As a part of the JellyTalk series, I will be discussing Yahoo! Search BOSS and open search alongside Eric Jensen from Twitter Search and Rajat Mukherjee from Google Custom Search on Friday, May 15 in San Francisco.

Yahoo! Search BOSS, Twitter Search, and Google Custom Search are all innovations that give developers access to powerful search functionality for splicing the Web in new and interesting ways. Recently real-time splicing of the Web have become popular in mainstream products like Twitter, Facebook Newsfeed, and FriendFeed, and mashups like TweetNews, OneRiot, twitturly, and Swine Flu Twitter Monitor. In particular, TweetNews and OneRiot leverage both Twitter and Yahoo! Search BOSS APIs to promote fresh content while backfilling authoritative results from the web.

However, these services are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with open search. What more can we do to advance real-time discovery by leveraging these open services in harmony? What can we make available in our APIs to facilitate greater innovation in this space? In this upcoming JellyTalk, we hope to discuss and answer questions on these topics.

Please tune in to the JellyTalk live stream on May 15th at 11:00 a.m. PST.

Vik Singh
Yahoo! Search BOSS

Photo by Amit Gupta

What happens when we put a few folks on the Yahoo! Search team in aprons and task them to cook a meal for 450 hungry Yahoos? Find out tonight at 10 p.m. ET/PT on Food Network’s Dinner Impossible episode, “Yahoo! Search Scramble.”

Back in January, chef Robert Irvine and the Dinner Impossible crew took over the Yahoo! kitchens to help us celebrate the fifth anniversary of Yahoo! Search. Their mission: make the top 15 most searched dishes, each dish using a randomly assigned top searched ingredient. Chef Irvine put Search SVP Tuoc Luong and VP of Marketing Raj Gossain to work in this tough challenge. All we can say is that eight hours of hectic chopping, cooking, and sweating made for pretty good television!

Be sure to catch the episode tonight. In the meantime, check out some photos from the shoot.

Eugenia Chien
Yahoo! Search Blog

Of course, if you have any questions, let us know in the comments below.

Yahoo! Search Blog team

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

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

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

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

Yahoo! Search Blog team

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

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

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

The Yahoo! Search Blog team

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

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

Swing by and tell Joshua we sent you!

Yahoo! Search Blog Team

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

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

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

Priyank Garg
Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

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

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

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

Jeremy Zawodny

Yahoo! Developer Network

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Havi Hoffman

Yahoo!

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

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

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

Jon Granrose
Product Manager, Yahoo! Toolbar

P.S. – If you haven’t already tried it, take a look at the Delicious Firefox extension that lets you manage your Delicious account from anywhere on the web.