Click to play demo
We know that search has been a hot topic over the past few weeks, so we wanted to share with you what the Yahoo! Search team has been focusing on lately. Today, we are announcing a new search page design that makes search more personally relevant and helps people explore the things that matter most to them. It exemplifies how Yahoo! is continuing to innovate in search technology and the user experience.

A few weeks ago, Yahoo! began rolling out a new homepage that is tailored to your interests. You may also have noticed that the Yahoo! Search team began testing a new design that will unify the experience between the new homepage and our search results page. We’ve been doing a lot of research such as usability experiments and eye-tracking research so that we can bring you a more personally relevant search experience that better understands what you’re looking for and helps you get things done quickly on the Web.

Unified Design

One of the designs we have been testing aligns the page framework and design with the new Yahoo! Homepage. Not only does this create a more integrated Yahoo! product experience, it also provides quick access to valuable search-specific applications and features in the left-hand column. For example, the section titled “Show Results From” helps people explore the results that matter most to them through sites they know and love.

Quick Access to Search Features

About a month ago, we launched a great new note-taking application called Search Pad.  In our new search page design, you have even easier access to the research you’ve been doing right at the top of the left column. In addition, we have integrated the SearchScan and Safe Search feature settings on the left column so you can more easily manage your protection from viruses, spyware, and spam while you search.

Enhancing Search Assistance

Our search assistance features are still the most sophisticated query assistance technologies on the Web. With the new design, assistance is still easily available directly below the search box where you need it most.

In addition, we are also testing ways to allow you to explore results through the “Related Concepts” section in the left column even when the Search Assist layer is hidden.

SearchMonkey

We recently celebrated the one-year anniversary of SearchMonkey. Over the past months, we have been driving efforts toward increasing structured data on the Web, more uses for existing structured data, and easier ways to display enhanced results for some data types. With the new search page design, we will be making it even easier to see richer results from an increasing number of sites. For example, you can easily show all of the enhanced results from Wikipedia on the new search page.

We’re testing the new Yahoo! Search results page with a percentage of our U.S. visitors chosen at random, so you may be one of the few who get a chance to try it out. Please let us know what you think in the comments section below. Over the next few weeks, we will be adding more new features during these tests. Be sure to check in often to see what we’re up to!

Larry Cornett

Vice President, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search

We’d like to congratulate Vik Singh, an architect at Yahoo!, who has just been picked as one of the MIT’s  Technology Review 35 Young Innovators Under 35 of 2009 for his contributions to Yahoo! Search BOSS.  Since its launch, thousands of developers have issued millions of queries through Yahoo! Search BOSS to power some great, personalized search platforms.

Check out a Q&A and JellyTalk with Vik, where he talks about creative uses of BOSS and future innovations in search.

Congratulations, Vik!

Yahoo! Search Team

Today we are rolling out several enhancements to Delicious that make it easier to find your bookmarks with our improved search tools, to see the freshest bookmarks on the Web, and to share bookmarks with your friends.

• New Delicious Search Tools
Many Delicious users have hundreds or thousands of bookmarks. To make finding your bookmarks easier, we’ve created new search tools with advanced timeline and tag filtering controls so that you can search within a given date range or filter the results by tag. We’ve also enhanced the search results page to display rich content including YouTube videos with inline playback, Flickr images, and Yelp local data when applicable.

Click to enlarge image

• Fresh Bookmarks on Delicious.com
Want to see the latest sites that people are saving and talking about? We’ve created the Fresh Bookmarks tab on the Delicious homepage to show the most recently saved Delicious bookmarks that are buzzing on Twitter. We combine the latest actions on Delicious and popular discussions on Twitter to bring you the best and freshest links about technology, web, politics, and media. (See the Delicious blog to learn more).

• Email and Tweet Bookmarks
When you save a bookmark from Delicious (using our Firefox extension or bookmarklets), instead of copying and pasting URLs into emails or Twitter updates, you can now email or tweet your bookmark directly from Delicious. These options are visible when you add recipients in the Send field.

