Yahoo! Web, Image, and Video search experiences on both desktop and mobile devices are now powered by the Microsoft platform in the US and Canada (English), with more markets to come. The speed in which this was completed is a testament to the great work and partnership between a number of Yahoo! and Microsoft employees, the ranks of which are numerous.  I’d like to express my sincere appreciation for each person who contributed to this great accomplishment.

With this week’s milestone behind us, Yahoo! will continue to drive technology innovation in the search experience to bring more value to users and advertisers alike. We are focused on creating rich, immersive experiences that foster serendipitous discovery for people across the Yahoo! network.  As we shared last week, we are also working hard on finalizing our revenue model for the Yahoo! Search BOSS program going forward, and will be offering other search-related tools for publishers in the months to come.

We continue to achieve our goals and I look forward to the opportunities ahead of us all.

Shashi Seth
Senior Vice President of Yahoo! Search Products

Later this week, we will begin transitioning the back-end technology for Yahoo! Search in the U.S. and Canada (English) over to the Microsoft platform, and will post an update when the organic search transition is complete for both Web and mobile searches.  Keep an eye out for the “Powered by Bing” indicator at the bottom of our search results page, which will indicate that you are viewing listings from Microsoft.  And of course, as we’ve stated before, you’ll continue to enjoy the same enhanced Yahoo! experience that surrounds the listings themselves – such as rich results, Search Assist suggestions, site filters, related topic suggestions, and more to come.

I know many in the developer and publisher community have had questions about whether this transition will impact tools we offer like SearchMonkey, Site Explorer, BOSS and our search APIs.  We’ve been hard at work sorting through these details with Microsoft and are happy to share updates for you today on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog, and in the blog posts below from the Site Explorer and SearchMonkey teams. Yahoo! has learned a lot from working with the developer and publisher communities on these products, and we are committed to supporting and enhancing a strong ecosystem that you can count on. We look forward to the next generation of search-related publisher tools to come, so stay tuned for more on this front.

In addition, this week we’re beginning testing of paid search account transitions, and advertisers can read more about that on our Yahoo! Search Marketing blog.

Shashi Seth
Senior Vice President of Yahoo! Search Products

• Enhancing results on over 60% of all Yahoo! Search Result Pages, with relevant images, links or other useful information about listings.
• Providing “object filters” for over 18% of Yahoo! Search results, including the ability to filter search results by your favorite Web sites.
• Jumpstarting Yahoo! Search initiatives to provide richer search experiences, including automatic rich results and richer object displays on Yahoo! Search.

In keeping these previous efforts to bring structure to the Web, our enhanced results program will continue as we transition organic search listings to Microsoft. As part of the enhanced results program, we will be adding new entities (including people, Q&A, and real estate) to power both additional enhanced results and object filters within Yahoo! Search.

All of the existing enhanced result templates will continue to be generated from websites’ page markup and structured data feeds, and Yahoo! will continue to show this structured data on the Yahoo! Search results page, along with Microsoft’s organic listings. Over time, some of this structured data processing will be supported natively by the Microsoft platform. Webmasters will continue to have the ability to affect the presentation of a search result through page markup on their site (microformats and RDFa).

As we look to the future of Yahoo! Search, we are focusing on new search-related offerings we believe will provide additional value for publishers and partners.  In order to align our resources on strategic priorities, we have decided to close the SearchMonkey developer tool, gallery, and app preferences on October 1, 2010.  As a result, third party custom result apps, infobar apps, and data services will no longer appear on Yahoo!’s search results.  For developers who wish to retain their code, please export it using your favorite copy/paste tool before then.

We know many people enjoyed being part of the SearchMonkey developer community, and we want to give a heartfelt “thank you” to all of the developers and webmasters who have participated over the last two years.  We look forward to continuing to work with developers to explore new and interesting ways to incorporate useful applications into the search experience.

Natasha Fattedad
Principal Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

Later this week, organic search listings on Yahoo! Search will start to be powered by Bing in the US and Canada (English) markets, and webmasters should begin familiarizing themselves with the Bing Webmaster Center tool.

However, you should continue to provide your site information to Yahoo! using Site Explorer, because in many parts of the world search results will continue to be powered by Yahoo!’s systems until the full transition is complete for all markets by early 2012. This will help to ensure that you continue to get high quality traffic from searches originating on Yahoo! and our partner sites, even in markets that are not yet transitioned to Microsoft’s systems. We will share site information that you provide on Site Explorer with Microsoft during this transition period, to ensure that you get high quality traffic from search results that are powered by Bing also.

Once all markets are being served by Microsoft, we plan to refine the focus of Yahoo! Site Explorer, and webmasters should use Bing’s Webmaster Center to provide information about their website and its structure. Of course, we will notify you well in advance of all markets being transitioned to Bing’s content systems.

Yahoo!’s Site Explorer team is continuing to innovate and provide new features for webmasters. We are planning features that provide richer analysis of the organic search traffic that you get from the Yahoo! network and our partner sites. Stay tuned for more details, and in the meantime we would love to hear from you as to how we can serve the webmaster community better.

Please review these FAQs for more details.

