On Yahoo! Image Search, just search for “Oscars 2010” and you’ll see our Oscars image carousel, with the latest image search results of the nominees and photos of the event. While counting down to the big night, you can easily search for snapshots from the film Inglourious Basterds or photos of nominees like Meryl Streep. You’ll see Oscars-related image results for these films and actors in the Oscars image refiner on the left hand side of the page. On Oscar night, use Yahoo! Image Search to see Penelope Cruz’s gown, George Clooney’s always-dapper suit, and other best- and worst-dressed celebs as they make their way down the red carpet.

This year, we are also giving you a quick and easy way to see the list of nominees and winners from the Web search results page. To see the nominees, just search for “Oscars” or “Academy Awards” on Yahoo! Search and you’ll see a list of nomination categories for the awards. Simply click any of the categories to see the full list of nominees.  We’ll be updating the results as soon as the winners are announced on Sunday night, so you can use the same queries and see the list of winners directly on the search results page.

Want more? We have video coverage of the Oscars too! If you didn’t catch the nominated flicks in the theater, check out the trailers of the nominated films on Yahoo! Video Search. Search for “Oscars” on Yahoo! Video Search and you’ll see that we’ve categorized the trailers on the left hand side of the page by award categories, actor interviews, speeches, and more. After the Oscars, search for the names of the winners to find updates results.

With these new ways of exploring the Academy Awards, we hope you enjoy your “front row” access to the Oscars coverage from beginning to end!

Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Image Search, and Yahoo! Video Search Teams

Details of Jackson’s controversial and sometimes disturbing life emerged again in Yahoo! search data as we saw searches for “Michael Jackson plastic surgery”, photos of the singer, and “was Michael Jackson abused as a child.”

Jackson’s death set multiple records across Yahoo!. Our front page story “Michael Jackson Rushed to Hospital” was the highest clicked story in our history, and Yahoo! News saw an all-time record in unique visitors yesterday. Yodel Anecdotal’s post on losing Michael Jackson captures even more details on how the online world reacted to his death.

As fans continue to flood the Internet with questions, we’ll keep being the source for memories, pictures, and news about the untimely death of the King of Pop.

Yahoo! Search

We saw four major opportunities that search entrepreneurs are pursuing:

1)    Vertical Search – Whether it be image, video, health, or even green search, dozens of entrepreneurs are working on building highly focused vertical search engines.

2)    Semantic Search – A group of promising start-ups are focused on using natural language processing or other approaches to build search engines that can understand and respond to the actual meaning of a query.

3)    Discovery Engines – A handful of search engines, such as Kosmix and Worio, are working on building engines that integrate structured data from high quality sources to present users with a starting point to discover the best content on a given topic.

4)    New Presentation Models – Many search entrepreneurs are working on new ways to present search results, by changing the visual presentation or by clustering by topic or data source.

Bill Michels, GM of BOSS, gave a quick overview of BOSS and where we see opportunities to provide technology to the growing search ecosystem. See his presentation on SlideShare:

Big thanks to Alt Search Engines for providing a venue for collaboration and learning.  Keep up the great work, search entrepreneurs!

Graham Mudd
Yahoo! Search BOSS

When you type a query from any of these three categories in Internet Explorer 8, instant visual results will appear with related information. For example, when you search for “weather Santa Clara, CA,” a three-day weather forecast for the area appears right below the search box.

Try searching for the following examples to see for yourself:

• “Yhoo” or “Quote Yahoo”

Instant visual results display the current stock chart for Yahoo!.

• “Movie Taken”

See movie synopsis and critic/user ratings.

• “Movie Slumdog Millionaire Santa Clara, CA”

See local show times, synopsis, and ratings.

Users will also continue to get instant text suggestions below the visual suggestions with Yahoo! Search Assist.

Download a Yahoo! optimized version of Internet Explorer 8 to check out this new feature. We plan to expand the list of visual search suggestions so please let us know what you think in the comments section below.

Rajiv Thondanoor
Yahoo! Search

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

When you use the <link> tag, you can indicate the canonical URL form for crawlers to use for each page of content, no matter how it was retrieved. This puts the preferred URL form with the content so that it is always available to the crawler, no matter which session id, link parameter, sort parameter, parameter order, or other source of variance is present in the URL form used to access the page.

To do this, specify a <link> tag in the <head> section of your page content:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/products” />

The above tag indicates to the crawler that the URL it is present on should be represented canonically as http://www.example.com/products. This would eliminate the following duplicates:

http://www.example.com/products?trackingid=feed
http://www.example.com/products?sessionid=hgjkeor2
http://www.example.com/products?printable=yes&trackingid=footer

A few technical details:

• The URL paths in the <link> tag can be absolute or relative, though we recommend using absolute paths to avoid any chance of errors.

• A <link> tag can only point to a canonical URL form within the same domain and not across domains. For example, a tag on http://test.example.com can point to a URL on http://www.example.com but not on http://yahoo.com or any other domain.

