Author Archive

As Americans look toward a new president in a tough economy this year, we have been noticing some very interesting data about how people are using search to help them in this recession. In the last few days, President-elect Barack Obama’s economic plan seems foremost on people’s minds – searches for “Obama stimulus package” in the last week quadrupled compared to the week before. Related searches include “stimulus checks” (up 80% compared to last week), “obama stimulus plan” (up 309%), and “second stimulus rebate checks” (up 75%).

The Obama stimulus plan has yet to reach Congress, but its search volume is already nearly half of the search volume for the Bush stimulus package when it was signed last February. As legislation is finalized on Obama’s stimulus plan, we can expect search volume to grow and perhaps even surpass its predecessor.

Though we learned only a month ago that America has been in a recession for a year, searches on unemployment and how to invest more safely had already started to bubble as early as last July. As people mulled over their investment strategies over the holidays, our search data showed that people are looking for conservative investment tools. Searches for “savings bonds” spiked 21 % this week, as did terms like “treasury bills” and “FDIC insured savings.”

While the jury is still out on how the new stimulus plan will affect the economy, people have already started searching for tax-related information to prepare for the tax season ahead. As early as the first of the year, we have seen searches for “taxes” steadily buzzing up - this week the search for “taxes” went up 50 %. Searches for “H and R Block” (up 66 %), “file taxes online” (up 50 %), and “where can I file my taxes” (up 39%) were all abuzz in web search this week as well.

As more details about Obama’s stimulus plan unfold, what information are you searching for to help you prepare for the economy this year?

By Eugenia Chien and Andrea Sandke
Yahoo! Search

Starting today, all Yahoo! Search users in the U.S. will see a Wikipedia SearchMonkey application. Not surprisingly, we’ve seen a handful of Wikipedia Enhanced Results and Infobars built in the past few months. After observing how people used these apps, we gathered the best elements from each and built a new app. If you prefer any of the other Wikipedia apps, you can of course opt to use them instead (by adjusting your preferences here).

Our Wikipedia app includes a photo (if there’s one in the corresponding article), deep links to the first four sections of the article, and a snippet pulled from the article summary. For example, say you’re a post-modern furniture fan and you’re looking to learn more about Eames chairs. A search for Eames chairs will bring up two Wikipedia results for two of their famous chairs. You can use the photo to help you decide which result is best for your needs (this is called result disambiguation by us search geeks) and then click a deep link to jump directly to your answer.

While Wikipedia may be the most well-known reference site on the web, it’s certainly not the only one. In fact, there are SearchMonkey apps for many other top sites, including HowStuffWorks, eHow, CIA World Factbook, Merriam-Webster, and a lot more.

We hope these apps make searching for reference information on the web easier and faster. Let us know if you have any feedback.

SearchMonkey Team

p.s. Today appears to be the 8th anniversary of the launch of Wikipedia. Congrats to Wikipedia and its many contributors!

The newly minted Obama administration can look forward to a large, internet-savvy constituency who demand more from the internet than they did four years ago. This time, instead of simply searching for information on “inauguration,” people are looking for ways to watch the inauguration online and capture moments of the inauguration that they missed. We saw new search spikes on “inauguration website”, “watch inauguration online”, and “obama inauguration speech video” – these are all terms that didn’t spike in the 2005 inauguration.

We also got a fascinating peek at some unexpected questions on our searcher’s minds. Users looked for off-beat searches like “inauguration luncheon recipes”, “inauguration how many times was god mentioned”, and “John Roberts oath of office ridiculousness”.

Want to read more about what people were curious about this inauguration? Check out the Inaugural Spikes post at Yodal Anecdotal . And don’t forget to tell us in the comments below: what were you looking for on Yahoo! Search about the presidential inauguration?

By Eugenia Chien
Yahoo! Search

This post announces an update to Graded Browser Support. The GBS page on the YUI site always has the most current information. This post includes a list of primary changes, the updated chart of browsers that receive A-grade support, and our GBS forecast.

Primary Changes

This GBS update adds A-grade support for IE8 on XP and Vista. A-grade support is discontinued for Firefox 3 on Win 2000 and Mac 10.4, keeping the A-grade testing surface at 15 platforms.

• Initiated A-grade support for IE 8, Win XP
• Initiated A-grade support for IE 8, Win Vista

• Discontinued A-grade support for Firefox 3, Win 2000
• Discontinued A-grade support for Firefox 3, Mac 10.4

• Incremented supported version of Opera to 9.6
• Incremented supported version of Safari to 3.2

The dagger symbol (as in “Firefox 3.†”) indicates that the most-current non-beta version at that branch level receives support. Put another way, † means “the most recent” instead of “all.”

