Search Blog Posts

Last year, Yahoo! Search launched Search Assist to help users find what they're looking for quickly and easily by providing query suggestions and related concepts in real-time. Today, Yahoo! Search is embracing the Mac community and offering similar search assistance features with the acquisition of Inquisitor software, a Safari browser plug-in.

Inquisitor 3, a search technology that auto-completes queries and delivers results right in Safari Web browser, is similar to Yahoo!'s existing Search Assist technology. Simply type in your query and websites will appear immediately, as well as suggestions for refining your search. Just as with Search Assist, the goal with Inquisitor is to help users find exactly the site they're looking for as quickly as possible.

The new version of Inquisitor removes affiliate ad links, simplifies the search provider selection interaction and refines the preferences user interface. Additionally, the new version provides quick access to Yahoo! Search however, existing users may still utilize their current default search engine or a different search engine entirely, such as a vertical alternative like Amazon or Flickr, if they prefer.

While search interface design has remained fairly utilitarian over the years, David Watanabe, founder and developer of Inquisitor, has done a fantastic job designing a simple and elegant UI. David and our team of macphiles will continue to innovate on both form and function for Inquisitor.

Mac users have been using the Inquisitor plug-in already and they seem to like it. It's a free download, so whether you're familiar with it or just trying it out for the first time with Yahoo! Search, let us know what you think in the comments below.

Ariel Seidman
Director of Product Management
Yahoo! Search

Today, we're announcing the beta release of SearchScan, a new feature from Yahoo! Search that helps protect users from viruses, spyware and spam. We've heard from users that security and privacy continue to be major concerns when they are online. We've also learned that solutions that require downloads and constant updating are less than ideal. To tackle the problem, we partnered with McAfee to build a feature that provides a safer and hassle-free search experience to all users.

How does it work? SearchScan leverages McAfee's SiteAdvisor technology to alert users if risky websites appear in Yahoo! Search results. Starting today, SearchScan will be turned on by default for all users in the U.S., Canada, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Spain, and will scan for three types of risks in our search index:

• Browser Exploits -- These are sites that can stealthily harm a user's computer or install malware simply by visiting the site. Beginning today, any such sites or pages included in McAfee's data will be removed from search results automatically.
• Dangerous Downloads -- SearchScan will display warnings next to search results for sites that offer potentially dangerous software, such as viruses, spyware or adware. Users often may be unaware that these can be passed along with the screensavers, games and other software downloads.
• Unsolicited Email -- SearchScan will alert users to scanned sites that send unsolicited emails or inappropriately share email addresses with third parties.

With SearchScan, our goal is to protect users by allowing them to make a more informed decision about the websites they visit. By displaying prominent warnings next to search results for sites with potentially dangerous downloads or unsavory email practices, users are aware that while visiting the site may be safe, downloading a file or sharing an email address could be risky. Browser exploits, which include drive-by downloads, are different. Since just visiting these sites can cause harm, they will not appear in Yahoo! Search results if they've been identified by McAfee.

While SearchScan will be on by default, users have control over how they use the feature. In preferences, users can choose to turn the feature off or choose to filter out all sites with warnings from their search results.

SearchScan will continue to evolve and improve, but in the meantime, let us know if you have any feedback in the comments below.

Priyank Garg, Director, Product Management
Graham Mudd, Product Marketing Manager
Yahoo! Search

Back in October, we launched Search Assist on the Yahoo! Search U.S. results page to help searchers formulate their queries when we detect they're having trouble and explore related concepts to find the page they're looking for. Since then, we've seen positive responses from the press and industry research firms. We've also extended the feature across Yahoo! Search channels and to consumers worldwide, and as of today, Search Assist is available in 15 markets and 7 languages.

We've rolled out Search Assist to the following countries, with more to come soon:

Argentina
Australia
Brazil
Canada
France
Germany
Italy
Mexico
New Zealand
Philippines
Singapore
Spain
UK
Vietnam

The international versions of Search Assist are tailor-made to reflect local search behavior and tendencies. So when you search for 'spurs' at Yahoo! UK Search, Search Assist won't suggest the San Antonio NBA team like it does in the U.S. Instead, it'll offer suggestions like Tottenham Hotspur soccer team.

Beyond the Front Page and search results page, Search Assist can be accessed through the Yahoo! Toolbar, and most recently on My Yahoo!. In honor of March Madness, try a search for 'bracket' from My Yahoo!.

Enjoy and let us know your thoughts.

Ya-Bing Chu
Yahoo! Search

Search Engine Strategies is in New York next week and Yahoo! will be there to discuss everything from viral campaigns, to searcher behavior research, to next generation search. With nine panels, one keynote and a booth, we're ready to head to the Big Apple.

While we've got several speakers attending across Yahoo!, here's where the Search discussions are taking place. Check out the YSM Blog to narrow in on the Search Marketing panels.

