We know that users want instant gratification when searching for videos – you want to be able to watch the videos as soon as you find it. So today, we’re introducing a larger inline video play feature that shows the videos directly on the video search results page.

Some videos on the results page will display a “Play Now” link, which opens a large overlay window and plays the video on the results page. Users can watch part or all of the video, then close the window and resume browsing search results.

We are also embedding videos related to the one you are watching in the in-line video player window. Just click any thumbnail in the Related Video section and the video will start playing in the open in-line player window.

Give it a try and let us know what you think!

Manish Mohan Sharma and Sapna Chandiramani
Yahoo! Video Search Team

What are some of the must-sees in Barcelona? What are the most popular landmarks in San Francisco? Whether you are an armchair traveler or avid globetrotter, you can now take a virtual tour of popular points of interest when you search for a destination in Yahoo! Image Search. With the new travel image refiner, we are continuing our focus on satisfying user intent through a deeper understanding the Web and presenting related objects from the real world. The travel image refiner taps into this “Web of Objects” and lets you explore these popular points of interest, giving you more contextual information about your destination.

Let’s say you are planning your first trip to Rome. The new travel image refiner shows categories for popular destinations such as the Colosseum, Pantheon, and Trevi Fountain.

Click on the Pantheon tab and you will see an overlay of images so you can virtually tour image results for this ancient temple without leaving your original search results page. You can explore any of the popular places to visit in Rome and use the many images you have at your fingertips to help you decide where to go.

Even if you’re not planning on hopping on a plane soon, you can use the travel image refiner to find out more about a place you’ve heard about. Or you can use it to check out how your hometown has changed by delving into images from some of your favorite places in town.

The Yahoo! Image Search refiner is currently available for location-specific searches, but we are planning to expand this capability to other types of image searches as well. In the meantime, explore aspects of cities like Las Vegas or find pics of a major tourist destination, like Barcelona. We would love to hear what you think!

Yahoo! Image Search Team

Ramu Adapala, Anand Ramani, Sriram J. Satish, Borkur Sigurbjornsson, and Roelof van Zwol

Finding a great image online elicits a little thrill, but it can be tricky – if you’re looking for a pic to pop into a presentation or illustrate a Web page, you need to know if you’re allowed to use that photo, and how you can use it. Today, Yahoo! Image Search is launching a Creative Commons license filter that allows you to simply and quickly find images that are available for reuse.

When you use Yahoo! Image Search, you’ll now see a checkbox for Creative Commons allowing you to filter for images from Flickr that can be used commercially or that can be modified (remixed, tweaked, or built upon) with restrictions set by the image’s creator.

We knew from our March blog post about the release of the Yahoo! Image Search filters that our community wanted an easy way to search for images that could be reused. By launching the Creative Commons license search with Flickr and making it available to all our Yahoo! Image Search users, we aim to promote reusable work and to be transparent about the guidelines issued by the creator of a particular image. We’re proud to be the first image search engine to offer this capability.

Try it and let us know what you think. We bet your next PowerPoint will be prettier than ever.

Polly Ng and Anuj Sahai
Yahoo! Image Search

We’ve revamped the Yahoo! Image Search preview page to make it a lot easier to use. Now, when you click on an image from the image search results page, the top bar opens to reveal a richer and sleeker interface that displays a larger view of the image, more search results, and popular related searches.

Our new image preview page features:
• A search box with search assistance to let you quickly and easily search for more images.
• More image search results (so you don’t have to hit the back button to see your other options).
• Suggestions based on queries from other users making similar searches.

New Image Search preview page:

Old Image Search preview page:

Try searching for images of beautiful sunsets, faraway places (Rome, anyone?), or hot celebs like Brad Pitt. Our new image search results preview page will help you find what you’re looking for – maybe you’ll even discover something new.

Anja Krombholz, Chris Kurian, and Polly Ng
Yahoo! Image Search

The array of images available on the Web can be both a great resource and a daunting challenge. So, based on recent user tests, The Yahoo! Image Search team built new filters to make searching for images on the Web easier and faster.

This new set of filters helps you find what you want quickly, whether you are looking for black and white photographs of flowers, a sunset wallpaper, or images on Flickr. With the new Image Search filters, you can narrow down image results by color or black and white, by size, or even by specifying dimensions for the image results. You can also choose whether the images come from Flickr.

These filters are just the first improvements we will be rolling out in the coming months for Image Search. Stay tuned for more features that will make finding what you’re looking for a breeze.

