At Yahoo!, we’re focused on creating deeply personal digital experiences and there’s no doubt that one of the biggest, if not the biggest, priorities for us is to bring those products and ideas to the mobile user, whether they’re using feature phones, smartphones or tablets.

We’ve got some amazing mobile experiences, from News, Sports and Finance, to Mail, Messenger and entirely new products like IntoNow and Livestand. Our commitment is to deliver these products in ways that help all of our users (and advertisers) enjoy engaging and seamless experiences across all the devices they use.

Our plan is to keep moving, to keep innovating, and to continuously measure and scrutinize what’s working and what isn’t – so we can make room for great new products. In that spirit, today we’re decommissioning several of our current mobile apps. We will be sending a notification later today that thefollowing apps will no longer be supported:

We’re moving forward with a “mobile first” mindset. You can expect to see more new Yahoo! mobile products in 2012, especially in areas ripe for innovation that build on Yahoo!’s strengths, such as companion experiences for TV like IntoNow, new ways to experience personalized media like Livestand, and some of our most popular and useful mobile apps like Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Sportacular and Flickr, which are already being used by millions of people around the world. And we’ll be building these experiences with disruptive technology that’s going to change the mobile game well beyond Yahoo!.

For apps such as AppSpot and Sketch-a-Search, we decided to integrate the key features you know and love into the Yahoo! Search app. For example, we recently announced the app search feature in the Yahoo! Search app for iPhone. Stay tuned for moreupdates to the mobile search apps for both iPhone and Android.

With more than 700 million users around the world, we’ve got a huge and growing audience. We’re going to bring them the Yahoo! they love on every device in their life.

Stay tuned for a lot of action from Yahoo this year. 2012 has just begun and we’re just getting started.

– Yahoo! Mobile Team

The newly launched Yahoo! Content Analysis service replaces Yahoo!’s popular Term Extraction service and now provides advanced content analysis on either text or a URL, leverages Yahoo!’s state of the art machine-learned ranking (MLR) technology to extract key terms from the content, and, more importantly, to rank them based on their overall importance to the content. The output you receive contains the keywords and their ranks along with other actionable metadata.

On top of entity extraction and ranking, developers need to know whether key terms correspond to objects with existing rich metadata. Having this entity/object connection allows for the creation of highly engaging user experiences. The Y! Content Analysis output provides related Wikipedia IDs for key terms when they can be confidently identified. This enables interoperability with linked data on the semantic Web.

Finally, sometimes you’re interested in the whole document in addition to its key terms. We provide classification for your content as well. We’ll map your content or URL to our deep and descriptive taxonomy.

Y! Content Analysis supports US English and Chinese languages for entity detection and ranking. Classification supports only English and more languages will be added gradually.

Our new service replaces the current Term Extraction Service, which is expected to end on March 31, 2012. We will continue to support the Term Extraction requests, but calls must be directed to our YQL table since we’ll be shutting down the non-YQL service. More details can be found on today’s YDN blog post.

The new features and MLR are supported only in the new request format. Give it a try today!

– Peter Levinson, Product Manager, Yahoo! Content Analysis

When launched, Yahoo! Search BOSS, offered developers a search API with the power, simplicity, and flexibility demanded by the marketplace. Yahoo!’s BOSS API currently enables thousands of customers with “Search as a Service,” used in a wide variety of online applications. The BOSS API was just the beginning.

Today, we are announcing a new home for Yahoo! Search BOSS, boss.yahoo.com, and three new BOSS offerings: BOSS Hosted Search, BOSS Site Search and BOSS Shortcuts. The new offerings address user engagement, traffic recirculation, monetization, and high development and maintenance costs.

Whether you’re a site owner looking for a robust customizable search solution, a developer that needs the utmost flexibility for search as a service, or a publisher that needs quality solutions that deliver higher user engagement, boss.yahoo.com has it all.

BOSS Hosted Search, available globally today, offers a free-of-charge web search experience, highly customizable right out of the box. In minutes, you can configure a web search experience much like the Yahoo! Search page with structured content, search refiners, image modules and other rich assets. Simply pick the bells and whistles that meet the look and feel you desire, insert the generated code snippet into your page and you are done. It is Search built your way and offers opportunity to apply for revenue sharing through search advertising.

BOSS Site Search. The concept of Site Search has been around for many years, but the products available in the marketplace leave a lot to be desired. Publishers deserve a solution that is more focused on the content of their site, that delivers results that are highly relevant and fresh, that offers rich customizations, and that can be deployed with ease.

Available globally today through our Private Alpha program, BOSS Site Search provides a hosted site search solution that delivers results that are highly relevant and fresh. This enables you to keep your users more engaged with your content and stay longer on your site.

BOSS Shortcuts.  Search is more than just the perfect display of meaningful results based on user keywords. It’s also about recommending related content based on the context of what a user is reading on a publisher site. Existing solutions are often over-commercialized, deliver poor results and drive users away.

Available today through our Private Alpha program for the US, Canada, India, and UK markets, BOSS Shortcuts delivers technology that understands the content to help analyze your article pages and find terms that engage with your audience. When users click on these terms a contextual window is presented filled with highly relevant results from your site, the web, and our ad marketplace.