We hope you give these new Delicious enhancements a try. Let us know what you think in the Comments section below.

Ariel Seidman | delicious.com/aseidman | twitter.com/aseidman
Director, Product Management

Many of you are probably already familiar with the Yahoo! Shortcut that appears at the top of the Yahoo! Search results page when you search for a local business,.  Starting today, we’re enhancing the Yahoo! Shortcut for local businesses to include links to information you care about most and an overlay that displays content directly on the search results page.

For example, if you conduct a search on a business, such as “Coupa Café Palo Alto,” you will see the following Shortcut:

You can now see a selection of images and reviews for the business directly on the search results page by clicking the “Reviews” and “Photos” tabs on the Shortcut, saving you time and giving you the information you need in one place:

We’ve enhanced the Shortcut for category searches too, for when you are searching for a type of business and don’t have a specific business name in mind. For example, when you search “sushi palo alto,” you’ll see a list of sushi restaurants in Palo Alto in the Shortcut, which again pulls content directly onto the page to help you decide where to go:

The local enhanced Shortcut brings the most relevant information from across the Web so you can find what you need in one place. It is also a part of our continuing effort to better understand query intent – what users mean in their queries – and to match it with the right content. About 20 percent of online searches have a local intent, where users are looking for businesses, organizations, events, and other information in a specific geographic area. Not only does this enhanced Shortcut make your time online more efficient, but it also helps you make the best use of your time when you’re off the Internet.

So give the local enhanced shortcut a try – remember that you can always find local business information by searching by city (”giordanos chicago“) or by zip code (”florist 94041“).  Let us know what you think.

Nitzan Achsaf

Sr. Product Manager, Yahoo! Search

Yahoo! and Microsoft today announced an agreement that will improve the Web search experience for users and advertisers, and deliver sustained innovation to the industry.  For more information, check out Carol Bartz, our CEO’s post on Yodel here.

The Yahoo! Search Team

What are some of the must-sees in Barcelona? What are the most popular landmarks in San Francisco? Whether you are an armchair traveler or avid globetrotter, you can now take a virtual tour of popular points of interest when you search for a destination in Yahoo! Image Search. With the new travel image refiner, we are continuing our focus on satisfying user intent through a deeper understanding the Web and presenting related objects from the real world. The travel image refiner taps into this “Web of Objects” and lets you explore these popular points of interest, giving you more contextual information about your destination.

Let’s say you are planning your first trip to Rome. The new travel image refiner shows categories for popular destinations such as the Colosseum, Pantheon, and Trevi Fountain.

Click on the Pantheon tab and you will see an overlay of images so you can virtually tour image results for this ancient temple without leaving your original search results page. You can explore any of the popular places to visit in Rome and use the many images you have at your fingertips to help you decide where to go.

Even if you’re not planning on hopping on a plane soon, you can use the travel image refiner to find out more about a place you’ve heard about. Or you can use it to check out how your hometown has changed by delving into images from some of your favorite places in town.

The Yahoo! Image Search refiner is currently available for location-specific searches, but we are planning to expand this capability to other types of image searches as well. In the meantime, explore aspects of cities like Las Vegas or find pics of a major tourist destination, like Barcelona. We would love to hear what you think!

Yahoo! Image Search Team

Ramu Adapala, Anand Ramani, Sriram J. Satish, Borkur Sigurbjornsson, and Roelof van Zwol

People have been clamoring to get their hands on Search Pad since we showed a demo video earlier this year. Today we are rolling out Search Pad to the public so you can see for yourself how it can help you organize research on the Web.

Search Pad helps you track sites and make notes by intelligently detecting user research intent and automatically collecting sites the user visits. Search Pad turns on automatically when you’re doing research, tracking sites to make document authoring a snap. You can then quickly edit and organize your notes with the Search Pad interface, which includes drag-and-drop functionality and auto-attributed pasting.

