Search Tips Blog Posts

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

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

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

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

• For UPS packages, simply type in your tracking number


• For FedEx or the U.S. Postal Service, just add the name before the tracking number. For example: 'FedEx [tracking number]' or 'USPS [tracking number]'

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

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

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

You can also combine these tricks for even more refined searches. Try: '"Sony VAIO" laptops OR notebooks.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Chu
Yahoo! Search

Staying focused on a task at hand in a world of information overload is really challenging these days. Every piece of information is an opportunity to disrupt my flow. I often find myself reading an article and asking questions like, "Where is Solihull?" or "What does 'ARM' stand for?" Then, I proceed on a 45 minute search to find answers, only to return asking myself again, "Where did all my time go and what was I looking for anyways?"

To solve this problem for me and a few hundred million users Reiner Kraft and his engineering team -- folks who have been researching these types of problems for years -- developed Yahoo! Shortcuts to make the vision of delivering relevant content and services at the point of inspiration a reality. You may have seen the post on the precursor to Yahoo! Shortcuts, Y!Q.

At the beginning of the year we worked with the Yahoo! Mail team to launch Yahoo! Shortcuts for mail. I knew we had something interesting when it passed the "wife-test" (my wife serves as a great barometer for whether a feature is actually useful). A few weekends ago we were headed into the city for a concert and my wife's friend had forwarded her the venue address. I glanced over to find that Yahoo! Shortcuts had detected the location and provided the exact cross-streets for the venue in a map similar to the one below. There was no need for her to pull-up a new browser window, navigate to a maps site, then copy and paste the address. It was all right there for her in this mini-map without her ever leaving the email.

It didn't stop with Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! Finance and parts of Yahoo! Travel also rolled out Yahoo! Shortcuts. Whether reading up on financial information or planning a vacation, the shortcuts offer added details in various online searches. And, most recently, Yahoo! News has also rolled out the shortcuts (many thanks to Rob Hall and the entire Yahoo! News team).

So, when you're reading a story on Yahoo! News and have no idea where Solihull is (myself included), or you just want to know more about what the Federal Reserve Board does, Y! Shortcuts can provide you with the quick answers you're looking for.

Whenever a jagged underline appears under a term, such as 'Federal Reserve' in the story below, simply click on it to see contextually relevant content in related news, photos, videos, web search results, maps, and more. If you know what type of content you want, just mouse over the term for a menu of options.

Yahoo! Shortcuts is about providing users with the information desired at the precise moment they want it -- from instant satisfaction of a passing curiosity to the ability to gain a deeper understanding of current events.

We are just getting started with Yahoo! Shortcuts and, as always, we welcome your feedback in the comments below. Which websites would you like to see Yahoo! Shortcuts deployed to? Any ideas for what content we could include in Yahoo! Shortcuts that would make you say "Wow!"? The floor is open.

Ariel Seidman
Yahoo! Search

It's that time of the year again where office pools make their rounds in the spirit of friendly competition and folks everywhere partake in the madness of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament. With sixty five teams competing within three weeks for the top slot, it's no wonder this tournament has so many inspired nicknames. For fans (and for those of you with skin in the game), we added a new shortcut to Yahoo! Search that provides a quick and easy way to stay on top of the games. Search for March Madness and get to where you want to go in one click. Check it out:

We've included seed numbers, game times, and when the games are in play, real-time scores. If you prefer, you can use our existing score shortcuts to get updates on a particular team. For example, try Gators score, UCLA score and Duke score.

For those of you who are a novice in a pool, Yahoo! Sports can help you get ready for tip off. We have some more sport shortcuts in the works to add to our growing list of shortcuts, so let us know if you've got any ideas and thoughts for others.

Carlos Teran
Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

Last winter, we released a beta of Open Shortcuts, a way to create your own custom keywords that take you directly to a site, a search, or start a task right from the search box. As Open Shortcuts increases in popularity, we're increasing the number of Open Shortcuts per user to 60.

To catch up, Open Shortcuts fans have been creating and using lots of shortcuts. Of note, last month, Steve Rubel wrote a great post on Open Shortcuts, and even included a handy list of Open Shortcuts to share, conveniently linked to make them easy to add to your own shortcuts list.

We didn't get around to thanking Steve at the time, so now seems good. So, here's an Open Shortcut to Steve's blog!

! rubel

Steve addresses an important question - how do I share my shortcuts with folks? The same conversation occurred recently on one of our internal developer lists, with people sending out their list of Open Shortcuts for people to share. So here's a quick review of Open Shortcuts - how to use 'em, and how to share 'em.