New Yahoo! Search BOSS API Updates

In addition to the new BOSS products, we are pleased to unveil new updates for the Yahoo! Search BOSS API:

·      Making Ads Simpler and Easier – Today, we are making the process of signing up for Yahoo! Ads and getting access to them easier. After completing a simple application form, start getting access to ads and monetizing offerings within a few days. And best of all, both ads and search results continue to be from the same service, and developers get one simple statement at the end of the month. Learn more from the documentation and in the FAQ.

·      New Markets — This morning we added more than 10 new markets for which we now serve search results. Flemish you say, well we got it covered. See a full list for all the various services.

It has been a momentous year for Yahoo! Search BOSS, from the launch of BOSS v2 in April, continued addition of new features, and today’s news of the new BOSS Portal and additional API updates.

Please keep a watch out on the Yahoo! Search blog and on the BOSS API Yahoo! group for  many more interesting additions coming your way for 2012.

– Ashim Chhabra and the Yahoo! Search BOSS team: Nagesh Pobbathi, Varun Aggarwal, Rahul Hampole, Himanshu Bafna, Srinivas Deeduvanu, Gloria Chien, and Eshwar Rao

Yahoo! Image Search now provides the ability to share any image through Facebook and Twitter. By clicking on the image from the search results page, users can browse effortlessly through full-size images via the desktop browser and share with their preferred network of family and friends.

In addition to social sharing, users can scroll down the Yahoo! Image search results to see more and more photos! Type a query for a current event and users will see photos pertaining to breaking news, along with the ability to continuously scroll through the results – all unique to Yahoo! Image Search.

Available for all four sections – Top Images, Latest, Galleries and Facebook – we believe the continuous scrolling and social sharing features will provide the most effective discovery and sharing experience for all image search queries. This, together with the richer content that is uniquely offered by Yahoo!, will offer users an even better, more immersive search experience.

So what are you waiting for, check out some amazing examples below and start scrolling pages of photos on Yahoo! Image Search today!

–– Girish Ananthakrishnan, Krishanu Seal and Caroline Tsay of the Image/Video Search product team

Let’s take a stroll through what’s new within the app:

Local Tabs: Use the top navigation box to quickly find nearby bars, restaurants, ATMs and more with one simple click.

Trending Topics: View the most current and popular searches by topic on the home page, with direct access to news, images and tweets.

Voice Search: Skip the typing. Just talk and we’ll do all the work to help make the search easier and faster.

Search and download iPhone apps: Search and find more iPhone apps that fit your lifestyle, with direct links to the App Store for quick and easy download right on the device.

Sophisticated New Look: Rich, high-quality information for many search terms in a variety of categories including sports, news, entertainment and finance.

Give it a tap to start your new and improved Yahoo! Search experience today and let us know what you think!

– Justine Shen, with the Yahoo! Search mobile team: Anand Chandrasekaran, Eric Hennings and Erik Jessen

New Recipe results

Spend less time looking for new recipes and more time making your newfound creations. Browse through images of the best and highest rated recipes from top culinary sources on the web.

Just search on Yahoo! for a food item + recipes (for example: “apple recipes” or “artichoke recipes”) and a window will appear on top of the search results page with top popular choices from leading food sites. Scroll through the recipe ideas, share recipes with your Facebook friends and click the tabs for filtered results such as “quick recipes” for less than 30 minutes cook time.

Dietary restrictions?  You can filter by ingredients to spend less time searching and more time cooking.  Simply click on ‘Filter by Ingredient’ and select the ingredient you want to include or avoid.

Yahoo! Recipe Search Tab

If you want to narrow down the results of recipes, sort by preparation time, star rating, diet, meal type, occasion, or source, click on the ‘Recipes’ tab on the search results page for the new Recipes Search.

Sometimes you have 30 minutes to whip up a meal, other times you are looking for a great turkey recipe, or ideas on what to do with the leftovers. Or perhaps you may want side dish ideas for a school potluck, or holiday dessert ideas to impress your in-laws. With the new recipe search tab, you can easily find all of this and more.

Click the new Recipes search tab for a page full of ideas, with a left tab full of new filters for ingredients you want and don’t want, total cooking time, rating, diet (including choices such as low calorie, low carb, low sodium and low cholesterol), meal type, occasion and source.

New Shopping Results

Get started on your holiday shopping with a new, rich shopping window at the top of the search results page. Search for a product or category, like watches or cameras, and then easily compare products, find coupons and deals, and check out helpful buying guides.  No need to visit and compare multiple products across multiple sites –select up to five products and let us do the comparison for you.  Find key information, such as prices, specifications, and warranty information.

Similar to recipe search, you can also share products with your friends.  Login to your Facebook account, and instantly ask your friends what they think!

Updated Entertainment results

The new entertainment results on Yahoo! Search present you with immediate answers about your favorite movies, music artists, celebrities and news stories.  To read latest news, watch a popular video, or even see what people are saying in the Twittersphere, find it all in one convenient place within Yahoo Search.