Thursday, March 20th
9 - 9:45 a.m.
Morning Keynote
Andrew Tomkins, Chief Scientist

12:25 - 1:45 p.m.
Meet the Crawlers
Sean Suchter, Vice President, Yahoo! Search Technology Engineering

Stay tuned for pictures from the Yahoo! booth as well. We'll be in Americas Hall 2.

Yahoo! Search Blog team

A few weeks ago, we began talking about the new Yahoo! Search open platform. Today, we're releasing more details about two important components of the initiative -- the developer platform as well as our support of a number of semantic web standards.

The Data Web in Action
While there has been remarkable progress made toward understanding the semantics of web content, the benefits of a data web have not reached the mainstream consumer. Without a killer semantic web app for consumers, site owners have been reluctant to support standards like RDF, or even microformats. We believe that app can be web search.

By supporting semantic web standards, Yahoo! Search and site owners can bring a far richer and more useful search experience to consumers. For example, by marking up its profile pages with microformats, LinkedIn can allow Yahoo! Search and others to understand the semantic content and the relationships of the many components of its site. With a richer understanding of LinkedIn's structured data included in our index, we will be able to present users with more compelling and useful search results for their site. The benefit to LinkedIn is, of course, increased traffic quality and quantity from sites like Yahoo! Search that utilize its structured data.

In the coming weeks, we'll be releasing more detailed specifications that will describe our support of semantic web standards. Initially, we plan to support a number of microformats, including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN. Yahoo! Search will work with the web community to evolve the vocabulary framework for embedding structured data. For starters, we plan to support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others based on feedback. And, we will support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages. Finally, we are announcing support for the OpenSearch specification, with extensions for structured queries to deep web data sources.

We believe that our open approach will let each of these formats evolve within their own passionate communities, while providing the necessary incentive to site owners (increased traffic from search) for more widespread adoption. Site owners interested in learning more about the open search platform can sign up here.

A Developer Ecosystem for Search
We're also announcing, today, that the Yahoo! Search open platform will be open to all third party developers. We will be kicking off this component of our open platform with a developer launch party at our Sunnyvale campus in the coming weeks. That day, we'll launch a beta program for a tool that developers can use to build Enhanced Results applications for the Yahoo! Search platform. Enhanced Results apps built by developers can utilize the structured data available through public APIs and in our index (made available by site owners through either feeds or the semantic web standards discussed above).

Let us know what you think below and keep an eye on the Search Blog -- we'll be posting more info about the upcoming launch party.

Amit Kumar
Director, Product Management, Yahoo! Search

One goal of Yahoo! Research is to develop leading-edge algorithms and technology that will power the next generation of search. In keeping with that commitment and to expand its global research capabilities, Yahoo! is opening a new Research Lab in Haifa, Israel.

The lab will be focused on research and development in the areas of Web search and information extraction, and led by Dr. Ronny Lempel, an information organization and retrieval expert. Most recently, Dr. Lempel worked for the Information Retrieval Group at IBM's Haifa Research Lab.

The Haifa research lab will be staffing up in the coming months -- so if you're interested in tackling some of the most challenging questions in web search, check out the job opportunities at Yahoo! Research.

Yodel Anecdotal has more details on the new development, so check out what they've got to say about Yahoo! Research, the new lab and what's to come.

Yahoo! Search Blog team

We're in the process of 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. To share your thoughts on this with other Yahoo! Search users, please visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board.

Update: With this weather update, you might also experience spikes or drops in crawl traffic for the next week or two.

Sharad Verma
Yahoo! Search

Today, Yahoo!, along with Google and Microsoft, is announcing Cross-host submission for Sitemaps, which will make it easier for webmasters to manage their Sitemap submissions to the major search engines. With this announcement, webmasters can now submit Sitemaps that correspond to several differently-hosted websites using a single mechanism.

For background, a Sitemap file contains the URLs for the pages on a site along with meta-data, such as priority, last crawled date and change frequency for the content. To ensure validity of this metadata, Sitemaps have previously been required to be on the same host and path as the URLs they contain. This requirement forced the Sitemaps files to be hosted on the same servers as the actual site content.

With today's announcement, a Sitemap can now be hosted on a different host and path than the URLs it contains. For example, say you have a Sitemap (sitemap-www.xml) for the URLs on http://www.example.com but you want to put that Sitemap on http://sitemaps.example.com. That is now possible. To make the Sitemap valid and preserve data security you need to refer to it from the robots.txt file on the site where the URLs it contains are located. For example, add the following line to http://www.example.com/robots.txt:

Sitemap: http://sitemaps.example.com/sitemap-www.xml

Our collaboration with Google and Microsoft began back in November 2006 when we announced joint support for the Sitemaps protocol. Since then, we've learned a lot about how webmasters and site owners manage their sites and feeds. We know that segregating user facing content from feeds, like Sitemaps, is important. We've also learned that managing feeds for large websites or websites using third party feed publishing services is critical. We hope this enhancement helps address those needs.