Using Open Shortcuts
We created a number of shortcuts to get you started, such as navigating to Craigslist: !clist; searching on Flickr: !flickr; or starting an application such as Notepad: !note. For a quick refresher, the Open Shortcuts FAQ has a couple of questions that'll get you started.

Creating Your Own Open Shortcuts
There are a couple ways to create more shortcuts - directly from the search box by typing !set shortcut_name URL, for example, and the other by using a form we provide. In both cases, you are prompted to confirm you'd like to set these up, and that URL can be used to share shortcuts with folks (like the new shortcut for Steve, above). We have a FAQ that explains this.

As a reminder, you can use the following keywords to view and edit shortcuts:

• !list Lists all your personal shortcuts and defaults
  
• !unset Removes shortcut_name from your list of shortcuts
  
• !help Displays Open Shortcuts Help page
  

That's it for now. If you'd like to share your Open Shortcuts, please consider posting them to our forum, or drop us a note below.

Thanks again, and please stay tuned for more updates coming soon!

Don Chennavasin
Yahoo! Search Product Manager

With all the recent discussion on where home prices are heading, we saw a great opportunity to improve our home valuation product on Yahoo! Real Estate. We?ve integrated our product with Zillow.com to provide users with free instant home value estimates and comparable home valuations for millions of homes in the U.S.

We also made it very easy to get your estimated home valuation: just go to Yahoo! Search and search for 'home values?. You can then refine your search with a Yahoo! Shortcut by entering any street address and city/state or ZIP to get the estimated value on Yahoo! Real Estate.

The home values page includes a map with your searched home, along with 10 comparables, and has a table showing each home?s Zestimate (estimated home value) and 1 week value change. We?re using Yahoo! Maps which provides satellite imagery in case you want to see what the neighborhood looks like. And we also provide a graph to show historical price trends and a link to Yahoo! Answers so you can ask questions on real estate and home values.

So go check your home?s value (or any home for that matter--your neighbor?s, your boss' ... you get the picture) and let us know what you think.

Fred Bao, Technical Yahoo!
Carlos Teran, Product Manager Yahoo! Real Estate
Yi Zhang, Engineering, Technical Yahoo!

I'm addicted to shortcuts. Shave 5 minutes from my commute by exiting 2 streets early and cutting through the back roads? I'm there. And with the Internet I�m always looking for ways to do things faster.

Fortunately, one of our engineers, Kannan, is equally impatient. He came up with the idea to open up Yahoo! Search Shortcuts so that anyone can create their very own shortcuts.

Open Shortcuts (beta) are custom keywords that take you directly to a site, a search, or start a task right from the search box. In Unix speak: if the search box is the command-line of the web, shortcuts are aliases.

To use an Open Shortcut, you type ! (exclamation point) followed by the name of the shortcut in the Yahoo! Search box. For example, type: !ebay lamps. This takes you directly to www.ebay.com and searches for lamps.

You can create your own shortcuts to:

• Instantly navigate to any URL on the Internet
• Easily recall common searches on Yahoo!
• Quickly search favorite sites
• Jump start frequently used Internet applications

We already developed a few Open Shortcuts to demonstrate how you might use them:

• Navigation example, type: !my to navigate to "http://my.yahoo.com"
• Common Searches example, type: !wsf to search "weather san francisco" on Yahoo!
• Search example, type: !wiki rozier to search for "rozier" on Wikipedia
• Application example, type: !mail bill@yahoo.com to compose a Y! Mail to "bill@yahoo.com"

To get started, read the instructions for creating an Open Shortcut and play around with 'em..

If a few months from now you can�t remember what shortcuts you created, just type !list and get a list of your Open Shortcuts.

Like or dislike, let us know what you think--are they helpful? What more would you like to do with them? We'll enhance and expand Open Shortcuts over time with your feedback.

Don Chennavasin
Product Manager, Yahoo! Search Shortcuts

Lalgudi Kannan
Technical Yahoo!

Update: The Y!Q Greasemonkey script is now compatible with both Firefox 1.0 and Firefox 1.5. Thanks to everyone for your feedback! The "official" link to the script from the Y!Q site will be updated later this week. In the meantime, simply make sure you have Greasemonkey installed, then right-click here to install the latest version of the Y!Q script.

Back in August, we announced that Y!Q had been integrated into Yahoo! Toolbar for Internet Explorer, enabling Toolbar users to select text on any Web page and get related search results on the spot — the latest embodiment of Y!Q's mission to enable search "at the point of inspiration." Firefox users quickly responded, “Great, but what about us?” Well, we heard you — just install the Y!Q Greasemonkey script, and you'll be able to perform a Y!Q search whenever — and wherever — the spirit moves you.

