Are you ready for soccer fever? In a few weeks, just about the whole world will be wrapped up in one of the biggest global sports event: the FIFA World Cup 2010 in South Africa. Many of the games happen during the week when you might be stuck at work or school, but don’t fret: you can follow this exciting and emotional journey of international sportsmanship with our World Cup coverage shortcuts and toolbar on Yahoo! Search.

Get World Cup Schedule, Scores and News with Yahoo! Shortcuts

We’ve created some handy Shortcuts so you can keep up to date with match scores and World Cup news from Yahoo! Sports and elsewhere across the web. Simply type ‘World Cup’ in Yahoo! Search and you’ll see scores, schedules, photos, and videos in the shortcut:

After the games kick into high gear, we’ll be launching Shortcuts that give you schedules and scores for specific team, group or match.  The Shortcut features will be available in 27 Yahoo sites globally. Type the name of the country, group, or match, and you will see shortcuts that look like these mock screenshots below.

Get World Cup Coverage on Yahoo! Toolbar

To give you more World Cup coverage at your fingertips, the Yahoo! Toolbar team just rolled out new features that let you show your team pride, and follow all of the latest soccer news. You can dress your toolbar in the colors and flag of your favorite team, search for your favorite team or play, and once the tournament begins we’ll have previews, live scores, and post-game wrap ups for every game. You also get live soccer news headlines right in your browser. Try out the toolbar with World Cup coverage here.

We just launched this in the U.S. and will be releasing it in 12 more countries throughout the month of May.

Click to enlarge

Click the drop-down button on the toolbar to see a list of upcoming games and news.

We know that the World Cup isn’t just a series of soccer games. In the words of U2 front man Bono, the World Cup “closes the schools, closes the shops, closes a city and stops a war.” So go ahead and give our shortcuts and toolbar a try as you follow the coverage of this much-anticipated event.

All together now: “Goooooooal!”

Joseph Bou-Younes and Yuko Kamae
Yahoo! Search

I had a yen for tuna sashimi after watching Iron Chef the other night, but I didn’t know where to go to satisfy my craving. Starting today, we are introducing a new feature that makes it easier to search for specific menu items for the times when you know what you want to eat but don’t know where to go.

By extracting structured content – in this case, menu items – from unstructured web pages and matching them to restaurant entities, Yahoo! Search can return results of restaurants near you that serve the dish you crave for when you enter the name of the dish in the search box. You can also try this experience in Yahoo! Local.

For example, to find a nearby restaurant serving tuna sashimi, I type “tuna sashimi San Francisco” in the search box. You can type the name of the city and state, or just use the zip code of your location. You’ll see a list of restaurants that serve tuna sashimi on the menu. I can then narrow down the results by my neighborhood or read more about the business in the overview tab. I can also discover more menu items that I might be interested in.

Yesterday folks around the office were hungry for biryani, so we quickly searched for “biryani palo alto”:

Go ahead, give this feature a try by searching for your favorite menu items near you. We are continuing our efforts on improving our overall local intent experiences on Yahoo! Search, so let us know what you think.

Nitzan Achsaf
Product Lead, Vertical Intent Experiences

We are unveiling a new look for Yahoo! Sports Search and News Search today, featuring a new layout, handy new filtering tools, related search suggestions and rich results that help you find what you’re looking for quickly and seamlessly.

New Look for Sports Search Results Page

We’ve packed some great features in the brand new left column on Yahoo! Sports search results pages to help you explore the latest news, commentaries, scores, photos, and videos that matter most to you.

Since the spring weather has ushered in the professional baseball pre-season, let’s use the New York Yankees as an example. Type team names like “New York Yankees” or player names like “Alex Rodriguez” in the Yahoo! Sports search box and you can filter for photos or videos about the Yankees quickly from the left column. You can also see what’s buzzing on Yahoo! Sports in the Popular Searches section.