We'll continue to work on addressing the needs of our webmasters through new standards and protocols. If you have other thoughts about how we can collaborate with other search engines on standards such as robots.txt, we'd love to hear from you. Leave us a comment below, or give us your feedback here.

Details about the Sitemaps protocol, including our recent addition, are available on the protocol website. Or, if you're at SMXW this week, bring your questions to our panelists and speakers.

Priyank Garg
Director, Product Management, Yahoo! Search

Sean Suchter
Vice President, Engineering, Yahoo! Search

If you didn't realize it, Yahoo! is embracing openness like never before:

• Hadoop Now at the Heart of Every Yahoo! Search
• Yahoo!'s Quest to Open Up

The open theme continues today as we are announcing that we are opening up Yahoo! Search itself. That's right -- you heard it correctly -- the Yahoo! Search experience will soon be open. This open search platform enables 3rd parties to build and present the next generation of search results. There are a number of layers and capabilities that we have built into the platform, but our intent is clear -- present users with richer, more useful search results so that they can complete their tasks more efficiently and get from "to do" to "done."

Because the platform is open it gives all Web site owners -- big or small -- an opportunity to present more useful information on the Yahoo! Search page as compared to what is presented on other search engines. Site owners will be able to provide all types of additional information about their site directly to Yahoo! Search. So instead of a simple title, abstract and URL, for the first time users will see rich results that incorporate the massive amount of data buried in websites -- ratings and reviews, images, deep links, and all kinds of other useful data -- directly on the Yahoo! Search results page.

For example, by sharing its database of restaurant reviews, location information and photos with Yahoo!, Yelp can develop a far more visually compelling and useful search result than was previously presented to users. Here is how it works: website owners like Yelp, WebMD, The New York Times, and anyone else can supply us with their data and our patented Machined Learned Ranking helps ensure these results are presented to users at the right time. Users benefit because their search results will have more useful information than they did before from websites they trust. And websites benefit through increased and higher quality traffic from Yahoo! Search. Here is an example of what it will look like:

Before

After

We believe that combining a free, open platform with structured, semantic content from across the Web is a clear win for all parties involved -- site owners, Yahoo! and most importantly, our users. And by the way, users will be in complete control of the experience and will be able to turn off anything related to open search if they so desire. Over the course of the next few months, we'll be talking more about how this platform will work and what it will enable.

If you're interested in learning more about our open search platform, you can do so live and in person tomorrow (Tue, 2/26) if you're coming to SMX West. Amit Kumar, the product lead for the open search platform, will be discussing it at a special lunch talk (Session time: 12:30 p.m. to 1:00 p.m.; Location: Santa Clara Convention Center, Great America J). If you can't make it but want to be kept in the loop, please share your information with us here.

We want to know what you think, so keep your comments coming. And stay tuned for more on this and a few other things we've got in the pipeline.

Vish Makhijani
SVP & GM, Yahoo! Search

Next week, Yahoo! is speaking at Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman's annual Search Marketing Expo West at the Santa Clara Convention Center. With a total of 12 panels and a keynote, we're ready to rock. Here's where you can find us at the show...

Tuesday, February 26
10:30 - 11:45 a.m.
Decrypting Quality Scores
David Pann, Vice President, Marketplace Design and Matching

10:30 - 11:45 a.m.
Search 3.0 Track: The Blended Search Revolution
Sean Suchter, Vice President of Engineering, Yahoo! Search

1:15 - 2:45 p.m.
Search 3.0 Track: Video, Images & Blended Results
Deepali Tamhane, Senior Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

3:15 - 4:30 p.m.
Search 3.0 Track: Local Search & Blended Results
Brian Gil, Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Local

3:15 - 4:30 p.m.
The Economics of Search
Michael Schwarz, Marketplace Designer, Yahoo! Research

4:45 - 6:00 p.m.
Search 3.0: Online Retail & Blended Results
Ken Kronquist, Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Shopping

7:00 - 8:00 p.m.
SMX Search Bowl
Sean Suchter, Vice President of Engineering, Yahoo! Search
Jan Pedersen, Chief Scientist Advertising and Search, Yahoo! Search

Wednesday, February 27
10:45 am - 12:00 p.m.
Marketing Track: Branding & Search
Edwin Wong, Senior Market Research Manager, Yahoo! Search Marketing

3:15 - 4:30 p.m.
Search 4.0 Track: Search Ads & Behavioral Targeting
David Kopp, Senior Director Product Strategy for Category Solutions

4:45 - 6:00 p.m.
Paid Search Roundtable
Dmitri Krakovsky, Vice President of Products, Yahoo! Online Channel and Small Business Services

4:45 - 6:00 p.m.
SEO Track: Search Engineers Q&A
Sean Suchter, Vice President of Engineering, Yahoo! Search

Thursday, February 28
9:00 - 10:00 a.m.
Keynote: Generation Next: Search in the Coming Decade
Larry Heck, Vice President of Search and Advertising Sciences

2:45 - 3:45 p.m.
SEO & Linking Track: Linking Q&A
Priyank Garg, Director Product Management, Yahoo! Search

For more info on Yahoo!'s presence at the show, check out the YSM Blog as well. Hope to see you there.