Also cool is the way the Y!Q Greasemonkey script came about: Jayanth, a former member of the Y!Q team who is now working on another project at Yahoo!, hatched the idea and ran with it on his own, one of many cool hacks coming from the team lately born from the vision and passion of one individual or small teams of like minded developers.

While we're on that subject, the Term Extraction and Contextual Search Web Services (Y!Q's close cousins over at the Yahoo! Developer Network) continue to fuel the imagination of internal and external "hackers" alike. Check out TagCloud.com (the evolution of a cool idea that we blogged about earlier this year), the Local Events Browser, a really slick, internally developed mashup that showcases a whole range of Yahoo! APIs (including the amazing new Yahoo! Maps APIs), and Matt Biddulph's intriguing use of term extraction to identify and visualize relationships expressed in unstructured Web content.

Stay tuned for more exciting news from the Contextual Search team in the coming months. In the meantime, don't be shy — we welcome your thoughts and suggestions for Y!Q, and would love to hear about your innovative uses of our Web Services.

Gray Norton
Product Manager, Contextual Search

As I eagerly await the arrival of my brand-spanking-new 60gb white Video iPod (for research purposes only, I assure my manager), I've been thinking about how I can fill my new device up with content, and I imagine many of you are doing the same.

Since I wanted to fill my new gadget as quickly as possible with video files found with Yahoo! Video Search, I realized that this would be a good time to mention that you can use the Media RSS feed from our Web Services API to easily pull in Yahoo! Video Search results as a video podcast with iTunes 6, and from there you can move them to your iPod. (So you can still use this feature with iTunes 6 even if your Video iPod hasn't arrived yet).

Here's what you need to do:

Step 1. Enter the video search search term you want results for (for example, "stunts") into our handy Media RSS feed generator below and watch as the feed URL automagically appears.

Yahoo! Video Search RSS URL Generator

To subscribe to the RSS feed for the above search, use this URL:

 

(the RSS feed URL will be shown here once you enter search term(s) above)

To learn more about this RSS feed and how to customize the results (for example, you might want to restrict your results to only MPEG or Quicktime files), or how to use our API for your own projects, check out the Yahoo! Video Search Web Services API.

Step 2. Take the RSS feed URL that just appeared above and copy it to your clipboard.

Step 3. Fire up iTunes 6, and under the "Advanced" menu choose "Subscribe to Podcast". Paste the URL you copied from step 2 into the window. You should see this:

Step 4. That's it! You'll see the downloadable video files that we've found online as results to your video search listed as the podcast "Yahoo! Video: stunts" (or whatever your search term was), and iTunes 6 will begin automatically downloading video files for your query. (don't forget to click the arrow next to your "podcast" name and click all the "Get" buttons for the video files you're interested in to make iTunes download them).

Once downloaded, you can view your new video files in the Videos section of iTunes 6, and fill your Video iPod up with them to your heart's delight. Enjoy!

We already feature these feeds as autodiscoverable RSS feeds in Yahoo! Video Search result pages (those of you with Yahoo! Toolbar or Firefox may have noticed this already), so if you have an RSS aggregator that supports Media RSS and/or RSS enclosures, you can use these feeds to automatically download the top video search results for your query as well!

Andy Volk
Product Manager, Yahoo! Video Search

These days, search has become such a fact of life, that everybody I talk to takes it completely for granted.

But it seems like every week I'm reminded why its so much fun working on a search engine that is used daily by millions of people, and most importantly by friends and neighbors and that lady in the store down the street. Take, for instance, last week ...

I was out for coffee at the local Starbucks when the guy ahead of us in the line had lost the piece of paper with directions to the restaurant he was meeting friends at ... and I was extremely happy to show him this:

So not only did it take me just one search to get the address and phone number, but now he has the listing and directions right on his cell phone ... :)

What was that? It is a new feature in our abstract generating algorithm that tries to guess the most used information about that page, and promotes it into the summaries for search results. Not only do we try to figure out the most used information on the page, but we also integrate relevant features from other parts of Yahoo!. For instance, in the example above, you can see that we have found Maps & Reviews on Yahoo! Local, and also found that Yahoo! Local can send the address and phone number to your mobile phone - so thats there too! But of course, its not always just content from Yahoo! - we also use content from the site itself if that's more relevant - try searching for Wal-Mart or 511 or FedEx ...

