We know that many of you come to Yahoo! Video search to find entertainment-related information. Our video search traffic also shows us that many of those queries have an exploratory intent, including digging for great work from your favorite music artists.

Starting today, you can easily dive into albums and songs by your favorite music artist in Yahoo! Video Search. We have hooked into the “Web of Things” to intelligently extract the most popular albums and songs for artist or band queries. This feature lets you explore music artists intuitively and easily.

For instance, say you are looking for music videos from U2. The new video search music refiner on the left rail shows popular albums, such as The Joshua Tree, and top songs, such as “Beautiful Day.”

Click on an album or song, and Yahoo! Video Search shows videos for the album or song in an overlay page.

For example, when you click on The Joshua Tree on the left rail, you will see videos of the album’s tops songs, including “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and “With or Without You.”

This is a great way to watch popular song videos from an album without losing the context of your original query.

For the video search music refiner, we tapped further into the Web of Things to give you a more personally relevant search experience. You’ve seen the image search travel refiner and the celebrity refiner – now you can give the video search music refiner a try.

Manish Sharma and Ishwar Sridharan

Yahoo! Video Search

Starting today you will see some subtle changes we’ve made in Sitemaps, partnering with Microsoft and Google.

First, we have updated the xsd files with the XML schemas for Sitemap or Siteindex files. The updated xsd files allow better extensibility of the Sitemaps protocol. All your existing Sitemaps will continue to validate so you don’t need to make any changes.

Second, the protocol will now allow 50,000 Sitemaps per Siteindex, up from the previous limit of 1000 Sitemaps. The file size limit will stay at 10MB.

We hope these changes will make it easier for you to use Sitemaps and submit them to Site Explorer for Yahoo! to index.

Priyank Garg
Yahoo! Search

This week, Yahoo! Labs announced the winners of our inaugural Key Scientific Challenges Program, where we provide seed funding and support for a handful of top Ph.D students who submitted proposals in Yahoo! Labs core research areas. Yahoo!’s senior research scientist Evgeniy Gabrilovich, who helped review the contest entries along with Ravi Kumar, Belle Tseng and Raghu Ramakrishnan, called out these winning proposals in the search technology category:

• Vertical Selection by Jaime Arguello of Carnegie Mellon University. Arguello’s proposal addresses vertical selection in search, the problem of selecting the verticals relevant to a user’s query. Arguello proposed research for better ways to acquire useful representations of vertical content and the need to model vertical search engine effectiveness on a query. His goal is to set up a framework for vertical selection by a search engine.

• Attention Routing by Polo Chau of Carnegie Mellon University’s Machine Learning Department. Chau conducts research on integrating data mining and human-computer interaction (HCI) to create an umbrella system for interactive mining of large graphs. Chau’s system provides fast, scalable tools to help analysts explore, visualize, and understand large graphs, like social networks, and pinpoint patterns, anomalies, and interesting properties among them.

• Detecting Searcher Frustration by Henry Feild of University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Feild’s proposal uses query logs to explore session boundary, task categorization, and ultimately detect when a search user has trouble finding the information they want. Through what Feild calls, “frustration detection and intervention,” he will build models to analyze the different causes of user frustration and develop new methods to address these issues.

• Object Search by Kim Cuong Pham of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne. Pham approached the idea of a semantic Web from a new angle. Instead of semantic Web’s original vision of embedding semantic data, he wants to use “computer technologies to search, read, analyze, and understand the Web, given its unstructured and somewhat chaotic format.” By understanding structured information on the Web, Pham says, “We are able to answer questions like “what are the homepages of all professors working in the database field,” or “what are all the shopping pages that sell digital cameras of at least 6MP but not less than $300.”

Winners receive funding and exclusive access to Yahoo! research scientists and data sets. You can see a list of all the winners on the Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges Program Website.

Jessica Hilberman
Yahoo! Search

We made the trek up north to the Banff Springs Hotel in Alberta, Canada to attend the WWW 2007 conference this week, which brings together the key folks that are shaping the future of the web.

We’ll be attending various panel discussions and sharing the experience, but we’ll also be a part of the fun. If you’re around, drop by and meet some of the team. Prabhakhar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research, Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo! Advanced Development Division and Andrew Tomkins, Yahoo! Research, will be participating in the following discussions:

“Web N.0: What sciences will it take?”
Prabhakhar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research
May 10 @ 8:30-10a.m.

“The Changing Face of Web Search”
Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo! Advanced Development Division
May 10 @ 10:30-11:15a.m.

“Tagging and Metadata for Social Information Organization”
Andrew Tomkins, Yahoo! Research (panelist)
May 12 @ 1:30-3p.m.

Hope to see you there!

Melissa Rische
Yahoo! Search

I love music but I’m terrible at understanding what a singer is saying and given how popular lyric searches are on Yahoo! Search, I’m not the only one with this problem. Finding a reliable lyrics source can be difficult and frustrating for music lovers. Thankfully, Yahoo! Music recently launched a lyrics web site that includes hundreds of thousands of song lyrics. It’s the first ever free and legal lyrics site. To coincide with this, Yahoo! Search added a new shortcut that will help music fans find lyrics from their favorite artists quickly and easily.

For example, try some old school favorites like The Ramones lyrics, The Beatles lyrics, or Stevie Wonder lyrics. Or, some current chart toppers like Avril Lavigne lyrics, Gwen Stefani lyrics, or Arctic Monkey lyrics. Looking to get a specific song stuck in your head? Try Nelly Furtado Say it Right lyrics, U2 Beautiful Day lyrics, or The Clash Rock the Casbah lyrics (it’s not rock the cash box??).