Yahoo! Search Blog team

Those of you who listened to Yahoo!'s fourth quarter earnings call may remember Sue Decker mentioning our embrace of open source infrastructure. On a very related note, we're announcing today that we implemented what we believe is the world's largest commercial application of Apache Hadoop. We are now using Hadoop to process the Webmap -- the application which produces the index from the billions of pages crawled by Yahoo! Search. Matt McAlister posted today about the Hadoop implementation, including some numbers that will give you a feel for the scale of this implementation.

Our implementation of a Hadoop-based Webmap is part of a larger strategy of Yahoo! moving toward openness -- both in our infrastructure and throughout the network (our recent OpenID announcement is another good example). Using open source software is a win-win situation for Yahoo! and the wider community. We achieve cost savings, faster processing, reduced maintenance, and increased scale and the community can benefit from the myriad improvements it took to make Hadoop viable for such a large-scale commercial implementation.

I'd like to thank the Hadoop and Apache communities, and reinforce our commitment to the open source world. We're definitely standing on the shoulders of giants here! For more info on this announcement, check out Matt's post and let us know what you think below.

Sean Suchter
VP, Yahoo! Search Engineering

A few months back, I shared some anecdotes from a customer field day that the Yahoo! Search team participated in. "A Day in Their Shoes" is what we called it. Our customers are the centerpiece of our organization, so I'd say it's really more than one day a year that we spend in their shoes. As the lead of the Customer Insights team, it's my job to directly connect with our customers, learn how they use search in their daily lives and then make sure that the products and features we build address their needs.

You might remember Search Assist, a feature we announced back in October, which was conceived and designed to help alleviate a key end user pain point -- the process of formulating and refining a query. We learned that for many queries, particularly more specific ones, users had difficulty finding the right query terms and this difficulty was preventing them from utilizing the full value of search.

We recently had the opportunity to review the latest Keynote Customer Experience study on search engines. The study, done twice yearly for the past four years, compares search engines from a direct user experience and customer satisfaction perspective. Keynote uses a panel of 2000 representative users to study how the major search engines stack up in terms of performance, relevance and customer satisfaction. The report also looked at how the major engines performed in terms of providing search assistance and suggestions. Keynote found that since launching Search Assist, our ranking jumped by 41 points to 878, taking us from third to first place in this category.

Overall, the Keynote study measured customer experience across four major indices -- overall customer experience, brand impact, future usage, and customer satisfaction. While we recognize that the evolution of the search experience is far from complete and user expectations will continue to increase, it's another proof point that Yahoo!'s made significant improvements in scores across all of Keynote's major indices. In fact, Yahoo! saw the biggest jump in overall customer satisfaction amongst the other search engines in the study.

Taking a step back, I think the Keynote study provides some nice 3rd party validation that by focusing directly on a key user need and building a solution that addresses it pays dividends to our users.

Now that you've had some time to play around with Search Assist, let us know what you think in the comments below.

Michael Kronthal
Customer Insights Team, Yahoo! Search

That may be a bit of a stretch, but there's no doubt that online search behavior can be an insightful window in the minds of consumers and voters. For this reason, our friends at Yahoo! News included Yahoo! Buzz data (which is based on search usage) in their new Political Dashboard. In addition to Buzz data, the dashboard includes traditional opinion poll data, campaign fundraising tallies and even predictions market data based on a sort of stock market for politicians.

Check out Yodel Anecdotal for more info and let us know what you think below.

Graham Mudd
Yahoo! Search

Writing a good blog post is more than just putting words on paper. It's also about rounding out ideas, opinions and thoughts with content that supports your statements -- be it maps, pictures or links. And sometimes, the hassle of digging up that supporting content is the most painful part. So, to help bloggers address these pain points, we built Yahoo! Shortcuts for Wordpress -- a technology that sits in the background and finds and offers content to help build out your post in real-time. Shortcuts lift the burden of finding additional content and integrating it into your posts so that you can focus on the meat -- the writing.

So, how does it work? Simply download the Yahoo! Shortcuts plug-in and as your typing it will begin to find terms in your post such as company names and tickers, locations, news and product names -- and, with no additional effort, integrates a roll-over or preview badge into your post. For example, "Crater Lake" brings up a map of Crater Lake to answer the "where the heck is that" question and "Citigroup" calls up a dynamic finance chart of the company's stock performance. The product Shortcut (e.g. Nintendo Wii) displays the latest product reviews and price comparisons from retailers across the web via Yahoo! Shopping.

