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

And today, we’re expanding Search Suggestions to Yahoo! Toolbar for Internet Explorer. Now, all new downloads include the same ease of use and quick search experience right from the Y! Toolbar for IE.

Sensing a pattern? We really believe that Search Suggestions improves your search experience. By automatically giving you suggestions based on what you’ve typed (as you’re typing), you can get to what you’re looking for faster.

We’re driving to push it out to all your favorite search boxes. So, if you haven’t tried it yet, give it a go and let us know how it’s working for you in the comments below. And, as always, if you’d like to bypass the suggestions altogether, you can easily turn it off in Yahoo! Toolbar by going to the menu below the suggestions or in “Toolbar Options” under Settings.

Hua Ai
Product Manager, Yahoo! Toolbar

You can also visit the forum to read and rate other people’s suggestions. The more votes a suggestion receives, the more likely it’ll attract our attention. And who knows, you may even bump into real folks from the Toolbar team who will chat with you about the suggestions.

So, if you’d like to participate and help make Yahoo! Toolbar better, please join our party and give us your feedback.

Thanks!

/duke

Yahoo! Toolbar for IE:

• When using IE, press Alt-S to put the cursor directly into the Yahoo! Toolbar search box.
• Once the cursor is in the search box, you can use the arrow keys to traverse the buttons and menus.
• Right-click any button or menu to open its link automatically in a new window (instead of in the current browser window).
• With Smart Tools  enabled (Toolbar Options under Settings menu), you can select text on the web page, by tabbing over the desired content.  A little Y! icon appears to help you easily search the web, look up in the dictionary and translate, in addition to other options as well.
• Right-click on a web page to easily Bookmark it or send it to a friend.

Yahoo! Toolbar for Firefox:

• Search Suggest: As you type in Yahoo! Toolbar, you will see suggestions of other common searches.
• Yahoo! menu: Yahoo! Toolbar puts a Yahoo! menu in the Firefox browser that duplicates all the links from the Toolbar (enabled in Toolbar Options under Settings menu). This is primarily to provide access to people with special computing needs, so that they can get to all the links on their Yahoo! Toolbar should they not be able to use a mouse or other device to point on the toolbar. But it’s also an additional convenient way for anyone to get to their favorite links.

Yahoo! Toolbar, both IE and Firefox:

• In newer versions, you can click and grab the little arrows near the right of the search box to drag and change the search box width.
• All Search Shortcuts work from Yahoo! Toolbar search box (i.e. Local Weather: [city] weather)
• Translate button: Under the Add/Edit buttons from the Settings menu, you can add a Translate button. This button will translate web pages to English, and has menu links to Babel Fish to translate words and bodies of text too.

Try ‘em out and let me know what you think in the comments.

Duke Fan
Yahoo! Toolbar Team

Now whenever you type in the Toolbar search box you will see the most popular searches that are relevant to what you’ve typed. Personally, I particularly like the fact that Live Search also suggests terms that don’t start with what you’ve typed. For example, suggestions for “fire” also include “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.”

While we were in the neighborhood, we made a few more improvements to the search box. In addition to making suggestions, it now shows matching items from your previous searches, and expands as you type so you can see what you’ve typed when you do one of those extra long queries.

Last but not least, now that Firefox 2.0 is imminent, we’ve enabled support in our most recent Toolbars. The Mozilla team has made a lot of improvements in the recent beta 2 release, so to all you Firefox 2.0 users out there, please make sure you upgrade to the latest version so you’ll have the best experience.

Click here to download Yahoo! Toolbar 1.3 for Firefox, and please let us know what you think.

Jon Granrose
Product Manager, Toolbar

On the IE front we’ve added support for tabbed browsing (yay!). The latest release (v 6.3) now includes the ability to use tabbed browsing from within Internet Explorer 5 and 6 so you can tab to your heart’s content in advance of the Internet Explorer 7 release.

On the Firefox side, we just released version 1.1.1 for all our supported counties. This improves a few things you’ve told us about with bookmarks, mail alerts, and Anti Spy, among other things.

Deliciousness
Speaking of changes, you must have heard about Delicious by now! People use Delicious to save and share web favorites. We’ve just created a Delicious button for our US users. You add it to your IE or Firefox toolbar to get easy access to your Delicious account from anywhere on the web. If you already have toolbar installed, you can add it with a click, otherwise, find it on the Add/Edit Buttons page in the “Personal Tools” section.

Grab the latest toolbar from http://toolbar.yahoo.com and let us know if you have any suggestions.

Alwin Chan
Jon Granrose
Toolbar Product Managers

If you’ve been using Yahoo! Toolbar for a while, you’re already familiar with its benefits such as:

• Bookmarks that follow you to any computer
• New mail notification for Yahoo! Mail
• Customizable, one-click access to most of Yahoo!, or any web site you choose
• Easy access to Yahoo! Search with an integrated search history for quick re-use
• Addition of RSS feeds to your My Yahoo! page with one click

For 1.0, we’ve made it even more useful for Firefox users (after all, we use it too):

• A drag-n-drop resizable search box
• A right mouse click menu to open bookmarks and toolbar buttons in new windows or tabs
• A search history drop down that automatically expands to the length of the longest search query
• Yahoo! Anti-Spy button that you can hide
• Addition of RSS / Atom feeds to My Yahoo! via the Live Bookmarks icon
• Support for the latest Firefox developer releases and alpha/beta browsers
• And more’

Usage of Mozilla Firefox around the world continues to grow in leaps and bounds, with over 75 million downloads since its release last November. To grow with them, we’ve also added more languages to Yahoo! Toolbar: Chinese (Taiwan, Hong Kong), English (UK), French, and German. Moreover, support for Mozilla continues to grow throughout Yahoo!, such as the ability to customize your Avatars in Firefox, and search your Thunderbird email using Yahoo! Desktop Search. We’ve several more cool hacks coming down the pipe soon, so keep your eyes peeled.

Toolbar concepts are flying fast and furious here with never enough time to do them all, so we depend on your feedback to guide future development. Please let us know what you think about Yahoo! Toolbar and what you’d most like to see next.

Jon Granrose
Yahoo! Toolbar Product Manager and Firefox instigator