GBS Forecast

In addition to the effective-immediately changes, we’re forecasting the discontinuation of A-grade support for Firefox 2 in the GBS update toward the end of June 2009.

The GBS Archive

• GBS Update, 2009-01-28
• GBS Update, 2008-07-03
• GBS Update, 2008-02-19

Tags: gbs

Vik Singh, a developer in the Yahoo! Search BOSS team, is the brains behind the BOSS Mashup Framework. Since last summer, he has built many sample apps using the framework. Most recently Vik released an informal mashup (not an official Yahoo! product) called TweetNews, which fuses Yahoo! News with the Twitter API to provide a new ranking model for breaking news queries. Vik took some time to answer our questions about his new application, creative uses of BOSS, and future innovations in search.

Yahoo! (Y!): What’s TweetNews and how does it work?

Vik Singh (VS): TweetNews is a mashup that reorders Yahoo!’s latest news search results based on how popular they are in Twitter. For example, if you search ‘iPhone’ on TweetNews, the service queries BOSS for the latest news results on the ‘iPhone’ and fetches the latest Twitter comment on ‘iPhone’ via Twitter’s API. The service computes how many of these Twitter messages relate to each Yahoo! news result by looking at how much textual overlap there is, then displays the news results re-ranked based on their number of related Twitter messages. Basically this service uses Twitter to determine authority for content that is so fresh it doesn’t have links yet.

Y!: Why did you build it? And what does it demonstrate about what’s possible with BOSS?

VS: One emerging area of search that I think no one has really solved is real-time authoritative search. When breaking news happens (like the Mumbai bombing, Hudson River plane crash, or wildfires), it’s difficult for traditional news sources to discover and prioritize all the information in a timely fashion. It can take several minutes or hours for traditional media to converge on the important stories. However, new social media outlets like Twitter are breaking these important stories faster than traditional media. By looking at the number of users chatting about these topics, one can measure the future newsworthiness of a very fresh story despite its potentially minimal traditional news coverage at that moment.

Although Twitter can be used to discover and rank content, it’s not necessarily the best place to get in-depth, factual information since Twitter messages are very short and unverified. This service ranks actual news stories which provide integrity and in-depth coverage while using Twitter as a signal for ranking. A couple of days ago I searched ‘tweetnews’ on TweetNews and underneath the top result, one of the related Twitter messages described the service as: “The reliability of news with the speed of Twitter.” That pretty much sums up the value proposition of this idea.

I think overall the service was well-received. The traffic filled up my allowed server quotas in minutes. It was quite an honor to read that Wired thought it was the best mashup they’ve ever seen. This idea shows that there are still inefficiencies in search, and that with BOSS, anyone can go out and solve them. All the code and tools I used are open source. It took a little less than 100 lines of code to represent all the search logic, thanks to BOSS. This application couldn’t exist pre-BOSS. Going from nothing to a 100-line search engine is a pretty big advancement!

Y!: What are your thoughts on publicly releasing mashups versus fully “productizing” new ideas before releasing them?

VS: It depends on the idea, but I find that sometimes releasing “quick and dirty” to the world is a great way to test a proof of concept with a real audience. Many ideas that are easy to prototype and test with real users instead go straight through the expensive and slow productization process only to be a dud when they go out to market. In this particular case, releasing TweetNews as a more open third-party mashup provided us invaluable feedback on the idea and empowered our BOSS developer community with more source code and search design patterns.

Y!: Any examples of mashups or search products built using BOSS that you think show potential?

VS: I really like Trogdor, OneRiot, PostRank, InsiderFood, and BuildaSearch, to name just a few. Trogdor saves the users time because they don’t have to press enter or refresh the page; it automatically updates your search results while you type. OneRiot and PostRank aim to solve the social freshness issues that TweetNews highlighted but employ other sophisticated ranking techniques. InsiderFood provides a new user experience for discovering and searching international cuisine.

I like BuildaSearch because it lets anyone build a search engine using BOSS without having to write a single line of code. A user just goes to their site, picks some colors and favorite URLs, and voila, BuildaSearch generates a search engine. I also like many others that have been linked to on this blog.

Y!: Where do you see the most potential for innovation in search?

VS: Blending and personalization of vertical and web search results – I believe vertical search (shopping, local, auctions, news, social) provides invaluable, unique results from what we typically find in Web search. However, users need to learn to pick and choose from multiple search engines based on their query and intent. Wouldn’t it be nice to skip this step and do this automatically for the user? Can we be smart enough to know which search engine is best for that query, and if we’re not exactly sure, can we blend results together from the best verticals and personalize the experience and ranking for the user? I believe every search engine a user encounters should be totally comprehensive, relevant, and personalized based on which site the user is searching from. I strongly believe BOSS can help sites build this new wave of search experience.

