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

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

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

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

• 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’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

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

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

Raj Gossain
Yahoo! Search

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

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