We are in the process of rolling out some changes to our search results. As usual, you may be seeing some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index throughout this process. This update began on Sunday night and should be complete by tomorrow morning.

Keep the feedback coming!

Tim Mayer
Yahoo! Search

Yahoo! Maps is coming out of Beta today. Check out our more detailed notes on the Yahoo! Local & Maps Blog. Since we released the beta version, we?ve spent our time optimizing the product and responding to user feedback to make it ready for mainstream use. The new Yahoo! Maps gives our users a more expedient method of finding locations and getting driving directions, and is an even more powerful tool within Yahoo! Local.

In addition to releasing the new Yahoo! Maps, we?re also rolling out street-level maps for Europe. These are available almost anywhere Yahoo! Maps can be found, whether on Flickr in their photo mapping feature, Yahoo! Travel?s Trip Planner product, and of course to our external developer community using Yahoo! Maps APIs.

Just a quick re-cap of what?s in the new Yahoo! Maps.

? The award winning, most interactive, easy to use interface for the new generation of mapping.
? Multi-point routing, (from A to B to C), which is a great way to plan your day, do your errands, visit garage sales or hunt for a house.
? A new mini-map which gives you an overview of what you?re looking at.
? Satellite and Aerial imagery, wall to wall in the USA, and for over 100 cities internationally.
? Full integration with Yahoo! Local, including search and SmartView.
? Saved locations and auto-complete against your saved locations, recent locations and Yahoo! Address Book.
? The ability to return to the old-style Yahoo! Maps for when you?re on a Dial-Up connection.
? Quick access to maps from within Yahoo! Mail using Yahoo! Shortcuts.

We certainly hope you enjoy using the new Yahoo! Maps, and the Maps team will continue to work to make it faster, more enjoyable, and more useful. Please Take a Tour of our new features, or jump right in!

Thank you!

Mike Lawless, Product Manager, and the Yahoo! Maps Team

Welcome to our first weather report of the fall season. We are rolling out an index update tonight. As usual, you’ll see some changes in ranking along with shuffling of the pages that are included in the index.

To share your thoughts with other Yahoo! Search users, please visit the Site Explorer forum. For other feedback or support issues, please refer to our webmaster resources page. We read all your feedback.

Thanks!

Priyank Garg
Product Manager
Yahoo! Search

The winners of Yahoo!’s first open Hack Day were Black Box Nation, fashion designers and hardware hackers Diana Eng (who you might recognize ? she was on Project Runway) and Emily Albinski from NYC, along with their good friend Audrey Roy.

They created a blogging purse by hacking fashion (handbag and fabric), hardware (Nokia 6682, pedometer, GPS device, custom stamp, breadboard, wires, soldering iron) and software (CSS, APIs) in less than 24 hours to produce a working prototype. The custom-designed handbag is rigged with a pedometer and a Nokia 6682. Every 10 steps (this is programmable), the pedometers triggers the 6682 to take a photo. The 6682 then uses Yahoo! Research Berkeley’s Zonetag mobile client to geotag the photos and upload the photos to Flickr.

You can follow the purse’s adventures at Blogging in Motion from the first few pics, to its journey back to New York. And there are some great photos of the purse being created along with Black Box’s recent fashion show at Maker Faire on Flickr.

Around here, FUSE is the acronym for our Search team?s vision to help people find, use, share and expand human knowledge. And with open APIs, the Yahoo! Developer Network is helping people fuse together wholly new applications with our own. That?s cool, but what?s really cool is that Black Box actually uses fuses and other bits to create new fashions based on technology. Like this necklace made of slow-blow fuses.

Now *that* is FUSE in action!

Jeannie Yang, Yahoo! Research Berkeley
Tara Kirchner, Yahoo!

PS – For more on Hack Day including Beck’s Hack Day Video, visit the Yodel Anecdotal.

Yes it’s true!

Jumpcut just announced they’ve agreed to join us, which will make Yahoo! Video an even better place for people to create, share, and discover great video online. If you haven’t heard of Jumpcut, it’s a San Francisco-based startup that has a passionate community of users and a great suite of online video editing capabilities.

Ever since Yahoo! Research Berkeley launched the International Remixer, our interest in this space has been pretty clear – we couldn’t stop talking about how cool it is to mashup multimedia of all kinds.

So needless to say, we are very happy to have Jumpcut join the Social Media group here. They’ll be bunk-mates with Flickr, and just around the virtual corner from Delicious, and Upcoming.

Please head over to Jumpcut’s blog for the official word.

Jason Zajac
VP Social Media

You may have heard about Hack Days at Yahoo!. These are internal 24-hour events where Yahoo! developers drop everything and work on something cool. For many of us, every day is hack day, but the real benefit of the official Hack Day is that you can take advantage of the resources at the company to help with your own cool hack – in fact, we’re having our next one this week!

But there’s more. On September 29-30, we are holding a public Hack Day. The first day, Friday, is a workshop-style Developer Day where you’ll meet a number of Yahoo! engineers and get hands-on information and training. The YUI guys will be there in full force showing off their latest Javascript magic. Douglas Crockford will teach you more about Javascript in an hour than you thought was possible, I’ll do my PHP thing, and you will hear from the Flickr, Delicious, Mail, Messenger, Maps, and of course, Search folks. Then that night chill out with the mashup Djs – Adrian + the Mysterious D. Saturday night’s entertainment has yet to be announced, but the rumors sound interesting.