Whaddyathink? Go ahead! Try it out. And perhaps next time you need directions for that restaurant, or suddenly crave some ice-cream (or coffee), or want a quick look to see if you won the lottery, and maybe (just maybe) see if the lottery money somehow made it into your bank account Yahoo! Search might have the answer right there for you.

Kalpana Ravinarayanan
Product Manager, Yahooo! Search

When we first released Y!Q Contextual Search we also provided a Y!Q Demobar for download. With the Y!Q Demobar, you could highlight not just a few words, but an entire sentence, a paragraph, or even a complete article, and use that selection to trigger a search.

With the Y!Q Demobar, you could enjoy two of Y!Q's most important benefits:

1. Not having to worry about query articulation. Select as much text as you want and Y!Q will "automagically" determine the context from your selection and provide the most relevant results. (Try copying and pasting long text into a regular search box for comparison and you will notice the difference.)
2. Getting search results on the spot without leaving the page that you're on. Y!Q gives you your results in a small overlay window. Some of my colleagues call this a "search snack." (Does that make search results in a full-size window a search "meal"?)

We received lots of positive feedback after the initial release of the Y!Q but many of you were asking: "Why do I need to download an extra toolbar? Why not just add Y!Q to the regular Yahoo! Toolbar"?

Good news: We heard the feedback, and the latest version of the Yahoo! Toolbar for Internet Explorer now supports Y!Q (integrated along with other cool features, such as saving to My Web and Y! Music Engine controls). Install the latest Yahoo! Toolbar, select several words from the web page you're reading, and you'll see an actuator icon. Select the "Search" menu item and you'll get contextual search results, right at "the point of inspiration" when you see something interesting on the web (see Figure below)

But we didn't stop with Toolbar. We also added Y!Q to the new version of Yahoo! Messenger with Voice, within the LiveWords feature. Activate LiveWords from the Yahoo! Messenger preferences menu and interesting words in your IM conversation are under-lined. Click on those words to trigger a search, or just as with Toolbar, select message text to trigger a Y!Q search (see Figure below)

Moving towards a "select and click model" for searching takes a little getting used to. I was used to sometimes typing in long and specific queries in a toolbar or search box, which worked fine most of the time. Now that I'm using the latest Yahoo! Toolbar and Yahoo! Messenger, I don't miss the typing or cutting-and-pasting at all.

We don't think you'll miss them either, so please give it a try within Yahoo! Toolbar and Yahoo! Messenger, and let us know what you think. We're always interested in learning more on how to improve Y!Q.

Reiner Kraft
Technical Yahoo!

One of the items I work on is Yahoo! Shortcuts. A Yahoo! Shortcut is a quick way to use web search to get to the information you want, ideally faster than combing through the web results. Shortcuts results appear automatically when they're relevant to your search and link to content on Yahoo! or across the web. That's a bit of an awkward description, so let's get a better definition and see a shortcut in action.

A web query for "define shortcut" gives The American Heritage Dictionary's definition of "shortcut" as "A more direct route than the customary one" in the Yahoo! Shortcut section (look for the red "Y!" next to it near the top of the web search results page. The pattern of "define x" can be used to get definitions, as is pretty obvious, aka apparent, clear, evident - you can get a whole list of synonyms by using "synonym obvious".

Back to the definition of "a more direct route", there are a number of patterns or key words you can use to get results from other areas of Yahoo!. Looking at the tabs across the top of the search box:

• Images: "photos" or "pictures" in a web query will give 4 images and a link to all Yahoo! Image Search results. Example: "puppy pictures" (a favorite of my wife)
• Video: "video" or "videos" in the query gives a link to all Yahoo! Video Search results. Example: "brad pitt videos" (another favorite of my wife)
• Directory: some terms will trigger links to the Yahoo! Directory's pages of categorized sites. Example: "History"
• Local: a pattern of [city] [state] [business name / type] will give 3 results from Yahoo! Local plus a link to all results. Example: "San Francisco ca plumbers"
• News: "news" in the query will gives three news headlines via Yahoo! News and a link to all results. Example: "Iraq news"
• Products: various products or categories of products queries will give links to Yahoo! Shopping. Example: "digital cameras", "canon powershot"

Many people also end up using the Shortcuts for navigation. For example, "Pool" is used by many to quickly get to Pool on Yahoo! Games. Some savvy users just put an "!" on the end web queries that are Yahoo! properties to be taken straight there. "Mail!" will take you to Yahoo! Mail, "music!" to Yahoo! Music, "maps!" goes to Yahoo! Maps, and so on. (Ok, you smart people will point out that for maps you can just do a web search for an address and get a map at the top of the page, such as "550 Geary St, San Francisco, CA").

