Search Marketing Expo East kicks off in New York City on Monday, with many Yahoos on various panels to talk about important issues in the SEO and SEM community. We hope you’ll stop by SMX East and check out what we’re up to!

Monday, October 5, 2009

Time: 10:45 a.m. -12 p.m.
Panel: Duplicate Content Issues: The Search Engine Edition
Speaker: Cris Pierry, Senior Director, Search, Yahoo! Search

Time: 3:45 p.m. – 5 p.m.
Panel: Maps, Maps, Maps!
Speaker: Atif Rafiq, Director, Product Marketing, Yahoo! Local, Yahoo!

Time: 3:45 p.m. – 5 p.m.
Panel: Trademarks & Paid Search: How Have Things Changed
Speaker: Laura Covington, Associate General Counsel, Global Brand and Trademarks, Yahoo!

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Time: 12 p.m. -1:30 p.m.
Panel: Ask The Search Engines: Best Practices Edition
Speaker: Cris Pierry, Senior Director, Search, Yahoo

Time: 4:45 p.m. – 6 p.m.
Panel: Universal & Blended Search Opportunities
Speaker: Larry Cornett, Vice President of Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Time: 9 a.m. -10:15 a.m.
Panel: Search Meet Display; Display Meet Search
Speaker: Antony Taylor, VP, Display Platforms, Yahoo!

Time: 11:45 a.m. -12:45 p.m.
Panel: Managing Search Across Business Units
Speaker: David Roth, Director of Search Marketing, Yahoo!

Time: 2 p.m. – 3 p.m.
Panel: Ask The Paid Search Reps
Speaker: David Miller, Director, Sponsored Search Product Management, Yahoo! Inc.

See the complete list of panelists and location.

Yahoo! and Microsoft today announced an agreement that will improve the Web search experience for users and advertisers, and deliver sustained innovation to the industry.  For more information, check out Carol Bartz, our CEO’s post on Yodel here.

The Yahoo! Search Team

People have been clamoring to get their hands on Search Pad since we showed a demo video earlier this year. Today we are rolling out Search Pad to the public so you can see for yourself how it can help you organize research on the Web.

Search Pad helps you track sites and make notes by intelligently detecting user research intent and automatically collecting sites the user visits. Search Pad turns on automatically when you’re doing research, tracking sites to make document authoring a snap. You can then quickly edit and organize your notes with the Search Pad interface, which includes drag-and-drop functionality and auto-attributed pasting.

For example, if you are planning a trip to Durango, Colo., Search Pad detects your research intent and asks if you’d like to take notes. Search Pad then saves the sites you’ve visited, like the tourism office or a day spa you’re headed to, and lets you take more notes on the information you’ve found.

You can save your documents using your Yahoo! ID so you can access your documents from anywhere on the Web.  This helps you save any research you’ve done so you needn’t do the same searches over and over again.

After you’ve done your research, you can publish your document to a permanent URL to share with friends and family so they can check out your trip itinerary and chime in with tips. Using Search Pad, you can share research on that new digital camera that you are checking out, things to do this weekend, or any other research you might do on the Web. You can even share Search Pad documents on Facebook, Twitter, or Delicious.

Search Pad can help you save your work across an entire session or even multiple sessions. Our intent detection allows us to offer Search Pad during sessions where it is most needed, and stay out of the way when it’s not. Of course, you can also opt to use Search Pad directly at any point during your research.

At Yahoo!, we’re always looking for ways to innovate in search by challenging the model that search is just about a keyword and 10 blue links. We are constantly improving our technology and experience in ways that people need most — Search Pad is just the latest result of those efforts.

Search Pad goes live today in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina.  See for yourself how Search Pad can help you save time, share information easily, and make the hardest search research tasks more manageable.  Give it a try. We look forward to hearing your feedback.

Tom Chi

Senior Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Search

Over the next few weeks, Yahoo! Search will be at Search Engine Strategies (SES) in Toronto and the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose, CA. Come by and hear more about what we have up our sleeves.

SES Toronto
Monday, June 8
2:30pm-3:45pm
Panel: Universal and Blended Search: Comprehensive Visibility Challenges
Nick Cox, Senior Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

Semantic Technology Conference
Wednesday, June 17
8:30am – 09:45am
Executive Round Table: Semantic Search
Andrew Tompkins, Chief Scientist, Yahoo! Search

11:45am – 12:15pm
SearchMonkey and the Semantic Web
Kevin Haas, Senior Engineering Manager – SearchMonkey, Yahoo! Search

2:30pm – 3:30pm
Year of the Monkey: Lessons from the first year of SearchMonkey
Peter Mika, Researcher, Yahoo! Research

Hope to see you there.

Yahoo! Search

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

Although the fabulous Spanish island of Ibiza may be better known for its beaches and disco sunrises, it was the backdrop last week for a different kind of party: Two gatherings of researchers and technologists discussed the future of Web search, with a focus on semantic search.

The first of these meetings, organized and sponsored by the Yahoo! Search team, was a part of the VoCamp series, which focuses on vocabularies for the Semantic Web and other practical questions related to semantic interoperability. At the VoCamp event, we reviewed the existing tools for creating and publishing vocabularies, discussed the applications of semantic tagging, and created a few small vocabularies ourselves (for example, to allow modeling the availability of resources such as representing the opening times of a restaurant). Additional VoCamps are coming up this year in Washington, D.C., New York, Sunnyvale, and Bristol, England.