On Saturday the hacking commences. Bring your ideas, team up with people and come up with something cool. What better way to create a hack involving Flickr than to work with one of the Flickr engineers? Or if you have trouble getting a certain neat CSS hack to work, grab Matt. PHP not cooperating? I can probably figure it out. There will be a critical mass of resources to solve just about any web hack problem. Hack Day has proven to be fun and effective here at Yahoo!, and I think it is going to be even more interesting as a public event.

If you are interested in participating, please go to HackDay.org.

Rasmus Lerdorf
Infrastructure Architect

Hi folks, we just launched a redesign of Yahoo! Real Estate. As part of this you can now find up-to-date local mortgage rate information directly within web search. Go to Yahoo! and search for ‘[your city] mortgage rates’ (ex: Santa Clara mortgage rates).

The new shortcut displays three of the most popular loan types along with their daily rates and the week-over-week trend. The shortcut also has links to view nearby individual lender rates as well as state mortgage rate trend graphs. If you’re looking for a mortgage type that is not displayed, you can click the ‘More mortgage rates’ link for additional loan types. You can also select the ‘Calculate payment’ link to figure out your monthly payments and amortization schedule for your desired loan amount.

Now seems like a good time to bring you up to date on some additional Yahoo! Real Estate search shortcuts such as the home valuation shortcut and local real estate search shortcut for ?[city] real estate? queries (ex: ?san Francisco real estate?). This shortcut helps users narrow their search and easily access local homes for sale by linking directly to MLS listings in the area in which they are searching.

The newly launched site also features a brand new design that leverages the Yahoo! Maps API with satellite imagery, and the Yahoo! Local API, both of which are available to the public.

With the new design, you can easily browse homes on a map and plot nearby points of interest such as schools, grocery stores, parks, and restaurants; many of which feature user reviews from Yahoo! Local. The site also allows you to research local market conditions such as an area’s housing inventory, median price, price trends, mortgage rates, and rate trends.

We hope these new features add breadth of service, usability and value to the more than 3 million home listings and existing real estate services Yahoo! offers. If you are looking to do some research, buy or sell, check out the new site and let us know what you think!

Vivek Gupta
Senior Engineering Manager, Yahoo! Real Estate

Carlos Teran
Product Manager, Yahoo! Real Estate

Mixing and matching unique content and technology is a defining aspect of the current Internet environment. And when it comes to mixing in location, maps and local is at the center of it all.

Today we are unveiling two new features that really highlight what local context can bring to social software. The products and services of two of our team’s favorites – Flickr and Upcoming – have been enhanced via integration with Yahoo! Maps and Yahoo! Local.

First is a new GeoTagging feature on Flickr. Using Yahoo! mapping and geo-tagging platforms, users can drag and drop photos to associate them with a location, and view and discover photos on an interactive map. Now, users have a whole new way to search, browse and save photos on Flickr. Give it a spin and let us know what you think!

Also, our journey to offer the most vibrant social events platform on the Web takes a big step forward today. A slew of new event content now appears on Upcoming, via Yahoo! Local event feeds. There are some new design changes we think you’ll like, as well. With these changes, we think you’ll not find a more active and engaging online event destination than Upcoming.

Of course, in the spirit of sharing and expanding knowledge, there are APIs for outside developers to remix their content or technology with Flickr, Local, Maps and Upcoming.

For additional details on today?s news, take a look at posts from Stewart and Andy.

Paul Levine
GM, Yahoo! Local

As some have noted, we rolled out a new search index. As usual, you’ll see some changes in ranking along with what is in the index. We’ve heard webmasters like you love the communication, such as weather reports from us. We are trying to connect with you more directly and enrich our interaction even further through Site Explorer. Please authenticate your site in Site Explorer and join the conversation on the Site Explorer forum.

For other feedback or support issues, please refer to our webmaster resources page. We love hearing from you.

Thanks
Priyank

We?ve all had moments in our lives when we wished we had our cameras around to capture a perfect sunset, an amusing cloud shape in the sky, or a candid shot of our friends, family or pets. That?s why Flickr is so great. It is full of these moments – as seen through the eyes of the world. Whenever I go looking for interesting images on Flickr, I?m always amazed by the diversity. Some are outright funny; others are serene, moving, or striking.

Now you can find this experience through Yahoo! Search. Try searching for funny photos and you?ll find hilarious and wacky Flickr photos of animals, kids, and signs. Searching for things that people think are funny is a good example of a query where combining what the community knows (and tags) with what algorithms can compute can lead to better search results.

If you are looking for striking photos, try searching for interesting photos. Sifting through these images makes me wish I could take a few months off to travel the world and just take pictures. Or, I guess I should finally go take that photography class I?ve been thinking about. For now, I?ll continue to appreciate the collection of images from various photography groups on Flickr. Try searching for travel photography, nature photography, or black and white photography.

I hope you enjoy getting lost in this experience as much as I do. Let us know your thoughts and ideas – we aim to expand this in the future.

Lingxian Ding
Yahoo! Search