Our brilliant scientists are working hard behind the scenes to uncover the relevant details and content hidden in the billions of pages on the Web. What this means is that we can surface the nuggets scattered across what we call the “Web of Things” to show you the stuff that matters to you, right on your Search results page. Our aim is to save you many clicks and a lot of time, while creating a fun way to conduct searches for related topics of interest.

For entertainment junkies, there is all kinds of great information we can find for you in our rich Search results. For example, if you’re a TV fan looking for details on your favorite show we just launched a new TV shortcut that will display the latest video clips, bonus videos (or even entire episodes), episodes list, ratings, show times from Yahoo! TV, and photos – all with just one click from the Search results page.

On the left side of the page, we show suggestions of related celebrities, movies or TV shows related to your entertainment queries. Check out the search results for “Days of our Lives” actor Jensen Ackles. If you click on Ackles’ result, we’ll show you a brand new rich shortcut with photos, videos and tweets about him. Plus you’ll get new suggestions to explore more Search results for his co-stars, like Jessica Alba and Orlando Bloom, or some of the movies he’s been in.

Click on Orlando Bloom and you’ll see that the new Celebrity shortcut brings up news, along with his photos, videos and tweets.

So go on and search for your favorite entertainment topics on Yahoo! We are curious to know what you think!

P.S. If your favorite celebrity has an official Twitter feed, you can see their tweets right on the search results page! This way, you won’t miss a minute of their lives.

P.P.S. We’re also now showing enhanced shortcuts for a broader range of movies and music to include even more of your favorite stuff. Take a look at our search results for music artist Tommy Emmanuel or the movie Pretty Woman.

Alexandra Levich and Yuko Kamae

Yahoo! Search

To share your thoughts on this latest update, please visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board.

Dan Rampton
Program Manager, Yahoo! Search

The buzziest acceptance speeches of the evening:  Sandra Bullock and  Mo’Nique – although the story behind Elinor Burkett and her so-called “hijacked” acceptance speech blazed a path through search logs on Monday.

Best Motion Picture contender that is the most anticipated DVD in search: The Blind Side, followed by Avatar, Precious, and The Hurt Locker.

The buzz, of course, is never simply about who won.  One of our favorite ways to explore major events is to check out the questions they inspired in search.  One standout: “Are the Oscars the same as the Academy Awards?”  (Why, yes!)

A sampling of notable Oscar 2010 search questions:

• Who won Best Actress? – the biggest award category in search questions
• Has Meryl Streep ever won an Oscar?
• What does Hurt Locker mean? – a big theme in search, coupled with “What is The Hurt Locker about?”
• How tall is Kathryn Bigelow?
• Are Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jake Gyllenhaal related?
• Who votes for the Oscars?

Check out The Buzz Log for more Oscar search trends and buzzing topics, courtesy of our friends at Yahoo! Buzz.

Andrea Sandke

Yahoo! Search

One of the hot topics discussed was real-time search, and I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel about that subject, titled “Real Time Search & the Major Search Engines.” Among other things, we discussed the real-time features we’ve rolled out for Yahoo! Search, like tweets in Yahoo! search results and getting the freshest information on developing news as well as some of the challenges and opportunities in this space.

In our down time I visited Yahoo!’s popular booth on the show floor – everyone loved our free coffee! Check out some of the highlights in the video below.

Ivan Davtchev

Yahoo! Search

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

When Taiwan users type their queries, they often need to switch the language input method from English mode to Chinese mode, taking several clicks before they can enter the query. The new search suggestion feature allows users to enter the phonetic representation of a Chinese query while still in English mode. This saves key strokes and makes it more convenient for our Taiwan users.

For example, to search for “Brad Pitt,” searchers can start typing the Zhuyin spelling of the actor’s name while in English mode and see search suggestion in traditional Chinese.

From the first launch of Yahoo! Search Assist in October, 2007, we have continued to enhance the Search Assist experience. We are also focused on the needs of international markets and features that are useful for non-English users. With new features that make your search more convenient, we hope to give you an even faster and more relevant experience when you use Yahoo! Search.

James Ying, Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

Today’s Yahoo! Search:

First, let’s take a step back and explain what this alliance means for people who search with Yahoo! Most of the things you see on the typical Yahoo! Search results page below will not immediately change as a result of this alliance. What will change is that the basic search listings and ads will be provided by Microsoft instead of our own back-end platform – those are the text and links that you see in the left-hand image.

However, as you can see highlighted in the right-hand image, Yahoo! will continue to enhance the search result listings as we do for people today. A few examples of this are:

1) Providing you with rich results that display the most relevant information from Yahoo!’s rich content properties, as well as other great product, local, entertainment, reference, social and tech sites.

