of genes and genetic evolution. Genes replicate, evolve, and spread biologically, while memes are transmitted by human communication.

Over the last few months, you may have noticed the emergence of a new meme: The Long Tail.

The long tail is a familiar statistical truth: Small, everyday events are extremely common, and big, momentous events (from huge blockbusters to great catastrophes) are rarities that attract attention. This phenomenon occurs in the natural world (there are many seismic blips and few major earthquakes) and in the human realm. You can see it in the distribution of wealth (there are very few billionaires) or population (there are very few mega-cities) or popular search queries. Or, you can see it in WordCount, Jonathan Harris's interactive widget that displays the frequencies of word use on the long tail of our language.

Back in October, Wired editor Chris Anderson authored a thought-provoking and influential article titled The Long Tail, and created a companion Long Tail blog, which he describes as "a public diary on the way to a book." In recent years, scientists and statisticians have applied Zipf�s law, power laws, and Pareto distributions (the old 80/20) to analyze and explore long-tail statistical phenomena on the Internet and elsewhere. But Anderson's riff takes it one step further.

Anderson explores how the Internet has changed the laws of distribution and the rules of the market. The barriers of time and geography are down, so is the cost of storage. The limitless shelf space of online commerce and the availability of powerful search engines and free or cheap publishing and communication tools (email, groups, message boards, instant messenger, groups, and weblogs) create new economic, social, and cultural opportunities and new freedom of choice.

Suddenly, the mainstream is not the only stream. There's room now for babbling brooks, crooked creeks, and tributaries where trends pick up momentum before they flow downstream. There's an audience for many voices --for the eclectic and the unpopular: little blogs and the micro-communities that cluster round them, small-press books on oddball topics, indie music, and arcane genre movies for niche audiences. Wikipedians edit thousands of articles on hundreds of thousands of topics. Breadth of content thrives in environments that are collaborative, distributed, bottom-up, and driven as much by passion as by profit.

In a comment to one of Anderson's blog posts soliciting definitions for the Long Tail, an Amazon employee described the marketplace sea change this way, "We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday."

It's no longer necessary to focus myopically on bestsellers and mass appeal, that's the message. Devoted enthusiasts, professional amateurs (pro-ams), and like-minded people find each other to create communities of interest, spread influence, and share recommendations. Thousands of RSS feeds bloom, and anyone, anywhere can find them, mix them, and add them to My Yahoo!. On Yahoo! Shopping (or Amazon or eBay), merchants add their goods to a global catalog connecting consumers to any title, any product, any brand. On Overture, merchants buy keywords that drive business to an "abundance of niches."

There are plenty of pilgrims on the long tail trail. To travel this road wisely and well, we all need long-tail tools that support self-expression, personalized search, recommendations, and trust. Anderson's vision shows us a horizon as vast and limitless and rich with possibility as the long tail itself.

What aspect of the Long Tail makes your tail wag? As always, we'd love to hear your thoughts.

Havi Hoffman
Yahoo! Editorial

While "researching" new online video files with Yahoo! Video Search, we ran across a clip of this guy singing what sounds like a europop song with the chorus "My Yahoo!, My Yahee!, My Yahoo!, My Yahaha!".

Once we stopped laughing at the glorious webcam kid along with the cheesy 80s-ness of the song, we just had to share this one with you. Hope this one amuses you as much as it did us -- the spot-on lip syncing alone makes this worth the watch.

Andy Volk
Product Manager, Yahoo! Video Search

What do you believe is true even though you can't prove it?

At The World Question Center, a virtual watering hole for intellectual discovery hosted by the Edge Foundation, a collection of scientists and cognoscenti have gathered to respond to this year's big question, "What do you believe is true even though you can't prove it?"

Edge is the brainchild of John Brockman, "cultural impresario," thought catalyst, and flamboyant literary agent. Brockman is a man who's made a career out of thinking big. He represents rock-star physicists, mathematicians, biologists, cognitive scientists, and authors who straddle many intellectual domains. Brockman believes that asking big questions in a roomful of big minds can yield rich and stimulating discourse, and feed the pursuit of intelligent hunches that benefit all of us.

In his introduction to the 2005 annual question, Brockman refers to the age of "searchculture" and ponders whether, as search technology gets better and better at answering our queries, we can continue to frame the right bright questions. The annual Edge science question smackdown is his contribution to this human quest.

Computer scientist Marti Hearst, one of 120 contributors to this year's Edge exercise, looks at how we use language to pose questions and find answers when we search on the Internet. She believes, but can't prove, that "the Search Problem is solvable"; that elegant, innovative advances in technology will allow people to find the answer to any question that's already been documented and answered in text. For Hearst, understanding queries is key to making Internet search tools more effective.

The Web has made human knowledge publicly accessible via vast electronic repositories of data. Search engines have an endless appetite for this bounty of information (and misinformation) as they ceaselessly crawl and consume the expanding online universe. Computational linguistics, natural language processing, and related technologies uncover rules that help search engines communicate better with us humans.

Hearst's work focuses on algorithms and interfaces that help users locate information without drowning in data. Researchers can discover new, unanticipated answers to unsolved problems through a process known as text mining. Users can find their way through complex information spaces like archives or image galleries, if the interface is designed for a flexible and
flowing experience.

As computer scientists discover new ways to "teach" the search engine to respond "intelligently" to patterns in our search behavior, search technology helps us hone in on that elusive needle in the haystack. Occasionally, it even spins us wonderful golden threads we couldn't have imagined in the days before the Web.

Personally, I'm a big believer in serendipitous discovery (in life and in search), and I believe, but can't prove, that serendipity is closely related to the mind's ability to weave truth out of hunches and accidental discoveries.

Meaning out of chaos. Isn't that what science, and for that matter Yahoo! Search, is all about?

Let us know what you believe is true about Search, even if you can't prove it. We welcome your comments and ideas.

(Note: Marti Hearst is currently serving as a consultant and science advisor to Yahoo! Search.)

Havi Hoffman
Yahoo! Editorial

While stars frolic in the snow of Sundance, I sit here in Sunnyvale and track the buzz filtering down from the mountains. The beloved film fest is always a search favorite, and this year is no exception. Searches on "Sundance" are up 97% and searches on "Sundance Film Festival" are up 123% as producers and studios perform their annual mating dance in celeb-packed Park City. Top affinity searches for Sundance over the past week include:

• Park City
• Robert Redford
• Variety
• Screenplays
• BAFTA

As far as the films unspooling in Utah, a few have made an impression in search. Of the movies that have screened, a handful have popped up in searches including Happy Endings, Inside Deep Throat, Strangers With Candy, and The Jacket.

The celebs canoodling in the frosty climes are also grabbing a decent share of buzz. Every day, we've been tracking the stars of Sundance by looking at the actors appearing in the flicks making their debut at the film fest. So while you won't see Paris on our list of top Sundance celebs, it does tilt toward the beautiful females starring in the indies that drive the festival:

1. Carmen Electra
2. Keira Knightley
3. Sandra Bullock
4. Liv Tyler
5. Keanu Reeves

Keep checking the Buzz Log every day for more dispatches from the world of pop-culture and search.

If you happened to be in Park City, you may have seen many of the celebs sporting the coveted Yahoo! Search "search me" shirts, printed onsite at Cafe Yahoo!. Overheard at a table at the Cafe earlier this week: Molly Sims entourage trying to come up with ways to boost Molly