• The <link> tag will be treated similarly to a 301 redirect, in terms of transferring link references and other effects to the canonical form of the page.

• We will use the tag information as provided, but we’ll also use algorithmic mechanisms to avoid situations where we think the tag was not used as intended. For example, if the canonical form is non-existent, returns an error or a 404, or if the content on the source and target was substantially distinct and unique, the canonical link may be considered erroneous and deferred.

• The tag is transitive. That is, if URL A marks B as canonical, and B marks C as canonical, we’ll treat C as canonical for both A and B, though we will break infinite chains and other issues.

For several years, we have had a clear policy on handling redirects that allows you to take control of how crawlers and browsers relate between pages on your site. Another useful tool for eliminating spurious dynamic URLs and avoiding content duplication is the Rewrite Dynamic URLs feature of Site Explorer. All you need to do is authenticate your site in Site Explorer, which can now be done instantly, and then create a URL Rewriting rule. The benefit of this approach is that Yahoo! does not need to crawl your duplicate pages to discover the canonical relationships. The <link> tag provides you with another resource to use, and is also being supported by our other partners in the Sitemaps effort, Google and Microsoft.

We recommend that you structure your site with normalized URLs and minimum duplication, or use 301s if need be. If those don’t work for you, try Site Explorer and/or the <link> tag. Our support for the <link> tag will be implemented over the coming months. Let us know if you have any questions on our Site Explorer Suggestion Board.

Priyank Garg
Director Product Management
Yahoo! Search

1. Square Brackets, “inurl,” “originurlextension,” and Site Restriction
To get a more targeted search, try these tricks out:

• Words within square brackets — adding square brackets to your search makes the keyword match order dependent. So typing in ‘[Jack Black]‘ will return results such as ‘jack with black’ but not ‘black jack.’
• “inurl” — if you want to be sure that a specific term will appear in the site’s URL, use the “inurl:[query]” operator. For example: ‘inurl:iPod.’
• Site restriction — to restrict your search to pages within a specific domain, use the “site:[domain]” operator, followed by your query. For instance: ‘Site:Apple.com iPod.’
• “orginurlextension” — to search on specific file types, add ‘originurlextension:[file format]‘ after your search query. For example: ‘nanotechnology originurlextension:swf‘ OR ‘nanotechnology originurlextension:pdf.’

2. Package Tracking
Did you know that you can track your packages right in Yahoo! Search? Here’s How it works:

• For UPS packages, simply type in your tracking number
• For FedEx or the U.S. Postal Service, just add the name before the tracking number. For example: ‘FedEx [tracking number]‘ or ‘USPS [tracking number]‘

3. Definitions & Synonyms
To look up the definition of a word, try adding “define” or “definition” to your search term. For example: ‘quixotic definition,’ ‘definition of globalization‘ or ‘define ergonomics.’ Or, if you’re looking for a synonym, try adding “synonym” to your search term. For example: ‘humorous synonym.’

4. Exclude Terms, Either/Or and Exact Phrase Match
This one’s been around for a while, but a few simple operators can be a huge time-saver:

• Exclude terms — if you want a term to be excluded from your results, use a minus sign before it. ‘Simpsons -movie‘ returns results for “The Simpsons” TV show, books, games, etc., but not the movie.
• Either/or — by default, all of the words you use in a search are included in the results. If you want to be more flexible, try adding “OR” (note the capitalization) between two terms. For example: ‘Sony laptops OR notebooks‘ gives you results containing either “Sony laptops” or “Sony notebooks.”
• Exact phrase match — if you want results to contain an exact phrase, put quotation marks around it: “Queen Elizabeth I”.

You can also combine these tricks for even more refined searches. Try: ‘“Sony VAIO” laptops OR notebooks.’

5. Travel
With the holidays approaching, many of us have travel on our minds. Here are a few shortcuts to get you to your destination even faster:

• Flight tracker — search for the airline and flight number and you’ll get a shortcut to the flight’s status. Try: ‘American 83‘ or ‘Lufthansa 421.’
• Traffic — if you’re driving instead of flying, you can search for traffic before you leave. Example: ‘traffic Los Angeles.’ Click on the shortcut and you’ll get a map with traffic alerts.
• Maps — try searching for the exact address: ‘1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC.’ Don’t have the address? No problem. Add “map” before the city: ‘map San Francisco.’ You can also search for the zip code by itself: ‘20502.’

You can go here to check out more handy travel shortcuts.

6. Yahoo! Services
If you’re looking for a Yahoo! site, simply add an exclamation point after the site name and voila! Try it out with ‘Mail!,’ ‘News!,’ ‘Sports!,’ or ‘Finance!‘

7. Yahoo! Open Shortcuts
Yahoo! Open Shortcuts are the ultimate time-saving search feature. Add an exclamation point to the front of certain terms to instantly navigate to a URL, search a site, recall a favorite Yahoo! search, or start an application.