2) Showing specific results from vertical search products, like Yahoo! News.

3) Providing handy tools on the left-side of the page, such as our Search Pad and Search Scan apps, site filters that help you refine and explore the search results more easily, and related search term suggestions to help you refine your search further if the results aren’t quite what you were looking for.

Tomorrow’s Yahoo! Search:

And what you’re seeing today is just the tip of the iceberg. With Microsoft providing us the underlying list of search results, our Yahoo! team can now focus on making the overall experience of finding stuff online and getting things done easier for you – whether you’re searching at yahoo.com or just looking for specific information in the moment while using our many great products and properties on any device. We have lots of ideas for things we can do to help you with three main aspects of searching:

• Ways to find things faster when you’re just starting your search – by continuing to enhance our great Search Assist technology and also weaving search more deeply and conveniently into other Yahoo! products.

• New ways to help you explore the things that matter most – whether that’s with more rich results and options for organizing the search results page, or by showing you interesting Search topics that you might want to browse through in other relevant places that you spend your time on Yahoo!

• More apps and other tools to help you get things done as quickly as possible. We know that people don’t want to search per se – you want to complete tasks in your day, and we’ll be inventing new ways to help you do that.

I’m very excited about the opportunities ahead and hope all of you will come along with us for the ride. Go to Yahoo! Search today, try out a few searches, and give us feedback. If you have questions about the alliance, we’ve posted more information at the official search alliance Website, on our Yahoo! Search Marketing blog, and on the Yahoo! Developer’s Network blog.

Shashi Seth
Senior Vice President, Yahoo! Search Products

Our new Senior Vice President of Search Products, Shashi Seth, joined Prabhakar Raghavan, Senior Vice President of Yahoo! Labs and Yahoo!’s Search Strategy, Larry Cornett, Vice President of Search Consumer Products, and David Pann, Vice President of Search Advertising, to share what we’ve been up to and preview some cool things we’re working on for the future. Here’s a video with some highlights from the event:

Some of the innovations in our demo included our Winter Olympics shortcut (which is live today), updates to Search Assist, Twitter integration, and a new idea we’re working on in our labs that will let you circle an area on a map on your iPhone and find restaurants within that area.

“Yahoo! has been in search, is in search, and will continue to be in search in the future,” Shashi said at SearchSpeak. “That is the stake we have put in the ground and we will continue to drive great features.”

We also talked about the great opportunity to make search results more useful for people by presenting them with actual things, rather than just basic links to Web pages – we see it as moving from a “Web of pages” to a “Web of things.” As we continue in this effort, our rich search results will help you discover and explore information that matters most to you.

You can check out the full footage from the event (except for the part during our unfortunate power outage!) and learn more about Yahoo! Search from Shashi and our execs.

Yahoo! Search Team

But the biggest sports event this winter, The Winter Olympics, opens this Friday in Vancouver and promises to be spectacular. To help you follow the coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympics, Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Video Search, and Yahoo! Mobile are introducing a set of features in the coming days to make your experience more fun and convenient.

Whether you follow familiar favorites like figure skating and ice hockey, or unusual sports like curling and the biathlon, you can type the sport’s name and see events and schedule on the search results page.

For example, type ‘ figure skating’ or ‘men’s ice hockey schedule’ to see event, time, and date information:

To follow your favorite athletes, simply type his or her name in the search box to get their profile, upcoming schedule, and recent results right on the top of the search results page.

Wonder which country is leading in medal count? Simply type ‘medal count’ and you’ll get the top five countries, or type ‘medal count Germany’ to get that country’s stats. Here’s a mock-up of what you might see on the search results page once the medal count rolls in.

You can also play the newscast or interview videos from Yahoo! Sports without leaving the search results page when you search for topics related to the 2010 Winter Olympics. And if you want to find out more information on a given topic, we will include links to the relevant content on Yahoo! Sports as part of the shortcut. Try it with ‘Olympics‘ and click on the “Play News Cast” play button.

You can see more videos about the 2010 Winter Olympics by searching for them on Yahoo! Video Search. Just enter “Winter Olympics” and refine by sport (“alpine skiing” or “curling”) or enter any athlete’s name to see relevant videos. We will keep these video refiners on Yahoo! Video Search for other events this year, so you can use this feature when you track other events of interest.

And of course, when you’re on the go, you can also follow the winter games on your mobile devices – we’ll be launching a set of features on Yahoo! Mobile so you can see information about your favorite sports or athletes wherever you are. For example, you can explore medal count, schedule, and athletes when you search for “alpine skiing” on your mobile phone.

To get started, go to m.yahoo.com from your mobile device.