Have fun and let us know what you think!

Carlos Teran
Yahoo! Search

Just a quick pointer to a creative new mashup that uses Yahoo! Pipes and the Yahoo! Answers API to help automatically discover unanswered questions about, well, pretty much anything. Patrick Hunt, Yahoo! Architect and the creator of this mashup shared the details this week on the Yahoo! Answers blog.

What about you — have you created or used any interesting pipes? We’d love to hear about ‘em!

Raj Gossain
Yahoo! Search

Hi, I’m Jonathan from the Yahoo! Desktop Products team. The Yahoo! Search team invited me to write about our latest collaboration, the Yahoo! Search gadget for the Windows Vista Sidebar. My team’s mission is to enable users to access Yahoo! services from anywhere on their personal computer desktop. And while we have quite a few Yahoo! products already available for Windows Vista, today I wanted to focus on our first Vista-only product, the Yahoo! Search gadget.

The Windows Vista Sidebar is a new feature in Vista that, similar to our own Yahoo! Widgets or Apple’s Dashboard, allows you to run mini applications (called gadgets) on your desktop that are connected to the Internet without having to open a browser. Since Yahoo! Search is one of our most popular services, it was a logical choice for our first ever Windows Vista Sidebar gadget. We designed the Yahoo! Search gadget to feel at home in Vista’s new visually rich environment with animations and four shiny colors to choose from. And whether docked in your Sidebar or floating on your desktop, the Yahoo! Search gadget puts Yahoo! Web Search, Answers, Local, Video, and more at your fingertips. Of course, there are a number of other ways to integrate Yahoo! Search into your Vista experience, including search plug-ins for IE7 and Firefox as well as the Yahoo! Toolbar also for IE7 and Firefox.

We’ve got a lot of stuff in the Vista pipeline, including more gadgets and a new Yahoo! Messenger client, which you can preview here. Stay tuned’

Jonathan Strauss
Yahoo! Desktop Products

Since launching Yahoo! Search Builder back in August we’ve received a lot of great feedback and have been working to address the issues nearest and dearest to our users. We’ve noticed a lot of talk around the width of the search box being too wide and not easily fitting into the sidebar of most blogging platforms. Today, we’re happy to introduce the new ’super-narrow’ search box option that, with 192 pixels, should fit nicely into most two column blog templates, e.g. the K2 template for WordPress.

We’re also making some enhancements to the Search Builder home page to include a new design and an added section entitled ‘Featured Search Builder Sites’ that will highlight cool sites and clever implementations of Yahoo! Search Builder. Here’s a sneak peak with the Breeder Retriever and Sanderson Headers ‘ who doesn’t love dogs and cars??

If you know of a great site (even if it’s your own) please let us know.

We look forward to your continued feedback!

The Yahoo! Search Builder team
Ariel Seidman, Alastair Gourlay, and Ron Feathers

We just rolled out our most recent product update on Yahoo! Answers. Among the enhancements, the team introduced a new way for users to share questions that they find interesting on Yahoo! Answers, called “stars”.

When you star a question, we add that question to your Answers profile page where you can see all your activity, points, questions, answers, etc.

This activity, along with all the other ways users tell us what they like (and don’t like) on Yahoo! Answers, we use to help surface the most interesting questions and answers for the rest of the Yahoo! community ‘ much like Flickr Interestingness and Delicious Popular.

For the complete story, please see Elizabeth’s post on the Yahoo! Answers blog.

Tara Kirchner
Yahoo! Search

If you’ve been following the news from CES 2007, you may have heard about the new Yahoo! mobile search on Yahoo! Go 2.0. What’s so new about mobile search, you might ask? I’m here to break it down for you.

First things first. The new search is called “oneSearch” and its so named because we’ve taken a radically different tack toward returning and displaying results on mobile devices, while leveraging a common search technology platform. The mobile device has very different requirements. With limited bandwidth, screen size and time, this service puts information all right in front of you without having to click on multiple links and then find your way back through a convoluted navigation process, as you might have to do on a more conventional mobile search service. Have a look at this example search for “49ers”.

With one search from your mobile device, you can now easily get to a wide variety of 49ers results ‘ scores, team web sites, photos, news articles, and more.

Our goal with this release is to provide a rich set of relevant content for a given query from a number of different categories of results. The new display therefore demonstrates significant vertical integration on the mobile search result page to bring back more direct results. We’re already doing this on the web search results pages. For example, you see a shortcut for news or images in addition to web results where it is likely you would be interested in seeing those items.

In addition to providing relevant links to web and mobile web sites, the new mobile search provides immediate answers for business listings, movies, sports, news, events, celebrity gossip, stock/finance information, and so on, all from a single search. If the query term is “ipod”, the top of the result page includes results from Yahoo! Shopping, with prices and reviews, which could help the user who’s considering a purchase. A search for “San Francisco” will return weather, traffic information, and local news.

In a way, we have merged all the tabs above the search box and do our best to determine the most relevant pieces of information without asking the user to pick a specific vertical.

To get the new mobile search, you’ll need to download Yahoo! Go for your phone. We would love to hear what you think of the new service, so please drop us a comment below!

Thanks!
Paul Yiu, Yahoo! Search

PS. Opera has also selected Yahoo! Search as the exclusive search for its millions of Web browsers for mobile phones, Opera Mini’ and Opera Mobile worldwide.