As aid workers in Haiti settle into the anything-but-routine work of helping care for a devastated country, people continue to come to Yahoo! Search to find out how to help victims of the earthquake. Just this week, Haiti-related search spikes turned to “tents for Haiti,” which had 1,000 percent more searches than the previous week. The plight of Haiti’s orphans also continues to be on people’s minds as they search for “Haiti orphan rescue,” which buzzed to over 9,000 percent this week as Haitian orphans were taken in by the U.S. and as a scandal erupted over possible removal of children from Haiti.

Yahoo! Search data also paints an intriguing timeline of the 7.0 earthquake that shook the country on Jan. 12. As news of the quake spread, concerned citizens took to the Yahoo! Search to learn the details and to research how to help.

Right after the news of the quake, people turned to their mobile devices for immediate information. In the first two days after the quake, Yahoo! Mobile searches on “Haiti Earthquake” increased 3,300 percent. Popular search themes centered on photos, relief efforts, Wyclef Jean, and current news almost immediately. Several of the top earthquake queries were in Spanish.  As the week went on, people started looking for more contextual information, wanting Haiti maps, asking “where is Haiti”, and looking for information on Haitian poverty and whether the country is cursed.

In Yahoo! Web search, searches focused more clearly on volunteering and donating aid and time. Users were deeply concerned about the plight of Haitian orphans, offered prayers for Haiti, and researched church-based relief organizations. People were also eager to donate their help via text messaging as we saw searches for “texting to help Haiti,” “text Haiti 90999,” and “text Yele.”

Many searches focused on the names mentioned in news reports about Haiti’s earthquake. Searchers looked for former president François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Port-au-Prince archbishop Joseph Serge Miot, and the head of the U.N. mission in Haiti, Hedi Annabi. Haitian president René Préval also spiked as he appealed for aid.

As the immediate shock subsided, Web searchers expanded their interest, looking for information on the Dominican Republic, Haiti’s neighboring country that that offered a lot of aid to migrating survivors. People also want to know more about other large earthquakes, notably the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes in California’s San Francisco Bay Area. They also looked up details about fault lines, causes of earthquakes and tsunamis, and the Richter scale for measuring the size of tremblers.

After learning of the quake, teams across Yahoo! stepped up to help with the relief efforts in a wide variety of ways. Yahoo! employees in the U.S. have donated more than $145,000 to the cause, including corporate matches for those donations. Yahoo! users have donated more than $1.5 million to support Haiti relief and rebuilding efforts globally. You can see more of our efforts on behalf of earthquake victims at Yodel Anecdotal. For up-to-date news about the Jan. 12 Haiti Earthquake, please visit http://news.yahoo.com/topics/haiti.

Jessica Hilberman

Yahoo! Search

We just made it easier to search for local businesses. Starting today, you can see the Yahoo! local business shortcut when you search for a business, even if you don’t include your location in your query. You can also refine results by neighborhood or nearby city right on the search results page.

We’ve seen in our user studies that, in many cases, users search for a local business without specifying a location but still want to see a Yahoo! Shortcut for that business. Now, they can. For example, if you are in the Palo Alto area and search for “evvia,” Yahoo! Search displays the local shortcut for the restaurant, including address, phone number, and reviews.

This also works when you search for business categories. Try searching for “yoga” or “auto repair”.

In addition, when you search for business categories or business chains, you can now filter the results further by neighborhood or nearby cities in one click. If the location is a major city, you can filter the results by neighborhood. Otherwise, you can refine the results by nearby cities. For example, if I searched for “Dentists San Francisco” and then decide I want to see only dentists in my neighborhood, I can click “Noe Valley” and the shortcut shows only dentists near me.

We hope you find our efforts to make Yahoo! Search more personally relevant to be useful for your local queries. Please try it out in Yahoo! Search today and let us know what you think.

Nitzan Achsaf

Sr. Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

When we launched a Yahoo! News shortcut with Twitter content integration earlier this month, we said more was coming. Starting today, you will see recent tweets directly integrated on the Web search result page when you search for buzzy topics. How is this different from what we launched earlier? You can still see relevant tweets about the most popular topics in the news in the expanded Yahoo! News shortcut with Twitter which combines news articles, images, videos, and tweets. Now you can see tweets about some of the less popular buzzing topics directly in the search results, usually at the bottom of the page, and you may see those tweets less frequently.