I hope these features will make it easier for you to follow and explore the coverage of the Winter Olympic Games. Please note that many of these shortcuts won’t begin working until the games kick off, but be sure to try them out on Yahoo! Search once the games begin and let us know what you think.

Yuko Kamae
Yahoo! Search

The last six months have gone by in the blink of an eye for the Yahoo! Search team. Since the summer of 2009, we’ve launched an amazing amount of new improvements in Yahoo! Search to deliver a more personally relevant search experience. Now it’s even easier to find and explore what matters most to you. We made a short video to showcase what we’ve done in the last six months. Here are some of the highlights:

All-new Yahoo! Search

On Sep 22, 2009, we launched a completely redesigned Yahoo! Search in multiple markets around the world. The new page design aligns the experience across our new Homepage, Mail, and the search results page. This dynamic and integrated experience better understands what you are looking for so you can get things done quickly on the Web.

By rebuilding much of the foundational code for the SRP design and core functionality completely from scratch, we deliver a faster Search page with many exciting new features:

• SearchMonkey structured data: You can explore results from key sites and narrow results using different types of SearchMonkey structured data, making it easier to see richer results from an increasing number of sites.
• Search Scan, Safe Search, and Search Pad: You can quickly access search features that make your online lives safer and easier, including Search Scan/SafeSearch (which helps protect you from viruses, spyware, and spam while you search) and Search Pad, our note-taking and research application.
• Query assistance: We’ve extended our powerful query assistance into the left-hand column of the page to allow you to easily explore and discover concepts related to your query.
• Image and video search refiners: We also apply this same design framework to our Image and Video Search experiences, where the left-hand column provides powerful ways to explore the things you care about most; including travel destinations, music artists, movies, TV shows, and celebrities.

If you haven’t tried it yet, let us take you on our tour that explains all of the features we delivered with this new experience.

Structuring the Web

We launched Yahoo! SearchMonkey in May 2008. Throughout 2009 we’ve continued to accelerate the adoption of structured data across the Web and empower developers to innovate in search. In May 2009, we shared with you the key milestones with Yahoo! Search BOSS and SearchMonkey: At that time, we had over 70 million enhanced SearchMonkey results viewed by users every day; and we increased the adoption of RDFa structured data by 413 percent since October, 2008.

By August 2009, we had expanded our coverage for enhanced results to multiple structured object formats including Video, Documents,  Games, Products, Local Businesses, Event, Discussions, and News.

Great Assistance across Yahoo!

In November 2009, we extended our Search Assist features from the Web search boxes to the search box at the top of nearly every property on Yahoo! The new features take you directly to the information you need, whether it is real-time stock quotes or movie trailers. This also includes enhanced search suggestions and ways to easily navigate to your Yahoo! property of choice.

Discover Breaking News on Yahoo!

Starting in November 2009, we began including relevant photos, videos, and tweets about a breaking news story within the Yahoo! News Shortcut on our Search results page. By including more of this real-time content, we make it easier for you to find all the information you need about an unfolding news event in one place.

Local Searches Made Easier

We’re focused on making it easier to search for local businesses. Starting in December 2009, we display more Yahoo! local business shortcuts when you search for a business, even if you don’t include your location in your query. We also began providing new functionality directly within the local shortcut to refine results by neighborhood or nearby city right on the search results page. This further enhances an already great shortcut that provides more of the information you care about most directly on the search results page; including ratings, reviews, photos, and directions.

Twitter in Web Search

In addition to our News shortcut that was already showing tweets for breaking news topics, in December 2009 we started integrating recent tweets from Twitter directly as a dedicated shortcut on our Web search results page when you search for buzzy topics. By providing this Twitter shortcut, we make it easy for you to see tweets about topics that may not be in news headlines.

Great Multimedia Search

Building on the great feedback we received, we added even more entertainment refiners within our Image and Video Search experiences. These new refiners help you explore your favorite TV shows and movies, celebrities, or the albums and songs from your favorites music artists. By tapping into the “Web of Things,” we have created intelligent contextual refiners to narrow down your search intent intuitively.

Shashi Seth joins Yahoo! Search

Finally, a very exciting change for Yahoo! Search happened just last month when Shashi Seth joined us as the Senior Vice President for the Yahoo! Search Products team. We’re sure that Shashi will help us keep the ideas flowing as we continue to make Yahoo! Search better and incorporate Yahoo! Search into all Yahoo! products.

We’ve been working hard to not only make it even easier for you to find the information you need, but also to enable you to discover more than you ever expected when you use Yahoo! Search. We’re continually focused on improving the Yahoo! Search experience, so check back often as we bring you more enhancements in the coming months.

Larry Cornett
Vice President, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search