And, because a picture is worth a thousand words we didn't stop there. While these days it is popular to release new features every half hour or so, we decided to hold the product and dive deeper to offer images, as well. Now, under Creative Commons licensing, we'll recommend Flickr images based on the key themes of your post, with proper attribution to the original author of the picture included. For a complete list of Shortcuts available, check out this site.

All of these capabilities are built on the premise of giving the publisher control -- you can decide whether to keep or reject the recommended content and how it is visually presented. To see these controls in action watch this short tutorial.

You can learn more about it at Yodel Anecdotal . And if you're one of the first 500 bloggers to install and use the plug-in we'll send you one of these cool t-shirts.

We'll continue to roll-out new versions to provide an open environment for developers to create their own modules for content within and outside of the Yahoo! network. So, stay tuned for future updates. If you have some ideas on which platforms to support next, let us know in the comments below.

Ariel Seidman & Luke Wroblewski
Yahoo! Search

The sun is quickly setting on 2007, but before we toast the New Year, we here on the Yahoo! Search and Buzz teams have traditionally taken a look back at the year's top trends in search. Billions of search queries from millions of users have always provided a fascinating window into the global cultural climate. This year is no different, but to keep things interesting, we decided to take a slightly different approach to looking at search trends in 2007. Instead of doing a top overall searches list, which is often stacked with celebrity meltdown-related searches, our engineers mined the search data to see if they could identify some more interesting trends that might tell us a bit more about how people are using search and more importantly, what it says about society overall in 2007. They identified seven categories that bubbled up to the surface, many of which were unique to this year. Also new for 2007 are two Top 10 lists using different sources of search data, del.icio.us and Yahoo! Kids. For those who might miss the celeb-centric list, don't fret, it's still one of our Top 10s.

Two of the seven trends - the environment and product recalls - were particularly unique to 2007. While the green movement is certainly not new (in fact the first Earth Day was 37 years ago), 2007 marks the urgency of environmental change among the public. And perhaps what's even more interesting is that a number of the search terms on the Top 10 list - such as recycling, freecycle, hybrid cars and solar energy - reveal that searchers are looking for ways to take action and do something to contribute to the cause, whether big or small.

It will come as no surprise that when it comes to product recalls affecting children or pets, consumers don't mess around. Whether it was looking for official government reports from the CPSC, FDA, or AVMA or getting the actual manufacturer's recall list with product names and pictures, the Top 10 recall list reveals that consumers clearly view search as the go to tool for getting actionable information. And, we also noticed that the public really is interested in the details. Searches on topics like wheat gluten and E. coli spiked as these topics were linked to various recalls this year. I'm guessing most people hadn't heard or thought about E. coli since high school biology.

To get a peek at what was on the minds of the influential crowd on the Web, we decided to look into the top 10 del.icio.us searches. Not surprisingly, many of the top search terms, such as design, web 2.0 and Ubuntu, were tech-focused. But searchers also relied on del.icio.us to help them find favorite sites for their personal passions, whether it be gaming, music, travel or photography. What's interesting about del.icio.us as a search engine is the way in which users use it. Often, generic categories are used as queries to bring up the most popular URLs for that term. But then users start to navigate the del.icio.us corpus by clicking on tags that are interesting to them. For example, "mac" was in the top 10. Not surprising given the del.icio.us audience and some of the press Apple's gotten from its new iMacs and Leopard operating system. A search on mac in del.icio.us brings up a wealth of useful sites and tags that can help users find sites focused on osx, shortcuts, tutorials, webdesign, and even rumors.

Looking back, it's clear that search continues to weave its way into our lives. We rely on it for everything from the most personal interests (our family's safety) to the most global of causes (the environment). We turn to search to stay connected to our world, whether it's the latest gadget or game, breaking world news or water cooler gossip. Search is clearly a resource of first resort.

We'll continue to look into the trends in search in 2007, so check back here for the latest. Our friends at Yodel Anecdotal also posted on Top Trends in 2007 today - check out what they have to say.

Graham Mudd, Yahoo! Search

There are two constants for almost every holiday -- family and food. The connection between the two is often traditions -- your grandma's stuffing, your great aunt's gravy and, for many of you, some tryptophan-induced time on the couch watching football. But as Emeril would say, it never hurts to kick it up a notch. So, check out our newest search feature, Recipe Shortcuts, to find a few ideas that just might give grandma's Thanksgiving, Hanukkah or Christmas recipes a bit of competition at the dinner table.

Here's how Recipe Shortcuts work. Just add the word 'recipes' after what you're looking to cook up and you'll see a corresponding list of categories as well as top-rated recipes from 14 providers, including Epicurious, EatingWell, Food & Wine, Every Day with Rachael Ray, and Martha Stewart, via Yahoo! Food.

Recipe Shortcuts allow you to search based on cuisine (e.g. 'Italian recipes'), ingredient (e.g. 'turkey recipes'), meal (e.g. 'brunch recipes'), and dish (e.g. cake recipes).