For example, if you are planning a trip to Durango, Colo., Search Pad detects your research intent and asks if you’d like to take notes. Search Pad then saves the sites you’ve visited, like the tourism office or a day spa you’re headed to, and lets you take more notes on the information you’ve found.

You can save your documents using your Yahoo! ID so you can access your documents from anywhere on the Web.  This helps you save any research you’ve done so you needn’t do the same searches over and over again.

After you’ve done your research, you can publish your document to a permanent URL to share with friends and family so they can check out your trip itinerary and chime in with tips. Using Search Pad, you can share research on that new digital camera that you are checking out, things to do this weekend, or any other research you might do on the Web. You can even share Search Pad documents on Facebook, Twitter, or Delicious.

Search Pad can help you save your work across an entire session or even multiple sessions. Our intent detection allows us to offer Search Pad during sessions where it is most needed, and stay out of the way when it’s not. Of course, you can also opt to use Search Pad directly at any point during your research.

At Yahoo!, we’re always looking for ways to innovate in search by challenging the model that search is just about a keyword and 10 blue links. We are constantly improving our technology and experience in ways that people need most — Search Pad is just the latest result of those efforts.

Search Pad goes live today in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina.  See for yourself how Search Pad can help you save time, share information easily, and make the hardest search research tasks more manageable.  Give it a try. We look forward to hearing your feedback.

Tom Chi

Senior Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Search

Yahoo! Search logs gave a revealing picture of what the King of Pop evokes for people as they mourned his passing today. Starting last night, searches for his legendary music surged. “Thriller,” “Man in the Mirror,” and “Billie Jean” were among the top lyrics, songs, and videos that people looked for on Yahoo! Search. As details of Jackson’s death emerge, searchers are looking for details on prescription drugs including Demerol, the hospital Jackson was taken to after he collapsed (UCLA Medical Center), and other lingering questions (”why did Michael Jackson die”).

Details of Jackson’s controversial and sometimes disturbing life emerged again in Yahoo! search data as we saw searches for “Michael Jackson plastic surgery”, photos of the singer, and “was Michael Jackson abused as a child.”

Jackson’s death set multiple records across Yahoo!. Our front page story “Michael Jackson Rushed to Hospital” was the highest clicked story in our history, and Yahoo! News saw an all-time record in unique visitors yesterday. Yodel Anecdotal’s post on losing Michael Jackson captures even more details on how the online world reacted to his death.

As fans continue to flood the Internet with questions, we’ll keep being the source for memories, pictures, and news about the untimely death of the King of Pop.

Yahoo! Search

An enthusiastic group of data geeks and Semantic Web enthusiasts met last week at our Sunnyvale headquarters where we hosted the latest edition of VoCamp. VoCamps are a series of informal events that provide a small setting where the Semantic Web community can discuss issues related to semantic interoperability and creating, managing, and publishing vocabularies.

The format of VoCamp was conceived by Talis’ Tom Heath and Yahoo!’s Peter Mika, with the first installment organized in Oxford, England, in September, 2008. Since then, VoCamps have grown into a real movement, with events organized in Galway, Ireland; Austin, Texas.; Ibiza, Spain; and Washington, D.C., with more planned in New York and Bristol, England.

In Sunnyvale, we spent the first afternoon discussing three broad issues: ways of finding vocabularies on the Semantic Web, tools for mapping vocabularies and executing data transformations, and methods for lifting relational databases into the RDF world. Over pastries and pizza the next day, the campers worked in small groups on more specialized topics, including creating methodologies for vocabulary development, and developing a microformat for code documentation. (Many thanks to the microformat admins Tantek Çelik, Kevin Marks, and Ben Ward for bringing their perspectives to this discussion.) Other topics discussed included the Common Tag format and vocabulary visualization.

As Yahoo! Search moves toward a Web of Objects, we know that the developer community will be a critical component for creating a more robust Semantic Web. We were proud to play host to VoCamp Sunnyvale and look forward to future VoCamp gatherings.