Lastly, with over 30 shortcuts on web search, there's plenty of ways to string them together to get things done faster. My wife will be headed to Las Vegas with some friends next month (yes, it is a bachelorette party and no, I'm not invited). She can use shortcuts to book her flight, look at prices and reviews for hotels in the area or a specific one, and line up a limo. When it's time to go, she can check the weather, get airport info, see if her flight is on time, check traffic, and see where to get cheap gas on the way to the airport.

Take a look at the web search shortcuts and see how they can help you find things faster. You can always click on the Shortcuts link on search.yahoo.com, our dedicated search home page, or on the top right of the web search results page, or by clicking the About link that's at the bottom of every shortcut. For access while on the go, take a look at the shortcuts for mobile devices.

Adam Durfee
Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

My dad is a bit of a gardener and he's also recently taken up roasting tiny batches of coffee beans. The results, besides earning the title of Papa Barista from my sister in law, are some great coffee and tasty veggies. He's been tinkering on both fronts - in the short term, new types of coffee beans every few weeks, and in the long term he's changed the mix in the garden, putting in more garlic this year, probably to tie in with the bumper crops of basil he gets and his pesto making activities.

We've been doing a little tinkering of our own on the Search front page at search.yahoo.com. No surprise that the focus of the page is search, but we got requests to add mail and news to the page, so we tried to do so with minimal impact on those who weren't interested. The result? We added individual mail and news modules that you can show or hide at will, so now if want to see your mail status or news headlines (or both), you've got that option. If not, you can simply leave the modules hidden. The choice is up to you.

Since the response has been good, we'll continue tinkering. The latest change to the page is the addition of a link to My Web, our personal search engine that allows you to save, recall, and share information you find online (check out Kevin's post for more info). In the short term we'll continue to test some different links and in the long term maybe change the mix a little as to what is shown where.

What can I say? Like father, like son. Grab a cup of fresh coffee (skip the pesto for now) and check the Search front page out at search.yahoo.com - we hope you like it. If you think of something you would like to see on the page or a change you think should be made, by all means, leave a comment below.

Adam Durfee
Product Manager
Yahoo! Search

If you run a public webserver, you have likely seen our webcrawler, named Slurp, in your logs. Its job is to find, fetch, and archive all of the page content that is fed into the Yahoo! Search engine. We continuously improve our crawler to pick up new pages and changes of your sites, but the flip side is that our crawler will use up some of your bandwidth as we navigate your site. Here are a few features that Yahoo!'s crawler supports that you can use to help save bandwidth while ensuring that we get the latest content from your site:

Gzipped Files: Our crawler supports gzipped files to reduce bandwidth requirements. On average, you will get a 75% savings when you enable compression for your site. Many webservers provide mechanisms for sending out HTML content in a compressed format (for example, mod_gzip for Apache). How much of your site's total bandwidth you can save will depend on how much of your content is compressed and how well it compresses. In general, static pages are good candidates for compression. Any user agent, whether it is a browser or a search engine spider, will let the webserver know it can process compressed content by adding "Accept-Encoding: gzip, x-gzip" to the header of its HTTP request. All major browsers support gzip compressed content. Also you should be happy to know that if our crawler has any trouble with a compressed page, it will re-fetch the uncompressed version. In practice, it does encounter a small percentage of decompression failures.

Smart Caching: Our crawler acts very much like a web cache. Once we grab your content, we hold onto it and keep a history of how it changes over time. We do this for a variety of reasons. One of them is so that we can use HTTP mechanisms designed to help reduce network usage when a client (that's us) repeatedly fetches a web file that has not changed. In particular, our crawler often sends the HTTP If-Modified-Since header (see section 14.25 of rfc 2616) when making repeat requests. If your webserver is setup to recognize this header, it will respond with a 304 HTTP status code instead of a 200 if the content is unchanged. The advantage of this is that a 304 doesn't include your page content, so it uses up less bandwidth than a full 200 response. Again, I'd like to emphasize that our crawler is conservative when it comes to ensuring it has the latest content; it won't use an If-Modified-Since request if it needs to re-fetch your content for any reason.

Most webservers will automatically handle If-Modified-Since requests for static content out of the box. Proper cache control of dynamic content (such as PHP pages and cgi scripts) can be tricky and is an advanced topic. In most cases, servers will play it safe by ignoring If-Modified-Since requests for dynamic content. There are several sites on the web that let you test the cacheability of your web pages. For the purposes of our crawler, pay attention to what they say about the Last-Modified value in your response header.