• ‘!wiki queen elizabeth‘ takes you directly to the Wikipedia page for Queen Elizabeth.
• ‘!wsf‘ gives you the Yahoo! Search results for “weather San Francisco.”
• ‘!clist‘ takes you to Craigslist.
• ‘!ebay lamps‘ searches eBay for lamps.

Search for ‘!list‘ to see a bunch more. Those examples have already been set up for everyone to use, but the real power is that YOU can create your own customized shortcuts.

Have new ideas or suggestions for us? Let us know in the comments below. We’re always looking for ways to make Yahoo! Search more efficient for you.

Michael Chu
Yahoo! Search

To solve this problem for me and a few hundred million users Reiner Kraft and his engineering team — folks who have been researching these types of problems for years — developed Yahoo! Shortcuts to make the vision of delivering relevant content and services at the point of inspiration a reality. You may have seen the post on the precursor to Yahoo! Shortcuts, Y!Q.

At the beginning of the year we worked with the Yahoo! Mail team to launch Yahoo! Shortcuts for mail. I knew we had something interesting when it passed the “wife-test” (my wife serves as a great barometer for whether a feature is actually useful). A few weekends ago we were headed into the city for a concert and my wife’s friend had forwarded her the venue address. I glanced over to find that Yahoo! Shortcuts had detected the location and provided the exact cross-streets for the venue in a map similar to the one below. There was no need for her to pull-up a new browser window, navigate to a maps site, then copy and paste the address. It was all right there for her in this mini-map without her ever leaving the email.

It didn’t stop with Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! Finance and parts of Yahoo! Travel also rolled out Yahoo! Shortcuts. Whether reading up on financial information or planning a vacation, the shortcuts offer added details in various online searches. And, most recently, Yahoo! News has also rolled out the shortcuts (many thanks to Rob Hall and the entire Yahoo! News team).

So, when you’re reading a story on Yahoo! News and have no idea where Solihull is (myself included), or you just want to know more about what the Federal Reserve Board does, Y! Shortcuts can provide you with the quick answers you’re looking for.

Whenever a jagged underline appears under a term, such as ‘Federal Reserve’ in the story below, simply click on it to see contextually relevant content in related news, photos, videos, web search results, maps, and more. If you know what type of content you want, just mouse over the term for a menu of options.

Yahoo! Shortcuts is about providing users with the information desired at the precise moment they want it — from instant satisfaction of a passing curiosity to the ability to gain a deeper understanding of current events.

We are just getting started with Yahoo! Shortcuts and, as always, we welcome your feedback in the comments below. Which websites would you like to see Yahoo! Shortcuts deployed to? Any ideas for what content we could include in Yahoo! Shortcuts that would make you say “Wow!”? The floor is open.

Ariel Seidman
Yahoo! Search

We’ve included seed numbers, game times, and when the games are in play, real-time scores. If you prefer, you can use our existing score shortcuts to get updates on a particular team. For example, try Gators score, UCLA score and Duke score.

For those of you who are a novice in a pool, Yahoo! Sports can help you get ready for tip off. We have some more sport shortcuts in the works to add to our growing list of shortcuts, so let us know if you’ve got any ideas and thoughts for others.

Carlos Teran
Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

To catch up, Open Shortcuts fans have been creating and using lots of shortcuts. Of note, last month, Steve Rubel wrote a great post on Open Shortcuts, and even included a handy list of Open Shortcuts to share, conveniently linked to make them easy to add to your own shortcuts list.

We didn’t get around to thanking Steve at the time, so now seems good. So, here’s an Open Shortcut to Steve’s blog!

! rubel

Steve addresses an important question – how do I share my shortcuts with folks? The same conversation occurred recently on one of our internal developer lists, with people sending out their list of Open Shortcuts for people to share. So here’s a quick review of Open Shortcuts – how to use ‘em, and how to share ‘em.

Using Open Shortcuts
We created a number of shortcuts to get you started, such as navigating to Craigslist: !clist; searching on Flickr: !flickr; or starting an application such as Notepad: !note. For a quick refresher, the Open Shortcuts FAQ has a couple of questions that’ll get you started.

Creating Your Own Open Shortcuts
There are a couple ways to create more shortcuts – directly from the search box by typing !set shortcut_name URL, for example, and the other by using a form we provide. In both cases, you are prompted to confirm you’d like to set these up, and that URL can be used to share shortcuts with folks (like the new shortcut for Steve, above). We have a FAQ that explains this.

As a reminder, you can use the following keywords to view and edit shortcuts:

• !list Lists all your personal shortcuts and defaults
• !unset Removes shortcut_name from your list of shortcuts
• !help Displays Open Shortcuts Help page

That’s it for now. If you’d like to share your Open Shortcuts, please consider posting them to our forum, or drop us a note below.

Thanks again, and please stay tuned for more updates coming soon!

Don Chennavasin
Yahoo! Search Product Manager