Perhaps a bit premature, but once the New Year rolls in, you'll be happy to know that you can also search for diet type (e.g. 'low fat recipes').

Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Yuko Kamae
Yahoo! Search

It's been a little while since we've talked about Yahoo! Search Sports Shortcuts. During that time, Josh Beckett carried the Red Sox through the World Series and roughly (!) half of the NFL got injured. And now, for those who like nothing but nets, I'd like to introduce our NBA and NHL player shortcuts. Both leagues recently started their relatively long seasons -- a good thing, because there's plenty of time to learn the new names and faces.

Let's start with the NBA. The big news this offseason was the rejuvenation of the Celtics, who now feature Rajon Rondo. They also have Paul Pierce, Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett. Search for these guys on Yahoo! Search to check out The Truth's all-around game, Ray Allen's new number (#20) and KG's exuberant grin.

Look for the position-specific stats; you'll see steals and 3-pointers for guards as well as blocks and field-goal percentage for centers. The Yahoo! Search Sports Shortcuts also feature quick access to key player information, news, photos, game logs, and more.

Looking for other NBA players to try? Let's not forget Luol Deng-that's-a-lot-of-money-to-turn-down! I don't blame him, he's gotta feed his family, or perhaps try to help with Travis Henry's.

Okay hockey fans, it's your turn. As a Red Wings fan, I made sure that Henrik Zetterberg and Pavel Datsyuk are represented, along with Original Six veteran Chris Chelios. It just goes to show that these days, age doesn't matter. But if you really want to know, just click through for the profile.

Finally, I'll throw in an honorable mention to Mike Modano, who recently broke the record for goals scored by an American-born player. Congrats Mike, even if hockey in Texas is a meteorological abomination.

I hope you all find this feature useful and relevant in your everyday quest to prove your "fanhood." Now that we've completed rolling out the shortcuts for the Fan-tastic Four, we'll explore more opportunities to make Yahoo! Search the best darn sports search, period. Please let us know if you have any ideas/suggestions.

Ya-Bing Chu
Yahoo! Search

As we mentioned last week, some of the folks here at Yahoo! headed out to ad:Tech New York to take part in the industry discussions there. We thought we would share a few helpful tips gleaned from the SEO Workshop panel.

Moderated by Bruce Clay, the panel included Tim Mayer, VP of Product Management at Yahoo! Search, Sandor Marik, Director of Marketing at CondeNet and Bill Macaitis, VP of Online Marketing and SEM/SEO at Fox Interactive Media.

The talk was sliced into five sub-categories -- spiderability; duplicate content; linking strategies; fighting spam; and blended search, social marketing, behavioral search, and local issues -- with an interactive Q&A after each. The result was a best practice talk, of sorts, on optimizing rankings. Here's a look at the key topics discussed by the panel participants and a couple tips from our team that you may find helpful:

Spiderability -- Refers to the ability for a spider to crawl and find your pages

• Low spiderability can result from poor site structure or login requirement for content access (spiders can't log in); use of link based navigation and sitemaps submission helps spiders discover more URLs.


• Inform search engines of the most important pages on the site (and the less important) through sitemaps and the use of meta data such as priority and update frequency.


• More important content should be placed higher up in the directories; it's easier for the spiders to discover easily found content than to discover deeply embedded content.


• Directories should be no more than 3 or 4 levels deep.


• Search engines care about how fast your site is; a slow server equals reduced spiderability.


• Use Robots-Nocontent to tell Slurp (Yahoo!'s spider) what parts of a page are unrelated to the main content and are only useful for visitors. Having crawlers focus on the main content results in proper matching and targeting which increases both the traffic as well as the conversion on your site.

Duplicate Content

• Try to have one unique URL for one page of content. Doing so should help you steer clear of lowered rankings due to duplicate pages and content.


• From a search engine perspective, static URLs are preferred when spidering a site. This does not mean that dynamic URls are not crawled. The cardinal rule is easy to find URLs; whether static or dynamic, they'll be crawled before the others.


• Use Yahoo!'s Dynamic URL Rewriting feature that provides the ability for site owners to alert Yahoo! of the dynamic parameters in URLs that they'd like Yahoo! to ignore; we'll then automatically rewrite accordingly. This will result in more efficient crawl, deeper site coverage and better site ranking due to reduced link fragmentation.

Linking Strategies

• Link to as many relevant pages as possible. Don't be an island, but at the same time don't link to sites that are not connected to you in any way; this can hurt search engine results. If you link to spam, your ranking could be severely hurt.


• The pages you link to are the pages your users will link to. Content is king. Create great content and ask yourself if you're a fan of it and if you would link to it.


• Use descriptive anchor text when linking internally and externally. Use of contextual and descriptive anchor text can have a huge impact on site rankings.

Fighting Spam

• IP cloaking, keyword stuffing and other spam techniques can draw unwanted attention to your site and potentially reduce your rank or get you removed from specific search engines.