With our new query experiences, you can browse through deep content and quickly scan the most important information, like cooking time or price.  No more searching on several sites and reading through endless content and results.  Find exactly what you’re looking for before you’ve even left the search results page.

Please check out the enhancements by doing a few searches on search.yahoo.com, and let us know what you think.

– Caroline Tsay and the Yahoo! Search Product Management team: Marc Davis, Paul Ko, Carrie Lin, Irene Lin, Libby Lin, Ray Louie, and Saniye Zainab.

The following changes are available now on the Web, Images, Video, News, Blogs, Finance and Sports search results pages:

• Clean and Simple – A cleaner and simplistic look and feel that helps you find what is most important to you and to enable you to take action faster.
• Automatic Tabs – Easily accessible tabs will automatically appear right below the Search box to give you the specialized content you may be looking for on our other vertical search results pages.  The tabs that may appear, based on the search results content, are Web, Images, Video, News, Blogs, Finance and Sports.
• Left Filters – Filters on the left side of the results will appear, for sorting results by time and related searches.

The query-aware tabs make it easier for you to dive into a specific vertical search experience, such as the Sports search results page example below. The related athletes filter on the left, combined with sports videos results on the right, also enhance this results page.

The improved News search results page will also include filters on the left for news sources, as well as news videos to the right of the search results.

Since last month’s Image Search update, we have made the above changes to the Image search results page, plus we have added:

• A larger pool of Facebook images to also include public profiles and fan pages
• A richer “Latest” pictures experience from across even more Yahoo! content
• Better recommendations at the end of galleries

Below is an example of the Image search results page for the “President Obama” query, which brings you the latest, most relevant pictures to the top, and indicates how long ago each image was published.

For the same query, you can also click on “Facebook” on the left rail to get the most popular public Facebook albums on President Obama.

If you type in “sunset,” amazing galleries from Yahoo! News, Flickr and omg! surface.  You’ll also see an end-of-gallery page with more recommendations for continued searching.

On the Video search results page, we also feature videos from across various Yahoo! Properties, in addition to the top web videos.

The new design you see today incorporates feedback from users like you.  We are continuously making new improvements and looking for even more ways to make Yahoo! Search better for you.  Keep checking back in on the Search blog, as more changes are planned for the coming weeks.

Please check out the changes by doing a few searches on search.yahoo.com, and let us know what you think of the new search results pages.

– Paul Ko, Girish Ananthakrishnan and Caroline Tsay from the Yahoo! Search team

Since the middle of August 2011, the Bing Webmaster Tools have also been integrating traffic data from Yahoo! into its reports. Please check out the Bing Webmaster blog post for more information.

We have been making great progress in transitioning organic search results to the Microsoft search platform in various markets, as part of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. The Site Explorer website will continue to be available until organic results are completely transitioned to the Microsoft Search platform in all markets (expected to be completed by the end of the year). Webmasters may continue to use the Site Explorer website and all its services until then.

As previously announced, the SiteExplorer YDN API’s are no longer available as of September 15, 2011. We thank all the YDN developer community who used and supported the APIs.

For FAQ’s please refer to Microsoft Webmaster Tools to support Yahoo! Site Explorer Community

– Hemant Minocha, Product Manager, Yahoo! Site Explorer

Today’s news is on the heels of recent announcements that Yahoo! transitioned algorithmic results to Microsoft in 12 additional countries: New Zealand, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, France, Germany, India, Italy, Spain and UK, among others.

The global transition to Microsoft’s back-end algorithmic search functionality enables us to continue to focus on creating compelling and innovative search experiences that will help people stay informed, productive and entertained. We will be sure to keep you updated as additional countries across Europe and Asia make this transition.

Kartik Ramakrishnan, Vice President, Search Engineering, Yahoo!

The new search results page sports a neatly tiled look, with each image equally sized, then becoming larger when you hover over one. 

In addition to displaying the best images from the web, the new Image Search includes three new category tabs to better categorize and present the images that interest you:

• Latest:  The “Latest” tab will automatically appear for image search results of trending topics, such as images of events, celebrities and news. For example, the “Latest” tab appears in a “President Obama” search shown below.
• Galleries:  The “Galleries” tab will appear for image search results that include photo galleries from Yahoo! News, Flickr and OMG.
• Facebook: If you choose to connect your Facebook account with Yahoo! Image Search, a “Facebook” tab will automatically appear if your search results include matches from your Facebook friends’ name, photo album names or album descriptions.

One of the most significant changes we’ve made to Yahoo! Image Search is the way images are displayed and navigated. By clicking on any image on the search results page, the image will appear on a fresh page allowing users to browse effortlessly through full-size images with a simple click on the desktop browser.

That’s right, no more clicking back and forth between pages to few the next image result. Available for all four sections– Top Images, Latest, Galleries and Facebook – we believe this provides the most clear viewing experience, letting you easily flip through images without missing a single detail.

We’re still enhancing Yahoo! Image search to bring you a stunning image search experience that is fast, clean, timely and personal.  Stay tuned for more design changes and integrations in the coming weeks.

Check out the new Yahoo! Image Search results page today by doing a search on images.yahoo.com.  

– Girish Ananthakrishnan, Image Search product team