Another cool feature in the left column is Related Searches, which features conceptually related topics. For example, when you search for New York Yankees, you can also see information about the team’s main rivals (Boston Red Sox), other professional sports teams in the area (New York Mets and New York Giants) or the team’s fan network (YES network). If you are doing research about stats and players for Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball, be sure to also check out the iPhone apps we just launched today.

In addition to the new tools in the left column, we’ve added new rich sports results on the top of the page. For example, as this year’s NCAA basketball tournament gears up for the final four this weekend, you can keep up with the latest action by searching “ncaa tournament” on Yahoo! Sports. You’ll see NCAA tournament coverage, featuring scores, schedules, brackets, and March Madness news at the top of the search results page.

New look for Yahoo! News Search Result Page

Many of the new features you see on the new Yahoo! Sports search results page are also now available on the revamped Yahoo! News search results page.

On the left column, you’ll see that we introduced a tool to filter your searches by popular news sources. This new filter is easy to use and lets you see only stories from specific news sources.

You can also use the Filter by Time tool on the left column to narrow the search results by time and see stories published within the last hour, day, or week.  Choose “Past Day” in the news search result page for the query “obama,” you’ll see only results published within the last day. The document count next to the news sources on the left column will update to reflect the number of results published within the last day. Of course, our rich results for news images and news videos are also updated with the past day’s results.

Beyond the features on the left column of the Yahoo! News search results page, we are introducing more enhancements in the main results page:

• Scrollable image results
• More rich results with enhanced News Topic shortcuts
• Twitter shortcuts showing the latest relevant tweets about the news topic you’re exploring

To see these news search enhancements, try searching for topics like “barack obama” or “health care reform.”

The Yahoo! Search team has been hard at work to revamp our vertical search experiences. This time, we have launched redesigned Yahoo! News search results pages in 12 countries: United States, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, Canada, India, United Kingdom, Singapore, Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, and Malaysia.

Try these newly redesigned search experiences today by searching on Yahoo! Sports and Yahoo! News.  Or go directly to: sports.search.yahoo.com and news.search.yahoo.com.

Arah Cho and Paul Ko
Yahoo! Search

The O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference begins today in San Jose, Calif. We’ll be there tomorrow to talk about where local search is heading. Details:

Wednesday, March 31
Time: 2 p.m. PT
Speaker: Tom Wailes, Sr. Director, Local Product & Design
Panel: The Big Picture, from the Big Players

In this session, representatives from the major search engines discuss the state of where we are and where things are going in the future.

We hope to see you there!

At Yahoo! Search, we pay attention to what’s popular on the Web and what matters most to you. We know that celebrities rank near the top of the buzziest searches on Yahoo!, so this is one area in search that we’ve been working on to make even better. As we’ve already started to do with news, local, sports, music and movies searches, we want to make your pop culture search results more useful.  Now you can find photos, videos, news and other interesting information right on top of our Search results page, without digging through all 10 blue links.

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

The Yahoo! Search engineering teams are rolling out updates to crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms.  Similar to previous updates, you may notice some ranking changes and page shuffling during the process, which we expect to complete over the next few days.

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

Dan Rampton
Program Manager, Yahoo! Search

We had a great time at the SMX West conference this past week in Santa Clara, CA. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer kicked things off with his keynote speech, where he addressed several questions on the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. Yahoo! participated in several different panels throughout the week, including Thursday’s keynote “The State of the Search Union” roundtable featuring David Roth, Director of Search Engine Marketing. (You can check out the full recap of this at Search Engine Land’s live-blog post.)

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

Continuing our celebration of the Academy Awards, we are rolling out a series of features that make it easier for you to follow coverage of the Oscars on 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

We’ve just added a new search suggestion feature in Web search for Yahoo! Taiwan (Yahoo! Kimo). This feature helps users easily enter queries in traditional Chinese in the search box using the Zhuyin (Bopomofo) system. Zhuyin is a phonetic system widely used in Taiwan.

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 we issued a press release announcing that we’ve received clearance from both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission for our search agreement with Microsoft. Now that we’re full steam ahead, I’d like to share what we at Yahoo! see as an exciting opportunity to focus on creating new ways for people to search online.

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