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

Last week, we introduced you to some great search features to keep up with the 82^nd Academy Awards. The coveted statuettes have been distributed and the post-show analysis is in full swing!

The buzziest acceptance speeches of the evening:  Sandra Bullock and  Mo’Nique – although the story behind Elinor Burkett and her so-called “hijacked” acceptance speech blazed a path through search logs on Monday.

Best Motion Picture contender that is the most anticipated DVD in search: The Blind Side, followed by Avatar, Precious, and The Hurt Locker.

The buzz, of course, is never simply about who won.  One of our favorite ways to explore major events is to check out the questions they inspired in search.  One standout: “Are the Oscars the same as the Academy Awards?”  (Why, yes!)

A sampling of notable Oscar 2010 search questions:

• Who won Best Actress? – the biggest award category in search questions
• Has Meryl Streep ever won an Oscar?
• What does Hurt Locker mean? – a big theme in search, coupled with “What is The Hurt Locker about?”
• How tall is Kathryn Bigelow?
• Are Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jake Gyllenhaal related?
• Who votes for the Oscars?

Check out The Buzz Log for more Oscar search trends and buzzing topics, courtesy of our friends at Yahoo! Buzz.

Andrea Sandke

Yahoo! Search

We’d like to welcome Shashi Seth as Senior Vice President of the Yahoo! Search Products team.  He’ll be joining us next week, leading all things Search.  As we’ve mentioned before, we’re doing lots of things to continue making Yahoo! Search better and incorporate it into all of our wonderful Yahoo! products, and we’re sure Shashi will help us keep the ideas flowing.

Shashi knows how to bring great products to life for consumers, while enabling big opportunities for advertisers, so expect amazing stuff from him and all of us at Yahoo! Search in 2010.

The Yahoo! Search Team

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