Yahoo! Search

Today, we are announcing two updates that make it easier for site owners and developers to share and use structured data within Yahoo! Search:  new enhanced results and the support of Google Base formatting for structured data feeds. Let’s take a look at these two updates.

New Enhanced Results – Products, Events, News and More

Back in March 2009, we announced a simple way for site owners to embed video, games, and documents in Yahoo! Search results. Starting today, we are expanding this capability by giving site owners the power to display enhanced results for product pages, local information, events, news, and discussions.

If your site’s data falls into one of these categories, add a few lines of markup to your pages, and SearchMonkey will do the rest of the work. After we recrawl your page, we’ll extract the structured data and use it to display your data as an enhanced result.

For example, a retail website could add a few lines of code so that its product pages display as an enhanced result that includes the overall rating, price, reviews, and product photo directly on the search results page. Let’s say we have a fictional store called Sytore.com and the site owners have added the following code to their product pages:

<div typeof="product:Product"
xmlns:product="http://search.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/product/"
xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#">

<span property="product:listPrice">49.99</span>
<span property="product:salePrice">39.99</span>
<span property="product:currency" content="USD" />

<span property="rdfs:label">Pinball Maven : Video Games : Electronics</span>

<span rel="rdfs:seeAlso media:image">
<img src="http://www.sytore.com/product.jpg"/>
</span>

<div rel="review:hasReview">
<span typeof="review:Review">
<span property="review:rating">4</span>
<span property="review:totalRatings">17</span>
</span>
</div>
</div>

Sytore.com’s product pages (such as its product page for “Pinball Maven”) would then display as an enhanced result:

(*Example only)

Enhanced results bring users the information they need while helping site owners stand out on the search results page. You can add code to display local information as enhanced results with phone numbers and addresses. You can also display location and date for festivals, concerts, and other events.

A news website can take advantage of the SearchMonkey news object type and add code to enhance how their pages display in search. For example, a news website such as the (fictional) Thenewsy.com could add a few lines of code to its news article pages to display a photo and publication date. A query on “Obama Iraq” could display an enhanced result from Thenewsy.com:

(*Example only)

If your site contains a forum, blog, or other types of online discussion, you can add some markup to display the number of comments and thread date.  You can learn about how to get started with each of these object types on our overview page.

Enhanced results for these new data types will appear in Yahoo! Search results a few weeks after you add the markup, and after we’ve crawled your pages to extract the necessary structured data. There is no sign-up process, so we encourage you to begin adding markup to your sites now so that your results can be visible to users.

From the beginning, SearchMonkey has been powered by open formats, which is why we are continuing to support the use of RDFa, microformats, and now NewsML for these additional object types.  With the help of site owners and developers, we are moving more rapidly towards structuring the Web and enabling new search experiences.  As we mentioned a few weeks ago, RDFa structured data collected by SearchMonkey has increased by 413% since October 2008. With the release of these new object types, we look forward to seeing that figure continue to climb.

Google Base

Since its launch in late 2005, there has been a growing community of tools and partners for Google Base, Google’s online repository for user-contributed structured data. Today, Yahoo! Search will accept five popular Google Base feed item types: Event, Product, Review, Job, and Personals.

Why is this important?  First, site owners who have Google Base feeds containing Event and Product information can now automatically have their enhanced results displayed in Yahoo! Search by submitting their existing feed through Yahoo! Site Explorer.

In addition, for all five item types, it’s now easier to use your Google Base feed within Yahoo! Search.  Site Explorer will convert your existing feed to DataRSS XML, allowing your data to be stored within Yahoo! and accessible to developers through BOSS for building third party search engines and the SearchMonkey Developer Tool for building applications.

For detailed instructions, refer to the full documentation within the Yahoo! Developer Network site.  For information about how to build your Google Base feed, refer to the Google Base feed documentation.

Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.  We welcome your feedback.

Yahoo! Search