Crawl-Delay: There's one last trick you can use to help reduce the bandwidth requirements of your site. You can use a special robots.txt directive, crawl-delay, to reduce the speed at which our crawlers make requests to your site. This allows webmasters to manage their bandwidth without restricting content on their site from crawlers and is being used effectively by sites like Slashdot. A safe value for this would be a delay that would allow us to fetch every page on your site in about five days. So a five second delay (crawl-delay: 5.0) would be fine for a site with 2,000 pages, but not for a site with 100,000 or more.

We hope you find these tips for safely saving hosting bandwidth useful and we'd appreciate any feedback, questions or new ideas to further help improve how our crawler interacts with your web sites.

Dave Simpson
Yahoo! Search Engineering

Search Keys is a great little Firefox extension that makes navigating search results easier from the keyboard. I couldn't stand to see this cool functionality not yet available for Yahoo! Search, so I built a quick Friday Hack (more on that tradition later) last week...

Here's what you need to do to try it:

1. First, download the Search Keys extension for Firefox.
2. Shutdown Firefox.
3. Search your profiles extensions folder for search-keys.jar and replace it with this one.
4. Restart Firefox and do a Yahoo! Search.

You should now get little numbers in boxes next to your Yahoo! Search results. Press the number to jump to that result.

Once I know this is working well and we've gotten all the bugs out, I'll send a patch to the Search Keys maintainer. So let me know what you think.

Marc Abramowitz
Technical Yahoo

To celebrate the public launch of RSS on Yahoo! News Search I thought I'd write a quick blog entry and expose some of the more useful (and lesser known) features of the service.

We have over 7,000 sources and searching them is monkey easy; just go to search.yahoo.com/news (or news.yahoo.com) and type into the search box.�But if you want to get a bit more advanced and make very focused queries, you can do some really cool stuff.

Here are a few things to try.

Advanced Searches

By Location

Curious what the Canadian press thinks about the Iraq war? A search for iraq location:canada queries only news sources in Canada.

By Source

Interested in the BBC's coverage of the British Prime Minister? Just search for source:bbc blair.

By Category

Want to keep an eye on your home team? Try cat:sports houston if you live in Houston.

By Language

How about news in German? (Notice the "vl&=lang_de" parameter in that URL?)

By News Type

For all press releases involving IBM, use the newstype option: newstype:pr ibm.

More Advanced Options

You can compose your own advanced search by using the above search commands or use our advanced news search page.

RSS Support

Two other cool features of Y! News Search are RSS support and the ability to add any search to My Yahoo!:

• Use the 'Add to My Yahoo!' button on the search result page to add any news results you want to your My Yahoo! page.
• RSS: using the new xml button on the News Search result page, you can now turn any search into a fresh RSS feed. For example hurricane location:florida gets you your own ongoing feed of hurricane news from Florida. The only restriction is that the source parameter doesn't work in RSS mode, and some providers may choose to opt out of RSS results.

Finally, it's worth noting that the feeds are now full-blown RSS 2.0 rather than the old RSS 1.0 RDF format that we first used.

Enjoy the new Y! News Search, and let us know what we can do to make it better.

Jacob Rosenberg
Technical Yahoo!

In looking at popular searches on movies for the last five years, distinctive trends have emerged. For big-budget blockbusters with A-List stars, buzz builds months in advance -- usually when the initial trailer hits the Net. Lesser-hyped movies may do a slower and smaller build, but the result is almost always the same.

The result involves a large spike in search on the Friday the movie opens, followed by sustained searches throughout the first weekend and a eventual leveling off. Some stick around longer than others, but almost all movies meet the same fate and flatline two to three months following their debut.

There is one movie that is the exception, the outlier that defies common wisdom. I assume you know where I'm headed. To a galaxy far, far away.

Star Wars is more than a movie -- it's become a universe of dedicated fans who flock to the Internet to meet, discuss, and gather information. This sci-fi touchstone was in our top 20 movie searches when we began tracking buzz in 2000 and has never departed. It's faced some recent challenges from powerhouse trilogies Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and The Matrix. These three mighty movies have also built strong cult followings on the Web, but will they still be popular in search in 2030?

That's the true testament to the popularity of Star Wars. A film released in 1977, it's in our top 100 searches today. No other movie is quite like it. Below is a graph of the movie titans in search over the last 30 days. Luke and Leia eclipse Harry with the recent DVD release of the first three Star Wars films, while Neo and Frodo keep chugging along at a consistent pace years after their film debut.