What’s popular in search changes all day every day. Sometimes it is current events in the news, like “Norway lights,” the strange spiral lights seen over Norway earlier this week:

Other times, a buzzy topic in search might not be in news headlines. For example, you might search for a popular products or shopping deals, such as searches for “Dell”:

So how does this work? We continuously keep track of queries searched on Yahoo!, and when there is a spike in interest in a topic, our search algorithm selects relevant tweets to show on the search results page, either as a part of the Yahoo! News shortcut or in a Twitter section, like in the examples above. The age of the tweets will vary – some will be a minute old, while others may be hours old. Our goal is to feature interesting Twitter content that is relevant to your query and complements the other results you find on the search page.

By presenting the latest Twitter discussions about buzzing topics, we are bringing you a wider variety of voices on the Web. We are constantly trying to improve search to bring you better results. We hope you like this new experience, so please go to Yahoo! Search to try it out.

Ivan Davtchev and Shiv Ramamurthi

Yahoo! Search

Building on the great feedback we received after the launch of the Yahoo! Video Search music refiners last month, we are launching even more entertainment refiners today. These two new refiners will help you explore your favorite TV shows and movies.

You can see that the left rail on our video search results page is becoming a place where you can use new ways to explore online videos. By hooking into the “Web of Things,” we have created intelligent contextual refiners to narrow down your search intent intuitively.

The TV refiner that we are launching today organizes TV series queries into main characters, popular episodes, and seasons. If you are looking for clips from the TV series “How I Met Your Mother,” you can explore clips from the show by its popular main characters, like Robin Scherbatsky and Lily Aldrin.

You can explore the show by popular episodes like Drumroll and Sandcastles in the Sand; or see clips chronologically by season.

You can choose to see clips from popular video hosting sites, such as Hulu.com and Joost.com, many of which offer high quality, exclusive content.

We are also launching the Movie Actors refiner in Yahoo! Video Search today for popular movie actors. If you are looking for videos of Tom Hanks, the Movie Actors refiner on the left rail helps you explore Tom Hanks’ work by showing links to video clips from his most popular movies like Big, Forrest Gump, and Philadelphia. This way, you can easily and quickly watch some of your favorite Tom Hanks performances.

These refiners are a part of our continued effort to better understand search intent and deliver search results that matter to you most. Give the TV and Movie Actors refiners in Yahoo! Video Search a try and use the comments section to let us know what you think.

Nilesh Gattani and Ranjita Naik

Yahoo! Video Search

Today we are rolling out several new Search Assist features for the Web search boxes at the top of nearly every property on Yahoo!, including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, and Yahoo! Finance. These new features can take you directly to the information you need, whether it is real-time stock quotes or movie trailers. You can also get enhanced search suggestions and easily navigate to the Yahoo! property that fits your needs the most.

With today’s enhanced Search Assist features, you can get information you need about movies, sports, travel destinations, or stock price directly in the Search Assist layer. For example, type the stock symbol for Energy Select SPDR in the search box. The Search Assist layer displays real-time stock quotes for the company, as well as links to stock charts and news about the company.

When you type the name of an athlete, like Kobe Bryant, Search Assist shows news, game log, scores, and schedules. You can also see travel information when you type the name of any travel destination.

Another Search Assist enhancement launched todayis the ability to help you navigate to the Yahoo! property that best fits your needs. When you type the name of a Yahoo! property in the search box, the Search Assist layer displays a link to the property. For example, if you are using Yahoo! Finance and would like to check your email, type “mail” in the search box and you will see a link to your inbox in the Search Assist layer.

You can also type “news” to go to Yahoo! News, or even “U.S. News” to see a link to the U.S. News section of Yahoo! News.

Lastly, today’s new Search Assist features include a smart detection system that can take you to Yahoo! Image Search or Yahoo! News Search. For example, type Obama in the search box and the Search Assist layer shows links to Yahoo! Image Search and Yahoo! News Search to help you find news or pictures of the president.

From first launch of Yahoo! Search Assist in October, 2007, we have continued to enhance the Search Assist experience. In fact, the number of queries from Search Assist has increased three-fold since the product’s kick off. With today’s improvements, we hope to give you an even faster and more relevant experience.

Linda Wang, Senior Product Manager, Yahoo! Search
Drew Geishecker, Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Network Services

Starting today, you can see relevant photos, videos, and tweets about a breaking news story on the Yahoo! News Shortcut. Many of you are already familiar with the existing Yahoo! News Shortcut, which displays headlines on our Web search results page when you look for news stories. The enhanced shortcut with these new tabs will now display for many breaking or major news searches.

For example, if you searched Space Shuttle Atlantis just after it was launched this week, you would have seen news, photo, video, and Twitter tabs in the news shortcut:

If you are interested in visual information about your query, check out the photos and videos tabs, which pull information from Yahoo! News. You can scroll to see more photos and videos from within the new shortcut.