• Spamming can get you penalized, so even though the site may be retained in the search engine index, rankings may be negatively impacted.


• While there are a limited number of policemen out there, that doesn't mean they're not actively looking. There are both human and automated ways to detect spam.

Blended Search, Social marketing, Behavioral Search, and Local Issues

• Adding multimedia content with different formats has been working well, like with videos ranking in video searches. This multiplies ranking opportunities.


• Upload your videos to video service sites like YouTube, Yahoo! Video and MetaCafe for expanded results.


• Participating in vertical forums where sponsors answer questions can help build a reputation and create a relationship to sell products to your audience.

So, there you have it -- a few high-level tips to help you get better rankings. If this post has sparked any questions, please feel free to leave your comments here and we'll do our best to answer them.

Yahoo! Search Blog team

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

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+

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

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

That sums up Yahoo! Search in a nutshell; the whole point is we want to get you from "to do" to "done." Whatever it is you want to do: research a topic, find a website, plan a vacation, research a medical condition, view a funny video, or any of the other billions of queries we get from users -- their intents expressed via a few keywords in a search box.

One thing we've learned since launching our own algorithmic search engine back in 2004 is that at the end of the day, people really don't want to search; they want to get things done. Today, we're launching an all new Yahoo! Search experience that gets users the answers they're looking for quickly and easily, and often in one search.

So what's new? Well the feature we believe that improves the search experience most is Yahoo! Search Assist. Most of you have already seen the real-time query suggestions we launched on Yahoo.com in July. Yahoo! Search Assist kicks it up a notch, bringing those suggestions to the search results page, along with related concepts that give users a point-and-click query refinement capability that enables them to explore a subject area they may be unfamiliar with.

Search 'united nations,' for example, and the new Search Assist knows that the following concepts are related to your query: general assembly, 1945, league of nations, secretary general, etc. Want to refine your query to explore 'united nations' + 'general assembly'? Just click on the 'general assembly' suggestion. You now get a new set of results and new concepts related to 'united nations general assembly.' Exploring further is now simply a matter of clicking on new concepts.

One thing you'll find when you use our new search experience is that Search Assist "automagically" drops down from the search box on the results page when it senses that you're having difficulty formulating a query. But it only shows up when you need it or ask for it. It then offers real-time suggestions and concepts to explore, just like on Yahoo.com. We did this to avoid a common complaint about assistance technologies offered by other search engines -- the "persistent assistance" that puts suggestions on the page regardless of whether a user wants or needs them.

We've been testing Search Assist over the past few months and have seen significant improvements in user satisfaction from those tests. One metric we found was a 61% increase in successful task completion when users had Search Assist as part of their search experience.

In addition to Search Assist, you may have also noticed our new header and footer. While our users think it looks better (we do too), it's also focused on helping users get things done. We moved the search box to the left to align with the results so that we make it easier for you to scan the results and find what you're looking for.

We've also spent some time focused on how we could improve our algorithmic results to deliver a better multi-media search experience. When your search results include links to videos from YouTube, Metacafe or Yahoo! Video, in addition to the link you get an inline video player so you can watch those videos immediately. A couple of my favorites include: Ready-Set-Bumbo and Otters holding hands. And a small power-user tip: using site restriction, you can get a video results page on your favorite topic. Here's an example: 'otters site:youtube.com.'

Our multi-media improvements include inline Flickr photos too. When a Flickr photo or tag shows up in your results, you get to see those great photos in addition to getting a link. You can see it in action here: 'sunflowers photos.'

And we know most of you have enjoyed the recent enhanced shortcuts that give you answers on the results page in categories like music artists, movies, travel destinations, etc.

Give the new Yahoo! Search a spin and let us know what you think.

Tim Mayer
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

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

Unless you're a huge sports fanatic, you may find it hard to keep up with all the new players in professional sports. I used to be pretty good at it back when I collected baseball cards, or when I was able to watch news and highlights every night. These days, I don't have the time to track it all, especially with the increased action due to the salary cap, free agency and blockbuster trades. But let's say I wanted to quickly check up on my favorite baseball players -- maybe Ichiro or Dontrelle Willis. The new Sports Shortcut in Yahoo! Search will let me do just that.

Search for Dontrelle Willis, and there's the D-train's personable smile, along with the vital stats. Want to settle a bar bet about his ERA, strikeouts, or even his player number? Done. Need a quick recap of his last performance? Try the Game Log. Want to see when the Marlins are coming to town? Didn't think so ;-) (Try the Scores & Schedule link). You can also click the Photos link to see more images, like action shots.

For you Yahoo! Fantasy Sports owners, you might find the fantasy ranks useful for "heat checks." It looks like Ichiro hasn't been doing well for the last month, but Robinson Cano is burning up the Bronx! There's also a small "Notes" link next to the player's name that Yahoo! Fantasy Sports owners might recognize.

