Yahoo! Search logs gave a revealing picture of what the King of Pop evokes for people as they mourned his passing today. Starting last night, searches for his legendary music surged. “Thriller,” “Man in the Mirror,” and “Billie Jean” were among the top lyrics, songs, and videos that people looked for on Yahoo! Search. As details of Jackson’s death emerge, searchers are looking for details on prescription drugs including Demerol, the hospital Jackson was taken to after he collapsed (UCLA Medical Center), and other lingering questions (”why did Michael Jackson die”).

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

An enthusiastic group of data geeks and Semantic Web enthusiasts met last week at our Sunnyvale headquarters where we hosted the latest edition of VoCamp. VoCamps are a series of informal events that provide a small setting where the Semantic Web community can discuss issues related to semantic interoperability and creating, managing, and publishing vocabularies.

The format of VoCamp was conceived by Talis’ Tom Heath and Yahoo!’s Peter Mika, with the first installment organized in Oxford, England, in September, 2008. Since then, VoCamps have grown into a real movement, with events organized in Galway, Ireland; Austin, Texas.; Ibiza, Spain; and Washington, D.C., with more planned in New York and Bristol, England.

In Sunnyvale, we spent the first afternoon discussing three broad issues: ways of finding vocabularies on the Semantic Web, tools for mapping vocabularies and executing data transformations, and methods for lifting relational databases into the RDF world. Over pastries and pizza the next day, the campers worked in small groups on more specialized topics, including creating methodologies for vocabulary development, and developing a microformat for code documentation. (Many thanks to the microformat admins Tantek Çelik, Kevin Marks, and Ben Ward for bringing their perspectives to this discussion.) Other topics discussed included the Common Tag format and vocabulary visualization.

As Yahoo! Search moves toward a Web of Objects, we know that the developer community will be a critical component for creating a more robust Semantic Web. We were proud to play host to VoCamp Sunnyvale and look forward to future VoCamp gatherings.

Yahoo! Search

The new Yahoo! Toolbar, already available on Internet Explorer, is now available on Firefox (beta) to make it easier for you to keep on top of your online world. You can get helpful suggestions in the search box in the Yahoo! Toolbar and jump right to search results on sites like Flickr, Wikipedia, and more. You can also preview sites and customize the toolbar with cool apps.

To get started using the Yahoo! Toolbar, download it at toolbar.yahoo.com. Check out today’s post on Yodel Anecdotal to see more details.

Yahoo! Search

Today we are announcing our support of Common Tag, a new semantic tagging format for Web pages. Developed jointly by a group of Web companies including Zemanta, Metaweb, and Yahoo!, the Common Tag format adds semantic meaning to tags, making Web content more discoverable and enabling the community to create more useful applications for aggregating, searching, and browsing the Web.

At Yahoo! Search, we’re proponents of open formats that accelerate the structuring of the Web and that improve the community’s overall ability to understand the Web. You can read more about this new format, which just launched today, on the Common Tag Website.

Yahoo! Search

Working on the new Yahoo! Search sports team shortcut has made me a new sports fan (I’m still mourning over the Celtics’ loss). Being a new fan, I’ve also learned how hectic it can be to follow your favorite professional and college sports teams. That’s exactly why we developed the new sports team shortcut.

Starting today, when you search for your favorite major league or college sports team on Yahoo! Search, a new shortcut appears with the real time score, the last game’s score, and the date and time of the next game. You’ll also find quick links to the team’s page, as well as news, scores, schedules, stats, and photos. Instead of having to click through search results a couple of times a day, you can use the shortcut to follow tonight’s pivotal game when the Nuggets take on the Los Angeles Lakers.

If you can’t make it to the New York Yankees’ new ballpark in person, follow them with the sports team shortcut:

You can also try searching for “NBA playoffs” to see a snapshot of today’s NBA playoffs schedule and scores.

Or try searching for “French Open.”

The sports team shortcut covers the NFL, MLB, NHL, and NBA, and college sports leagues including the NCAAF and NCAAB.

Whether you’re a new sports fan like me or a lifelong diehard fanatic, we hope you’ll find it easier to follow your favorite teams with this new shortcut. Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

Yuko Kamae
Yahoo! Search

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

Since launching SearchMonkey last May and Yahoo! Search BOSS last July, we’ve reached some impressive milestones: BOSS is now serving 30 million queries a day, and SearchMonkey is celebrating its first anniversary with 70 million enhanced results viewed daily.

Along the way, we’ve made great headway in opening up Yahoo! Search by accelerating the adoption of structured data across the Web and empowering developers to innovate in search. Here’s a look at some of the important initiatives we’ve accomplished with SearchMonkey and BOSS.

With BOSS, we’ve made key updates including allowing developers to monetize through third-party platforms and enabling access to SearchMonkey structured data. The BOSS API is on track to hit 1 billion monthly queries in May, without even including the volume from traditional Yahoo Search syndication. This is more than three times the queries served just six months ago, and ranks ahead of the combined searches on Ask and Facebook, and just behind Microsoft¹.