Hemant Minocha
Product Manager, Site Explorer, Yahoo! Search

Highlights of Yahoo! speakers at SES:

Tuesday, August 17

Search: Where to Next?
11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
Speaker: Shashi Seth, Senior Vice President, Search Products

Digital Asset Optimization
1:30 p.m.–2:30 p.m.
Speaker: Josh Cobb, Sr. Director, Americas/Business Development & Partnerships Group

Price-per-Click (PPC) Lab
3:00 p.m.–5:15 p.m.
Speaker: David Roth, Director of Search Marketing

Developing Great Content
4:15 p.m.–5:15 p.m.
Speaker: Wendi Sturgis, Vice President, North America, Business Development and Partnership Group

Wednesday, August 18

Crossing the Digital Divide: The Leap from Search to Display
11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m.
Speaker: Dave Zinman, Vice President and General Manager, Display Advertising

Getting Mobilized Marketing Strategies
1:00 p.m.–2:00 p.m.
Speaker: Paul Cushman, Senior Director, Mobile Sales Strategy

Thursday, August 19

Social and the Marketing Mix
2:00 p.m.–3:00 p.m.
Speaker: Bobby Figueroa, Vice President, Product Development

Advanced Paid Search Tactics
4:45 p.m.–5:45 p.m.
Speaker: Jon Mette, Senior Strategist, Search Optimization and Strategy

See the complete SES San Francisco conference agenda.

The Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog will be tweeting (#sessf), posting to Facebook, and uploading snaps to Flickr page. So check back here for updates. We hope to see you there!

In this screenshot of our tests, the boxed areas of the search results page are coming from Microsoft’s platform, while the rest of the page is still powered by Yahoo! – as we described when our search alliance received clearance earlier this year.

In the coming months, we will also be integrating Microsoft’s mobile organic and paid search listings, so Yahoo! Mobile search fans in the U.S. and Canada will also eventually see Microsoft organic and paid search listings on their phones. And, as with all Yahoo! Search experiences, Yahoo! will continue to innovate and enhance the overall consumer experience around those core listings.

Pending the results of our current testing, we anticipate that our U.S. and Canada organic search listings in both desktop and mobile experiences will be fully powered by the Microsoft platform beginning in the August/September timeframe, and paid search in October.

For more details on the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance, check out the Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog.

Kartik Ramakrishnan

Vice President, Yahoo! Search Product Operations

Yahoo! has been at the forefront of content discovery since our early days as “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” Today we provide a unique blend of the most popular and most effective types of online discovery – from editorial, communications, and search to newer social sharing. Every day, people are sifting through the massive amount of information on the web and exploring news, videos, images, and other information on Yahoo! Search technology is becoming more critical to helping people find the stuff that interests them most, no matter where they are online. Today, tons of searches can actually be done without ever hitting return on a search box – for example, by checking out our contextual shortcuts for underlined words while you’re perusing the latest news, or using cool new mobile apps.

The industry as a whole is changing rapidly, and as search continues to evolve, so will the measurements used to understand the market. People no longer search to find a list of blue links; they search to find answers in the shortest amount of time possible. We believe that surfacing the right information at the right time is more important than the number of total results delivered or number of traditional queries conducted.

As we push forward with new search features to bring relevant search results to more people in more places, we look forward to talking with folks like comScore and the industry at large about how to measure the new paradigm of search. Our goal is to help evolve measurement standards, definitions and metrics so the industry has what it needs to accurately understand trends in search share across different types of searches and different companies.

What do you think is the best way to measure the success of a search provider – share of queries, share of query type, share of revenue, engagement, consumer loyalty, search sessions per month?  There is no single answer to this question, but I expect that as the industry evolves, we will identify a blend of metrics to better meet the needs of all audiences who are interested in what’s happening throughout the search industry.

Shashi Seth
Senior Vice President of Yahoo! Search Products

We’ve just launched the new Yahoo! News Search page for French, Spanish, German, and Indonesian language users in 11 international markets.

For example, check out the new Yahoo! News Search results page in German for soccer star Michael Ballack, with new refiners on the left side of the page:

This is a part of our effort to focus on the needs of international markets. If you use Yahoo! in French, German, Spanish, or Indonesian, be sure to search for any hot news topics in the enhanced News Search page. We will be rolling out the new Yahoo! News Search page in more global markets so please check back for updates.

Paul Ko
Yahoo! Search

People are asking questions about how to be green at home on Yahoo! Search. We’ve seen questions like, “how to compost,” “how to build a solar panel”, and “how to build a green PC” spiking on Yahoo! Search this year. In fact, searches for solar power-related queries are popular — “home solar panels” are up 11% on Yahoo! this month, and “solar oven” searches are up 14%.

Reusing goods is a big component of the green DIY movement, and people are looking for all kinds of creative ways to reuse and recycle. Searches for “recycled crafts,” “recycled art” and “recycle decorating” are hot on Yahoo! Search this month, as are searches for “reusable snack bags” (up 117%) and “reusable metal toothpick” (up 1200%).

If you’re looking for even more ways to be green, check out the Yahoo! Search green trivia game (don’t peek at the answers in the comments section!) Or take a look at  Yahoo!’s Earth Day microsite to learn global warming myths and facts, how to turn your electronics into cash and more.

Yahoo! Search Blog Team

Yahoo! Search is featuring a bunch of green trivia questions like “What’s the difference between brown eggs and white eggs?” or “Which city has the highest gas prices?. If you need a cheat sheet, you can find the answers to these puzzles and more by searching on Yahoo!. Yahoo!’s Earth Day site also highlights trending green topics that people are searching for on Yahoo! as well as great tips and tricks for what really matters when it comes to living a greener lifestyle.

So how many answers to green trivia questions did you find?  Answers will be revealed in the Comments section tomorrow, so stay tuned!