Here is an example of the photos tab:

And the videos tab:

If you want more immediate, user-generated content, check out the Twitter tab. There, you will find recent tweets and related videos that have been shared on Twitter.

This is our first integration of fresh, social content like Twitter into Web search, and we are planning to continue along these lines. In the future, we will enhance your search experience with more real-time content so you can find all the information you need about an unfolding news event in one place.
Try it out and let us know what you think in the comments section.

Ivan Davtchev and Nitzan Achsaf

Yahoo! Search

Music is an integral part of everyday life. Since launching a partnership with Rhapsody in September 2008 and launching the FoxyPlayer last year, music has been an integral part of the Yahoo! Search experience as well.

We have found that nearly 6 percent of all Yahoo! searches are music-related. Given the massive number of things people search for, we think it is pretty significant.  With enhancements that we’ve made to the search experience, we are seeing a 38 percent increase in Rhapsody enhanced results served in our SERP since July.

We’ve made it easier to find music videos, artist information, and play full length songs from within the search results page. This is just one of the many ways Yahoo! is enhancing the search experience for music lovers. With Search Assist, Search Monkey, and Yahoo! Shortcuts, you can discover even more relevant information about your favorite artist. Wonder what U2 is up to these days? Search for U2 and you’ll see images and videos, and hear full-length songs all in one place.

At Yahoo! Search, our goal is to give you a more personally relevant search experience.  We are also continuing our investment in structuring the Web to allow you to explore a “Web of things,” more than just a Web of pages. That includes helping you find and explore everything there is to know about your favorite music artists.  Whether you like to rock out to The Killers, dance it up to Beyonce, or secretly sing along to Miley Cyrus, you can find relevant information about these artists and explore their music right at your fingertips on Yahoo! Search.

Larry Cornett

Vice President, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search

Today, we are launching an all-new Yahoo! Search experience that makes search more personally relevant. We tested the changes in August with a percentage of users, and now the new page is available to everyone. The new page is designed to help you easily find and explore the things that matter most to you. The Yahoo! Search team is delighted to demonstrate our commitment to innovate in search technology and deliver an amazing user experience.

Yahoo! has also just launched a number of major changes to our core products, which include a new Yahoo! homepage, improved Yahoo! Mail, high-quality video calling in Yahoo! Messenger, and a suite of new Yahoo! Mobile experiences. The new Yahoo! Search page design aligns the experience between our new homepage, mail, and the search results page. This delivers a dynamic, compelling, and integrated experience that better understands what you are looking for so you can get things done quickly on the Web.

Most importantly, we designed this new page framework so that we can introduce and experiment with new search applications and features faster than before. Today’s launch is just the beginning of innovations to come.

Key highlights:

• Intelligent Search Results – Allows you to explore results from key sites and narrow results using different types of SearchMonkey structured data. Over the past few months, even more enhanced results for product, local, entertainment, reference, social, and tech sites have been displayed automatically. With the new search page design, we have made it easier to see these riche results from an increasing number of sites.
• Feature-Rich Experience – Provides quick access to search features that make people’s online lives safer and easier, including Search Scan/SafeSearch (which helps protect you from viruses, spyware, and spam while you search) and Search Pad. Now it will be even easier to return to the research documents you have created while searching.
• Search Assist Expansion – With the new design, our powerful query assistance is still available directly below the search box, but we’ve also incorporated it into the left-hand column for quick access lower on the page, even when the Search Assist layer is hidden. You can use this column to easily explore and discover concepts related to your query. We have added Search Assist to the search box on every Yahoo! page in the U.S. with the launch of a new universal header.

Today we are also revamping our image search and video search results pages to present a consistent user experience. In the left-hand column on the image search results page, users can find an extension of the travel refiners that we introduced back in July, as well as celebrity and entertainment categories. When you search for celebs like “Matt Damon” or “Tina Fey,” Yahoo! Image Search will tap into the “web of objects” and present related people, movies, and TV shows in their appropriate categories.

Now, here’s the best part: Rather than building this new experience on top of our existing front-end technology, our talented engineering and design teams rebuilt much of the foundational markup/CSS/JavaScript for the SRP design and core functionality completely from scratch. This allowed us to get rid of old cruft and take advantage of quite a few new techniques and best practices, reducing core page weight and render complexity in the process.