We've also added images to the News Shortcut. So, if you're searching for Barry Bonds breaking the home run record, for example, you'll now see pictures incorporated with the news results.

I hope that you baseball fans find this useful. We've got almost all MLB players (even Aaron bleepin' Boone!). We also plan to roll out the NFL, NBA and NHL as they rotate into season, so stay tuned.

Try it out and let us know what you think.

Ya-Bing Chu
Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

P.S. Yes, I'm a Red Sox fan.

Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land thought it would be interesting to encourage his readers to try a different search engine one day a month so they could see what all the major search players were up to. Well, it looks like today's our day.

Danny's got a nice summary of some of the features that we've got here in Yahoo! Search. So if you've never used our search engine, give it a go. And if you're a regular, well welcome back. After you've kicked the tires a bit, let us know what you think with a comment or two below.

Raj Gossain
Yahoo! Search

...A faster way to find what you're looking for. Introducing Search Suggest on Yahoo.com.

It works like this: When you do a search on Yahoo!, you'll automatically be given suggestions based on what you have typed - as you're typing. So, not only does this limit the number of words you need to type into a query, it may also present similar queries to shorten your searching time and get to what you're looking for quicker. Search Suggest isn't new, just new to Yahoo.com. We launched this feature in the Yahoo! Toolbar in Firefox a while back and you can get it directly from the Firefox 2 search box when you select Yahoo! as your search engine.

Let's say I'm trying to keep up with our illustrious "governator" here in California. I type "arnold s" in the search box and the suggestions pop up Arnold Schwarzenegger, which saves me from trying to spell out his last name. Or, I'm watching TV and wonder what song is in the background of a commercial that just came on. Problem is that I only remember part of the company name, "journey diamond". I type it into our new search box, and "journey diamond jewelry commercial song" is suggested right away - problem solved. Of course, the assistance it provides when I attempt to find some new bicycle tires, "mavic ksyrium" just after the first few letters, "mavic k" is much appreciated. Not only does the feature eliminate my embarrassment of misspellings, it makes for a much more efficient search experience.

The nice thing about the suggestions is that they're not obtrusive, so if you already know what you're searching for, you can overlook the suggestions without them getting in your way. But, when you experience those brain dead moments like we all do, it's the type of feature that just might get things moving again. If you don't like change, you can turn it off altogether by simply selecting "disable" in the bottom right corner of the drop down menu. And, if you're having regrets, you can reinstall it by selecting "more" above the search box.

Try it out and let me know what you think in the comments.

UPDATE: Thank you for all of your feedback. We appreciate you working with us and apologize for any annoyances you've experienced with the "disable" feature while we've been working on a fix. As noted in the comments below, the bug has been fixed, so you should be able to disable the Search Suggest feature without any problems. Please keep us informed if the problem persists.

Kevin Lee
Yahoo! Search

Occasionally, I'm a stickler for details. With Independence Day approaching, I thought it would be cool to recreate the first celebration. So, I made a list. Break free from Britain. Have a bonfire on my lawn. Clear my driveway for horse-drawn floats. Stock the feast rum, salted meat, fish, and more rum. Persuade New York to release all its debtors from prison.

Well, I don't have a driveway, so I'm celebrating the new-fangled American way with picnics, parades and, naturally, pyrotechnics.

Enthusiasm for fireworks though, seems a little mixed and it's not because the Fourth falls on a hump day this year. As we noted in our annual Buzz log nod to the Fourth, anticipation for the Fourth of July in the past six months has been 30% higher than in 2006. Yet, recent "fireworks" look-ups are a full 33% lower than last year.

However, tally up all those DIY queries for fireworks stores and specific sellers like phantom fireworks, and the numbers show that interest in our grand explosive tradition hasn't necessarily fizzled out. Yes, guys still tend to be the primary pyros, driving six out of 10 searches. Not that I can prove it, but I suspect it's the boys responsible for all the homemade fireworks searches.

The Buzz has also been tracking a surge for pies. For the most part, apple has been the filling of choice in Search... but we've had a last-minute upset. No, I dare not impugn the wholesome pomaceous fruit and its role in the most American of delicacies, but in the past week, key lime pie has squeezed past to get to the top of the pie heap. And yes, cherry pie is still staying strong in the mix.

As for the heart and soul of July Fourth, I'm happy to report that the patriotic spirit is alive and well. We've tracked searches that look into historical figures and places, clothing and tattoos, decorating the homestead and making crafts, and how to sing songs and recite poetry that shows our love of the motherland. Interestingly, public interest in the Patriot Act picked up noticeably in June. Curiosity and debate about Patriot Act summary, Patriot Act pros and cons and the like shows how Search has become part of the democratic process, and underscores how we the citizenry continue to involve ourselves in the workings of our republic.

However you choose to declare your independence, you won't be alone. Happy Fourth of July.

Vera Chan
Senior Buzz Team Editor
Yahoo! Search