What films do you think we'll be searching on 25 years from now? Will The Force still be with us? Are there any concepts out there in the current world of pop culture that will still resonate a quarter-century from now? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Erik Gunther
Yahoo! Buzz Index Editor

Everyday, I go through my bookmarked blogs. I know. Before you even say it, I know RSS is the way to go. I guess you can call me old-fashioned because I don't mind actually visiting a site to read the latest posts. Some may find it unbearably slow or even anachronistic, but I enjoy my daily slog through my bookmarks. Some were sites I used for fodder when I worked on Yahoo! Picks, others wound up on my list through research for buzz topics, and still others ended up in my bookmarks through pure serendipity.

When you think about blogs, search may not be the first thing that comes to mind. I find most blogs end up staring back at me from the browser window thanks to links from other blogs. But people search for blogs on a variety of subjects -- in the past week, we've seen over 3,000 different search terms with the word "blog" in them -- everything from "Dream Blog" to the more philosophical "What does blog mean?"

Tools that help a person establish a blog presence on the Internet are insanely popular in search. Xanga and LiveJournal are the top two spots for those looking to start a blog. Both of these services are firmly ensconced in our top 500 search terms. Blogging seems to have replaced the old "Dear Diary..." among teenagers and these two destinations are the hottest places for teens looking to work through adolescent angst.

Here's how they measure up in searches over the past 60 days:

Xanga's on top, but LiveJournal runs a close second. What's interesting to note is the spikes that occur every weekend as people jump on the blog bandwagon in their spare time.

Although I'm loathe to give up my trusty bookmarks, someday I'll see the light. I swear. Beyond me switching to an RSS reader, I'd love to know what trends you see taking place in the blogosphere over the next few months.

Erik Gunther
Yahoo! Buzz Index Editor

We live up in the Santa Cruz Mountains (Northern California), and as a result we were stuck with dial up access until a few months ago. My daughter, who is 16 �, has been on the "Quest for a Car" for some time now, but prior to our getting broadband, her search pretty much consisted of calling me from her cell phone whenever she came across a car with a For Sale sign. Also, not wanting to waste any time, she would have already called the owner and would have full details to relay to me when she called. Now, of course, this always took place while I was at work, and in the middle of trying to get something done.

Then, about 3 months ago, DSL made its way into our neck of the woods, and it wasn't just our Internet access that went into high speed, so did her car search. Suddenly I'm getting emails about cars listed on craigslist (often followed by a phone call to make sure I got the email) -- things like convertibles, 4x4s, old trucks, and other vehicles designed to make a parent groan inwardly.

Somewhere along the line, I pointed out to her that there were other websites that listed used cars. Over the next few weeks she taught herself how to use the search refinement tools on the used auto sites. It was quite entertaining from my end to watch as she slowly came to terms with the kinds of cars that would actually be in her price range (yes, evil parents that we are, we made her come up with a fair percentage of the cost). Eventually she had it narrowed down to a handful of makes from a certain range of years that were most likely to come up with a car that she could afford.

One of the most interesting parts of the experience for me as a parent, was seeing how different the process of finding a car was for her compared to me when I was her age. I either looked at the classifieds in the newspaper or kept an eye out when passing by the unofficial used car lots in the small town I grew up in. For my daughter, her first instinct was to go online. No used car dealers -- that would take too much time. No newspapers -- what good is three lines of text? She wanted details -- does it have a CD player, is it an automatic, etc., etc. Most of all, she wanted pictures. Was it a good color, did it look like it was in good shape, did the insides look okay? All of those things were checked out before ever giving the owner a call to set up a time to actually look at the car.

In the end, she found a car by searching on Yahoo! Autos (tell me you didn't see *that* coming!). It is now sitting in our driveway, and next we get to go through "The Driving Test."

Jerry Welch
Lead Surfer

If you don't mind me dropping in every week to discuss subjects from the frivolous to the enlightening, I'll be happy to kick a little knowledge your way. Let me say I appreciate the depths of your interest in certain topics that are always hot (can anyone say Britney?), but even more, I appreciate the breadth of what you're seeking. The ways in which you turn to the search box on such a variety of subjects offers a reflection of what drives your life.

I'm on the search beat every day, so I tend to get a little jaded about hype. Everyone loves an underdog, and I'm no exception. So when a little buzz ripple blossoms into a full-fledged trend, I tend to identify. Such is the case with the movie Napoleon Dynamite. While many big-budget summer blockbusters have come and gone, the little engine of Napoleon Dynamite is chugging along in our top 500 searches. Reaching out to the coveted teen audience, the indie flick did a super-slow-mo build to prominence. But unlike the shooting stars who performed mightily in their opening weekend only to slip quietly toward video, Dynamite has held steady in search for the better part of three months. On its way to cult fandom, the film inspired searches on "Napoleon Dynamite quotes" (+18%) and "Napoleon Dynamite soundtrack" (+62%) over the last week -- adding further evidence of the film's geeky yet oh so-powerful legs.