The second event focusing on Semantic Search was part of the yearly Future of Web Search workshop series organized by Yahoo! Research. We brought together some of the brightest minds in Information Retrieval with people who are working daily with semantic Web and linked data technologies. Sessions included topics ranging from disambiguation and query interface to NLP and information extraction.

And of course, since we were in Ibiza, we didn’t forget to enjoy the beautiful island. Check out these photos from the Future of Web Search event. And, a big thank you to all the researchers and developers who joined us!

Peter Mika
Researcher and Data Architect, Yahoo!

Photo credit: tommyh

This week, Yahoo! Labs announced the winners of our inaugural Key Scientific Challenges Program, where we provide seed funding and support for a handful of top Ph.D students who submitted proposals in Yahoo! Labs core research areas. Yahoo!’s senior research scientist Evgeniy Gabrilovich, who helped review the contest entries along with Ravi Kumar, Belle Tseng and Raghu Ramakrishnan, called out these winning proposals in the search technology category:

• Vertical Selection by Jaime Arguello of Carnegie Mellon University. Arguello’s proposal addresses vertical selection in search, the problem of selecting the verticals relevant to a user’s query. Arguello proposed research for better ways to acquire useful representations of vertical content and the need to model vertical search engine effectiveness on a query. His goal is to set up a framework for vertical selection by a search engine.

• Attention Routing by Polo Chau of Carnegie Mellon University’s Machine Learning Department. Chau conducts research on integrating data mining and human-computer interaction (HCI) to create an umbrella system for interactive mining of large graphs. Chau’s system provides fast, scalable tools to help analysts explore, visualize, and understand large graphs, like social networks, and pinpoint patterns, anomalies, and interesting properties among them.

• Detecting Searcher Frustration by Henry Feild of University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Feild’s proposal uses query logs to explore session boundary, task categorization, and ultimately detect when a search user has trouble finding the information they want. Through what Feild calls, “frustration detection and intervention,” he will build models to analyze the different causes of user frustration and develop new methods to address these issues.

• Object Search by Kim Cuong Pham of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne. Pham approached the idea of a semantic Web from a new angle. Instead of semantic Web’s original vision of embedding semantic data, he wants to use “computer technologies to search, read, analyze, and understand the Web, given its unstructured and somewhat chaotic format.” By understanding structured information on the Web, Pham says, “We are able to answer questions like “what are the homepages of all professors working in the database field,” or “what are all the shopping pages that sell digital cameras of at least 6MP but not less than $300.”

Winners receive funding and exclusive access to Yahoo! research scientists and data sets. You can see a list of all the winners on the Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges Program Website.

Jessica Hilberman
Yahoo! Search

Chef Irvine with VP of Marketing Raj Gossain and Search SVP Tuoc Luong

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

Fans of the Colbert Report may be familiar with the host’s notion of truth as defined by the individual – otherwise known as “truthiness.” As strange an idea as this may be, we believe there’s some legitimacy to the idea that people want sources of information that only confirm and never contradict their world view. Today we’re happy to announce that Yahoo! has created a search engine that provides exactly this functionality – Ideological Search.

This new search engine was built using Yahoo! Search BOSS technology and is available immediately. Building Ideological Search was a major scientific undertaking, as the big brains at Yahoo! Labs explain.

We’re excited to see the user response to this new product. If it’s anything close to what we expect, we may add a new Ideological Search tab to the Yahoo! front page.

With Ideological Search, you can pretend everyone on the web thinks just like you, so give it a try today!

Raj Gossain
Yahoo! Search

We are wrapping up the Spring 2009 season of Yahoo! Hack U – Yahoo!’s university hack day competitions. This season, students produced a group of hacks built on Yahoo! Search APIs, including:

• FireSale (by Patrick R. Jordan of University of Michigan): This cleverly named hack uses FireEagle and Local Search via YQL. It provides a location-based ad auction mechanism that augments local advertisers’ ads with Yahoo! Local Search data.

• Tangent (by Kunal Bhatia of IIT Delhi): Tangent is a javascript bookmarklet that allows you to fly off of tangential concepts and retrieve more information that you’re curious about. It first generates context using the Yahoo! Content Analysis Service, then displays information about any of the contexts generated using Twitter, Flickr, or Wikipedia data via Yahoo! Search.

• y!Vmail (by Arnab Nandi, Daniel Peek, and Pradeep Padala of UMich): This hack allows people to access their Yahoo! mail through a 1-800 number, using any touch tone phone. y!Vmail figures out which emails are important, and reads them first. The system also uses Yahoo! Search’s term extraction to summarize long emails. This hack won second place at UMich Hack U.

• Pick and Roll (by Michael Xu and Alex Guan of Georgia Tech): The aptly-named Pick and Roll hack visualizes NBA teams as they travel, keeps track of all of their results, displays news sorted by date, and highlight videos from NBA.com. This hack won first place at Georgia Tech Hack U.

• Skynet Search (by Jason Chen, James Lee, and Kon Pik of the University of Washington): A fast search aggregator that allows a user to search the web quickly across many kinds of media by loading only the content that the user wants to see.

We’ll be on the road again in fall. Check the Hack U website this summer for the 2009-2010 Hack U schedule.

Evan Goer
Yahoo! Search