With SearchMonkey, we’ve launched numerous valuable initiatives over the last year. We turned applications default-on for many sites to improve local , reference, and social searches. We also enabled publishers to more easily display enhanced results for video, games, and documents by adding a few lines of code. Additionally, as a part of our effort to promote a more meaningful understanding of the Web, we have continued to support semantic tech gatherings such as VoCamp.

SearchMonkey is currently live in 23 markets around the world, reaching some significant global milestones:
• 70 million enhanced SearchMonkey results are viewed by users every day.
• Site owners have seen a more than 15% increase in the click-through rates of their SearchMonkey search results when tested against non-SearchMonkey results.
• 200 people enter the developer tool and start creating an application each day.
• Over 15,000 developers have registered to build applications, with over 400 applications available for use in galleries.
• RDFa structured data driven by SearchMonkey has increased by 413% since October, 2008.

In the coming months with SearchMonkey, we will be driving efforts toward increasing structured data on the Web, more uses for existing structured data, and easier ways to display enhanced results for some data types. We’ll throw in a little fun, too, with some open customization of the Yahoo! Search results page. With BOSS, you can look forward to more specialized searches that will help consumers reach their content more easily than ever.

We want to extend our thanks to the developer communities within both SearchMonkey and BOSS and to partners including Facebook, Yelp, and LinkedIn, for joining us in our efforts to make search richer and more open, and for helping us reach these milestones. We’re pleased with what we’ve done in this past year. More importantly, we’re excited about and focused on where we’re taking you next.

Larry Cornett
Vice President, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search

¹comScore qSearch April 2009. Queries delivered via the BOSS API and served by Yahoo! partners are not counted as Yahoo! Search queries by comScore or other metrics providers.

It’s been 100 days into President Barack Obama’s administration – this week also marks the first 100 days of an Obama search extravaganza. Users all over the world have turned to Yahoo! Search to learn about the stimulus plan, the housing bill, the First Family, and even Bo, the First Dog.

From the beginning, it was clear this president was as popular online as he was in initial voting. The Obama administration caused major spikes on Yahoo! Search – during the inauguration in January, people looked for ways to watch the event online and see moments from Obama’s inauguration speech.

Inauguration search spikes on Yahoo! also captured quirky details like “Aretha Franklin inauguration hat” (and “Aretha Franklin bow”), “inauguration luncheon recipes,” and “who designed Michelle Obama’s dress.”

The first lady herself causes some of the most amusing queries, including the persistent search for “Michelle Obama pregnant.” (She isn’t, as far as we know.) People want to know everything from “Michelle Obama dress size” and “Michelle Obama wedding ring” to “how tall is Michelle Obama.”

Searches on President Obama’s personable style can cause some entertaining search spikes too – people wanted to know “how to make Obama Hope poster” and what are “Barack Obama’s NCAA picks.” The Obamas’ fitness regime has not gone unnoticed by searchers as they looked for ‘Obama shirtless” and “Michelle Obama arm.”

Queries on Yahoo! Search about the Obama administration also reflected on the seriousness of current economic times. By far, Obama’s stimulus plan was the most popular Obama-related searches on Yahoo!; top search terms included “Obama stimulus plan details,” “economic stimulus plan,” and “what is in the stimulus bill.” We even saw searches for “economic stimulus song.” In April, the G20 Summit heightened interest in Obama’s economic plan. Housing and mortgage terms related to Obama’s housing bill also caused major spikes in Yahoo! Search.

Just as Obama’s domestic economic policies have caused major search spikes, his work abroad was something that people search for on Yahoo! Obama’s overseas visits to France and Afghanistan, as well as his unannounced stop in Iraq, all were buzzing on Yahoo! Search. The graph below shows Yahoo! web search spikes of foreign leaders (and spouses) that Obama visited during his trips.

One of Obama’s interactions with a foreign leader caused major spikes in Yahoo! search: “Did President Obama bow to the Saudi King” during the G-20? Searchers urgently wanted to know. But does it really matter if Obama bowed? That’s a State secret.

If the administration’s online campaign is any indication, they know people are looking for information and they’re serving it up - makinghomeaffordable.gov, financialstability.gov, and recovery.gov are all new government websites that saw search spikes in the last 100 days. The sheer volume of searches related to the Obama presidency so far suggests that this administration is facing an internet-savvy constituency who follows their every move from the Web – and they’re doing it with Yahoo! Search.

Eugenia Chien and Andrea Sandke

Yahoo! 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 Yahoo! Search BOSS team attended the Alt Search Engines conference in San Francisco earlier this week, and we came away from the conference even more convinced that there’s still a lot of room for innovation in search.  We saw dozens of demos of search engines in various stages of development, many of which use BOSS technologies as part of their approach.

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