To celebrate a little movie that could, we present this indisputable visual evidence for your enjoyment:

Do you have a favorite movie, TV show, or band that built slowly toward mainstream acceptance? Comments? I'd love to know what you think.

Erik Gunther
Yahoo! Buzz Index Editor

Like sizable percentage of my engineering minded friends and coworkers who don't use Windows, I often find myself using Mozilla FireFox rather than Internet Explorer.

But being on a non-Windows platform means that none of the Search Toolbars work for us. In fact, I'm often asked when we'll see a toolbar for non-IE browsers.

Well, Pat McDonald e-mailed me to mention the FireFox Toolbar (beta, of course). And Ross Mayfield noticed it too. So I had to check it out.

True to its claims, it works just fine on Mac OS X. (It probably works just fine on Linux/BSD too.) It supports a ton of search services, including Yahoo Search and Yahoo Finance. I suspect we could add Yahoo News without much effort too.

Anyway, if you're a FireFox user, check it out.

Jeremy Zawodny
Technical Yahoo!

Tracking trends on the Internet through search is actually a really cool job. I get to put my finger right on what people are looking for every day...and I know more about Britney Spears, J. Lo, and Paris Hilton than I ever truly wanted to.

Right now, one of the hottest topics on Yahoo! Search is the offspring of presidential candidates. Between appearances at the MTV Video Music Awards and the RNC, political daughters are red-hot right now. Searches on the Bush twins and the Kerry sisters spiked dramatically over the last week as this graph illustrates:

Jenna Bush leads the pack followed closely by Alexandra Kerry. Queries on "Kerry Daughters" and "Bush Twins" are also up over 500% in the past week.

Shameless plug here -- if you're interested in trends and the latest in pop culture, top search terms from the Buzz Index are also available via RSS feeds.

Erik Gunther
Yahoo! Buzz Index Editor

Walking around the Campus is an interesting experience. It's located at the far end of the San Francisco bay with lots of trails for hiking and jogging. On one of the beautifully clear days, many folks keep thinking that it might be fun to go out and enjoy being outside.

Of course, we don't. I mean sure the sun is bright and shiny and all, but one of us got this really bad sun burn and...well, never mind, let's just say there's another reason that our various significant others have considered getting us vitamin A booster shots: we love what we're doing.

No doubt about it, search is pretty darn cool.

Despite what you may have read in some news sources, Yahoo! Search does indeed offer dictionary definitions and a search line calculator. Granted, we had the calculator tool for a while if you count the one that's in AllTheWeb, but it took a while to move it to the main search box. More than likely it was stuck in a moving box next to one of those carved coconut monkeys we bought on vacation in Orlando, but I digress.

To be honest, it's easy to miss because we never really blow a big horn about a lot of the things we have. Take, for instance, some of the hidden search tricks we can do. Most folks probably know about the stuff like you can search for content in specific file types (including Microsoft Powerpoint, and XML), and you probably know most of the shortcuts we're constantly adding to, but there are a few others that, well, we've been sorta keeping to ourselves.

One is the "s:" shortcut in Yahoo! Messenger. Let's say you're on line with your Dad who is planning on doing some shop work. He's got an old desk of yours that he wants to redo but, since you were a messy child, it's currently coated in stain resistant, latex paint. He's worried that sanding might be a problem. After a bit of discussion you decide to do some research, and enter in "s:latex remover" into the conversation window and you both get to see a number of results that might be helpful.

Another semi-hidden treasure we offer is the inurl: prefix. This is particularly useful if you want to search for something which happens to be on a shared server. A good example is ibiblio.org (previously known as sunsite). This is a fantastic resource loaded with all sorts of different goodies, one of which is a herbal reference site (so we can find a nice anti-rickets supplement). By specifying a search like: site:ibiblio.org inurl:herbmed rickets we get a bunch of articles detailing what we're looking for. And a mental note to stop by the cafe and pick up a few oranges.

No, none of these are perfect. Mostly because "perfect" depends entirely on the perception of the user. And for us, we're never really satisfied. There's always one new cool thing we'll try and add in because it's something we found pretty useful, and we'll keep plugging away until we think it's better.

Sure, we may be inside more often than we should, but it's mighty satisfying to walk out at the end of the day and take a deep breath knowing that we're doing something pretty cool, and give someone another tool to get to the info they want.

JR
Technical Yahoo!