Key points about performance:

• Improved total page load time – Even though the new design includes dozens of additional assistance features and graphical assets, we are seeing faster page loading time and significant speed improvements.
• Improved perceived load time – In addition to reducing the weight of the page, we also greatly reduced the perceived load time by sending the page in three semantically meaningful chunks: first the search box and page header, then the rest of the visible content, and finally JavaScript for rich behavior.
• Inline data URI images – We’re taking advantage of specialized techniques for modern browsers such as inline data URI images, which we use to generate our subtle repeating gradients. This improves perceived and real performance dramatically. For legacy browsers, we provide the same gradients with traditional image sprites.

What does this all mean for you? Quite simply, the new search page is faster because it was built with performance in mind from the start.

We’re thrilled to put the all-new Yahoo! Search results page in your hands today in the U.S., U.K., France, Spain, Mexico, and India. You can learn more by checking out a tour that explains all of the features of this new experience. Please let us know what you think in the comments section below. Over the coming months, we will continue to deliver even more enhancements to this new experience, so be sure to check in often to see what we’re up to!

Larry Cornett

Vice President, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search

Click to play demo
We know that search has been a hot topic over the past few weeks, so we wanted to share with you what the Yahoo! Search team has been focusing on lately. Today, we are announcing a new search page design that makes search more personally relevant and helps people explore the things that matter most to them. It exemplifies how Yahoo! is continuing to innovate in search technology and the user experience.

A few weeks ago, Yahoo! began rolling out a new homepage that is tailored to your interests. You may also have noticed that the Yahoo! Search team began testing a new design that will unify the experience between the new homepage and our search results page. We’ve been doing a lot of research such as usability experiments and eye-tracking research so that we can bring you a more personally relevant search experience that better understands what you’re looking for and helps you get things done quickly on the Web.

Unified Design

One of the designs we have been testing aligns the page framework and design with the new Yahoo! Homepage. Not only does this create a more integrated Yahoo! product experience, it also provides quick access to valuable search-specific applications and features in the left-hand column. For example, the section titled “Show Results From” helps people explore the results that matter most to them through sites they know and love.

Quick Access to Search Features

About a month ago, we launched a great new note-taking application called Search Pad.  In our new search page design, you have even easier access to the research you’ve been doing right at the top of the left column. In addition, we have integrated the SearchScan and Safe Search feature settings on the left column so you can more easily manage your protection from viruses, spyware, and spam while you search.

Enhancing Search Assistance

Our search assistance features are still the most sophisticated query assistance technologies on the Web. With the new design, assistance is still easily available directly below the search box where you need it most.

In addition, we are also testing ways to allow you to explore results through the “Related Concepts” section in the left column even when the Search Assist layer is hidden.

SearchMonkey

We recently celebrated the one-year anniversary of SearchMonkey. Over the past months, we have been 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. With the new search page design, we will be making it even easier to see richer results from an increasing number of sites. For example, you can easily show all of the enhanced results from Wikipedia on the new search page.

We’re testing the new Yahoo! Search results page with a percentage of our U.S. visitors chosen at random, so you may be one of the few who get a chance to try it out. Please let us know what you think in the comments section below. Over the next few weeks, we will be adding more new features during these tests. Be sure to check in often to see what we’re up to!

Larry Cornett

Vice President, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search

Today we are rolling out several enhancements to Delicious that make it easier to find your bookmarks with our improved search tools, to see the freshest bookmarks on the Web, and to share bookmarks with your friends.

• New Delicious Search Tools
Many Delicious users have hundreds or thousands of bookmarks. To make finding your bookmarks easier, we’ve created new search tools with advanced timeline and tag filtering controls so that you can search within a given date range or filter the results by tag. We’ve also enhanced the search results page to display rich content including YouTube videos with inline playback, Flickr images, and Yelp local data when applicable.

Click to enlarge image

• Fresh Bookmarks on Delicious.com
Want to see the latest sites that people are saving and talking about? We’ve created the Fresh Bookmarks tab on the Delicious homepage to show the most recently saved Delicious bookmarks that are buzzing on Twitter. We combine the latest actions on Delicious and popular discussions on Twitter to bring you the best and freshest links about technology, web, politics, and media. (See the Delicious blog to learn more).

• Email and Tweet Bookmarks
When you save a bookmark from Delicious (using our Firefox extension or bookmarklets), instead of copying and pasting URLs into emails or Twitter updates, you can now email or tweet your bookmark directly from Delicious. These options are visible when you add recipients in the Send field.

We hope you give these new Delicious enhancements a try. Let us know what you think in the Comments section below.

Ariel Seidman | delicious.com/aseidman | twitter.com/aseidman
Director, Product Management