Anuj Sahai and Ramu Adapala
Yahoo! Image Search

The Oscars are one of our favorite times of year at Yahoo! Image Search. Our fascination with movies, celebrities, and red carpet fashion actually can be passed off as work! For the 81st Academy Awards, we are rolling out a new image carousel in Yahoo! Image Search so you can find some of the newest, most popular pictures from Yahoo!’s news and entertainment portals when you search for your favorite stars and Oscar moments.

To see the Oscars image carousel, search for the name of any nominated film or actor in Yahoo! Image Search. You’ll see a rolling gallery of the newest photos above the regular search results, with arrows to toggle through the images. And if you happen to miss any of the key moments on Sunday night, try searching for Oscars or Academy Awards after the show.

If you’ve got your own favorite nominees, check out Yahoo! Movies’ complete coverage of the Oscars, where you can follow the buzz and see what Yahoo! users have predicted for this year’s winners. So far, Yahoo! users have picked “Slumdog Millionaire” for best picture, Brad Pitt for best actor (in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), and Kate Winslet for best actress (in “The Reader”). You can download a printable ballot and make your own bets too.

Join us as we prepare for the fun on Sunday night and enjoy the Oscars!

Yahoo! Image Search Team

Most people find videos on the web by typing keywords into a video search engine. As an editor for the Yahoo! Video Search home page, I often use the search engine in a slightly different way. When I’m looking for cool videos to feature, I usually don’t have a specific query in mind. Instead, I just watch loads of random videos and keep track of the good ones. I need the ability to browse the index without having to target a specific query.

So I utilize a trick that I’d like to share.

The search syntax is: site:domain.com

This lets me browse what’s in the Yahoo! Video Search index from a specific site — without limiting the search to a specific query.

For example, try: site:vsocial.com, site:break.com, site:grouper.com, site:putfile.com , and site:vimeo.com.

These searches will show you everything from each particular site that the Yahoo! Video Search engine has indexed. Keep in mind that the code won’t work for every site you may try, but our coverage is increasing all the time.

Christopher Akhavan
Yahoo! Video Search Editor

Here at Yahoo!, we work on bringing you lots of ways to tap the web for whatever interests you ‘ movies, music, games, etc ‘ both on Yahoo and from across the web.

This weekend, we’re featuring news, images, video and other related Oscar goodness for the 78th Annual Academy Awards, with a special Oscar site and videos you can find from across the web using Yahoo! Video Search. You can search for trailers for Brokeback Mountain, Munich, and Walk the Line as well as tons of other content, like movie trailer mashups.

And if you miss it, we’ll also feature highlights from the evening the day after. It’s another way to take in Hollywood however, and whenever, you want ‘ the best and worst dresses, weepy acceptance speeches, lifetime achievement awards, you name it.

Have a great weekend!

Yahoo! Video team

While you’re relaxing this holiday season, you may have heard about Yahoo’s exclusive, commercial free streaming of the CBS ‘Comedy Bowl,’ which includes episodes from the shows ‘Two and a Half Men’ and ‘How I Met Your Mother.’

As Andy mentioned recently, we debuted a new frontdoor for Yahoo! Video Search, where you can easily find this content and also search deeper into our index to discover related or other interesting videos. Check it out and leave us comments to let us know what you think.

Happy holidays.

Jeff Karnes
Yahoo! Video

I wanted to spread the word that we’re turning up the volume a bit on audio search by adding a new ‘Audio’ tab to the Yahoo! Front Page. Since launching Audio Search in August, user response has been great; proving yet again that the Web wants its audio. So, it is time that a larger audience gets to enjoy the sound’

If, like me, you’re audio searching for newer bands or the more obscure side of things, Yahoo! Audio Search is the place to start. There’s even a lot to browse about the late, great comedian Richard Pryor, including some podcasts if you’d like to hear some good commentary on his life of comedy.

Yahoo! Audio Search is engineered so that it can accommodate the broadest range of audio interests on the Web, which means more than just displaying structured data for mainstream music queries. It means finding all the content that’s out there; not just popular songs from the large record labels, but the smaller artists, podcasters and audio publishers who have already posted their content on the Web.

Along these lines, Audio Search is integrated with our media-RSS format to enable all musicians, podcasters and audio publishers to submit their content directly to us.

In addition, I would encourage you to check out the open Audio Search API which extends Audio Search functionality to the developer community outside Yahoo!. The tools are in your hands; build what you want.

That’s about it ‘ just tapping the volume knob a little ‘ so keep sending your feedback, and I promise we’ll be back with more updates as Audio Search evolves. Happy listening!

Regards,
Ethan Fassett, Product Manager

PS – For a deeper dive into Yahoo!’s strengths and strategy in multimedia search, check out this Podtech interview with Jeff Karnes.