Between Yahoo! Image Search and Video Search, we have a long and rich experience in providing search solutions for multimedia content on the web. Along the way we’ve made a list of challenges we want to tackle in order to provide a more engaging user experience. We want to open this opportunity to the best minds in the research community to shape the next generation of multimedia search.

So today we are announcing two exciting grand challenge problems for the Association for Computing Machinery’s ACM Multimedia Grand Challenge. This competition invites researcher to submit solutions to these challenge problems for an opportunity to present at ACM’s 2009 conference in Beijing.

Yahoo!’s two challenges in a nutshell:

1. Image search challenge: Develop a robust way of understanding user intent from a given query and generate highly relevant image clusters that match with the intent so that more images can be surfaced to searchers. We are also looking for interesting presentation methods that will help searchers navigate these image clusters easily.

2. Video search challenge: Develop methods, techniques, and algorithms to automatically generate narrative themes for a given video, as well as present the content in an easy-to-consume manner to video search users.

See the full problem statements from Yahoo! at ACM Multimedia Grand Challenge 2009.

We hope you will participate and let us know what you think are some of the key challenges facing multimedia search.

Anja Krombholz – Lead Designer, Multimedia Search
Kaushal Kurapati – Director, Product Management

If you’ve ever used a search engine as a tool to help plan a vacation, research a purchase, or find health information on an illness, you know how difficult it is to keep track of the relevant websites and notes you find. Today, we are testing a new feature called Search Pad^TM to help users effortlessly capture websites that they find on Yahoo! Search and organize that information to complete important tasks.

Our user studies show that people often use word-processing documents, sticky notes, emails, bookmarks (or a combination of the above) to record what they find on the Web. These methods can be quite cumbersome and require extra steps which are time-consuming and distracting. Search Pad tackles this problem by intelligently detecting users’ research intent, automatically collecting visited sites, and providing simple tools for users to organize and add notes – all in one place. Users can easily edit, delete, and re-order notes they’ve taken on a topic, and then print them out or email them to friends and family. They can also save the notes to access later by logging in with their Yahoo! ID. This helps to make online research much more productive and convenient.

Search Pad is currently only in testing and is not visible to all users. While our scientists and engineers are still working hard to improve the product before we bring it to everyone, you can take a sneak peek by checking out this quick video demo of Search Pad.

See the full screen version of the video.

Let us know what you think and share your experiences/suggestions around online research in the comments below.

Tom Chi
Senior Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Search

The title may be a bit dramatic since we can pretty much see the conference venue for SMX West from our building, but we’re excited to be there nonetheless! Yahoos will be sitting on a handful of panels, so stop by and learn what we’re up to.

Tuesday, February 10

Time: 10:45 am - noon
Panel: Technical SEO Issues For Developers
Speaker: Arnab Bhattacharjee, Senior Director, Yahoo! Search Technology & Engineering

Time: 1:15 pm – 2:30 pm
Panel: Local Search Marketing Tactics
Speaker: Atif Rafiq, Director, Product Marketing, Strategy and Business Development, Yahoo! Local

Wednesday, February 11

Time: 3:00 pm to 4:15 pm
Panel: Just Behave, A Look At Searcher Behavior
Speaker: Larry Cornett, Vice President, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search

Time: 3:00 pm to 4:15 pm
Panel: Tapping Into Image Search
Speaker: Kaushal Kurapati, Director, Product Management, Yahoo! Search Multi-Media

Thursday, February 12

Time: 11:30 am – 12:30 pm
Panel: Ask The Paid Search Reps
Speaker: Patrizio Spagnoletto, Senior Director, Yahoo! Search Marketing

Time: 1:30 pm to 2:30 pm
Panel: Ask The Search Engines
Speaker: Sharad Verma, Senior Manager, Yahoo! Search Technology

Time: 2:45pm – 3:45 pm
Panel: In House: Reporting & Scorecarding for Management - Management loves numbers
Speaker: David Roth, Director, Search Engine Marketing

Hope to see you there.

Yahoo! Search Blog Team

The Yahoo! Mobile team works every day to make mobile search faster, easier, and more relevant for millions of Yahoo! oneSearch users worldwide. Today we’re launching several new features for the Yahoo! oneSearch Shortcut, including an auto-locate feature that uses cell tower triangulation and Wi-Fi to detect the user’s location, enhanced Search Assist that incorporates the user’s recent search history, and a Windows Mobile client.

Last August, we launched the Yahoo! oneSearch Shortcut to provide one-click access to Yahoo! oneSearch, making search easily accessible on mobile devices. With today’s launch, we’re integrating voice search so you can speak or type your query directly from the home screen of the devices. Second, we’ve added an auto-locate feature on select devices to deliver local search results based on a combination of cell tower triangulation and Wi-Fi hotspots. You no longer need to type in your address or zip code to access local listings – Yahoo! oneSearch can provide results based on your location.

Finally, since we know it can be challenging to type on mobile devices, we’re improving our Search Assist technology on BlackBerry devices by incorporating the user’s search history. This will enable faster and easier input, delivering contextual recommendations and predictive text completion alongside the user’s previously searched terms. Simply type in your query and your recent searches or similar queries will display on the screen as a prompt. For example, while typing “Sus” in San Francisco, you may be offered Sushi Groove if you previously searched for it, or you may see “sushi recipe” as an assisted suggestion.

In this launch, we have also made Yahoo! oneSearch Shortcut available on more platforms, extending it to Windows Mobile devices in the U.S. The Yahoo! oneSearch clients now support some of the latest Nokia, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile devices. It is also now available on select devices in Australia, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Click here for additional information on device/country support.

For more information and to download the applications, Nokia and Windows Mobile users can visit our PC site or http://m.yahoo.com/shortcut from their mobile device. BlackBerry users can visit this website or direct their mobile phone browser to http://m.yahoo.com/voice. We hope you will try out these new features and let us know what you think in the comments below.

Joy Ghanekar
Yahoo! Mobile

Today, we’re announcing a handful of new features for Yahoo! Search BOSS as well as important updates on our terms of service and pricing.

Three New Features
Perhaps the most important component of what we’re releasing today is access to SearchMonkey structured data through the BOSS API. The primary way in which SearchMonkey acquires structured data is by using the Yahoo! Web Crawler to scour the web for embedded semantic markup such as microformats or RDF. Starting today, all this data is available to BOSS API users.

The structured data that site owners share with us through feeds will be openly available in the near future if site owners opt to participate. You can read more about how it all works here, but it’s pretty straightforward – just add the “view=searchmonkey_feed” parameter to your API request and we’ll return all available structured data name-value pairs in DataRSS XML. You can also return semantic data in RDF XML using view=”searchmonkey_rdf”.

Here’s an XML example of structured data from President Obama’s LinkedIn page:

We’re excited to see what can be built with this data, so please tag your mashups and products with bossmashup on Delicious.

Second, building on our release of Key Terms last November and SearchMonkey structured data today, we’re also making Long Abstracts available. This is all part of an effort to provide a rich set of document-level data to BOSS developers – in this case a longer description of the page (up to 300 characters compared to 170 previously). You can access these by appending the “abstract=long” parameter to your API request.

Lastly, for years Site Explorer has been a valuable tool for webmasters to understand how Yahoo! Search is indexing their site. Site Explorer also allows users to obtain inlinks for domains and URLs, which are now available through two new BOSS services called se_inlink and se_pagedata. Please refer to the updated documentation for details.

Open Monetization & Pricing
Effective immediately, we have changed our terms of service to allow developers to use third party monetization platforms (ad-based or otherwise). For obvious reasons monetization is critical to the BOSS ecosystem, so to provide as many opportunities as possible we have decided to adjust our terms to provide developers with more flexibility.

Today we’re also announcing our plans for implementing usage fees for BOSS. We’re introducing fees for a couple of reasons. First and most importantly, we’re hard at work on a number of technologies that will enhance both the functionality and performance of BOSS, and usage fees will help support this development. For example, once we introduce pricing, developers will be able to request 1000 results in a single API call (instead of the current 50). We’ll also be introducing an SLA to ensure BOSS is a robust and stable service for developers. Second, we believe that introducing the proposed pricing structure will improve the ecosystem by optimizing capacity for our serious developers.

You can find all the details on how the fee structure will work here. Instead of focusing on the particulars, we’ll share the principles we used in developing it. Our goal is to encourage adoption and usage with a low, but fair price – so as not to maximize revenue at the expense of trial and innovation. That is also why we’re going to provide up to 10,000 search queries per day (depending on the type of API call) free of charge to all developers. You’ll notice that the cost to developers is dependent not just on the number of queries requested, but also the type (i.e. how deep your query is). Rather than go with a simplistic “one size fits all” model, we feel that a “pay for what you use” approach is fairest for all types of users.

We’re announcing the fee structure months in advance of it taking effect (likely late Q2 of this year) because we want to give our developers as much advanced notice as possible, and also because we’re as interested as ever in your feedback – so feel free to comment below or on the BOSS developer forum.

Ashim Chhabra
Yahoo! Search BOSS Team