Author Archive

Are you tired of being lost in the Clouds? We're talking about that large Tag Cloud of course, while it's cool to see a snap shot of tags from yourself, your community or everyone, we've heard your wishes for the...

I’m Matt Stevens, the new Community Manager for My Web. And you scoff, “What kind of foofy, touchy-feely crap is that?” Well, Yahoo believes that people are the heart of the Net experience. After all, the Net is created by...

1,100 librarians recently swarmed on the seaside town of Monterey, California for a deep dive in search technology, and I was among them. Topics included desktop search, visual and clustering search, podcasting, taxonomies and metadata, RSS, blogs, wikis, online education, intranets, spyware, digitization, wireless access, and more. In today’s world of search engines, librarians are reaching way beyond the physical walls of the library.

To make library services more compelling, some librarians have begun experimenting with new virtual reference techniques like instant messenger and text-messaging to interact with patrons. Although some adults may be slow to adopt these techniques in the library, just imagine the usefulness to all the teenagers who already use instant messenger and text-messaging as their main methods of communication.

Elsewhere, librarians discussed creating online library catalogs that allow patrons to tag, comment, review, share, recommend, and otherwise create a virtual community around records in the catalog. Imagine browsing through a library catalog and seeing other people’s reviews or recommendations for similar items. Sounds like what happens on many Web sites now, places like Yahoo! Local, My Web 2.0, Flickr, Furl, Amazon.com, etc.

Of course I attended the search-related discussions at the conference, which included representatives from Yahoo! , Google, Ask, A9, Groxis and PubSub. My main take-away was that some librarians feel the major search companies are helping improve access to information, while other librarians are concerned about the monopolization and commercialization of information. This was particularly evident in the sessions and hallway conversations I heard about digitizing books, which we’ve been thinking hard about, as well.

Finally, librarians are continuing to evolve their roles now that people rely so heavily on search engines. What does this mean?

• For search, knowing when to use particular vertical and specialty engines, specialty databases, meta-search engines, advanced search syntax for the big engines, and so forth.
• For news, helping people use RSS, email alerts, and so forth to know when new and relevant content is available online.
• For sharing information, helping people find and share with others by using blogs, wikis, and tagging.

As the world of online and offline libraries continue to converge, I think this quote summarizes the conference perfectly: “In 2020, Internet Librarian will simply be called the Librarian Conference.” Mark Sandler, University of Michigan.

Got something to say about libraries in the digital age? Let us know!

Chris Fillius
Manager, Search Quality Analysis Team

We will be making changes to the index tonight. You should see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index. This update will be complete by tomorrow (Monday) morning.

As always if you have any feedback for us about the new index please email: ystfeedback@yahoo.com. Please provide specific feedback that includes either:

1) Specific query terms where the results are good or bad.

2) Specific domains that you feel are either being under or over indexed.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Tim Mayer
Yahoo! Search

Today we released the Shoposphere and Pick Lists beta, plus enhancements to our core shopping search capabilities, which we hope you’ll try out during your holiday gift-giving spree.

The Shoposphere and Pick Lists are examples of social commerce. We believe the community of shoppers is one of the best sources for product information and advice. The Shoposphere is a place to discover interesting and cool products thematically arranged into Pick Lists by other shoppers. It’s always changing. It includes new lists in a “product stream” and highest rated lists which are a fun way to explore new products and trends. The Shoposphere will continue to evolve as a hub for other types of user-generated content.

Pick Lists are lists of products on any topic, and can include any of the 90 million products available through Yahoo! Shopping. With Pick Lists, users can share their knowledge about products they’ve researched for the benefit of the community. Anyone can view a Pick List in the Shoposphere, rate it, and comment on it. What we like most is that Pick Lists show off the 'long tail' of shopping search. It’s not just about digital cameras and iPods, but anything you can think of. You can peruse Pick Lists for such delights as fake food, denim leg warmers, and fuel cell experiment kits. And, we've also integrated the Yahoo! 360 social network into Pick Lists (and user reviews) so you can see if you’re connected to the creator of the content.

We’ve also done a lot to improve our core shopping search, starting with a new search UI with easier scanning of prices and product reviews. We've integrated deals into search results so that free shipping offers, rebates, and coupons are a click of the mouse away. My Lists allow you to easily save, organize, and share product lists. You can make multiple lists including wish lists for you or your friends or lists for researching products, etc. And these lists are easy to share with email and RSS or can be kept private. Finally we’ve launched a new product overview page that integrates editorial reviews, user reviews, product specs, deals and price comparison – all in one place to help you make informed buying decisions.

That’s it for now. Please check out the Shoposphere, build a Pick List, and tell us what you think of our shopping search capabilities. The beta is a first step and we plan on rolling out more and more features to make this the best experience possible. Look for tagging, search enhancements, more 360 integration, badges for putting a Pick List on your blog, and other surprises coming soon. We'd love your feedback on this.

David Beach
Product Manager, Yahoo! Shopping

Vivek Gupta
Engineering Manager, Yahoo! Shopping

It was while we were horking the love seat that I started to think about scamming. As Yahoo’s search division moves out of its seriously overcrowded corner of the Yahoo campus into its own office tower, the empty cubes of...

In March, 1980, the fictional J.R. Ewing was shot on T.V.’s Dallas. Then the actors all went on strike. It wasn’t until late November that an anxious world got to learn “Who shot J.R.?”—and the famous question made Dallas the...

Every holiday season I find myself in a wintry climate cooped up with a bunch of people and not much to do except eat, drink, and be merry. There’s really only so much of this I can take, so invariably we go and catch a movie. The problem is finding something that both my parents and my teenage cousins will enjoy. I’m sure that I’m not the only one with this problem.

To make your search for a movie easier, I’d like to tell you about two movie shortcuts on Yahoo! Search. The first shortcut is the Movie Trailer shortcut. Just by entering a movie name followed by “trailer” or "trailers" you can see trailers and clips for just about any major motion picture.

Try Harry Potter Trailer to see movie trailers and an exclusive clip from our friends at Yahoo! Movies.

After watching the trailer, try the Movie Showtimes shortcut. By entering the title of a movie and a location, (major city, zip, or city+state) you’ll get a listing of the closest theaters showing that movie. For example, Harry Potter Palo Alto CA. With a single search, you’ll get showtimes as well as ratings and maps.

Currently we have over 30 Search Shortcuts to help you find what you’re looking for. Missed the game? Scores are a click away with a search for the team name followed by “scores”. Can’t find an address? Searching for the address will show you the map right away.

As always, please let us know what you think.

Nick Nguyen
Product Manager, Yahoo! Search Shortcuts

Update: The Y!Q Greasemonkey script is now compatible with both Firefox 1.0 and Firefox 1.5. Thanks to everyone for your feedback! The "official" link to the script from the Y!Q site will be updated later this week. In the meantime, simply make sure you have Greasemonkey installed, then right-click here to install the latest version of the Y!Q script.

Back in August, we announced that Y!Q had been integrated into Yahoo! Toolbar for Internet Explorer, enabling Toolbar users to select text on any Web page and get related search results on the spot — the latest embodiment of Y!Q's mission to enable search "at the point of inspiration." Firefox users quickly responded, “Great, but what about us?” Well, we heard you — just install the Y!Q Greasemonkey script, and you'll be able to perform a Y!Q search whenever — and wherever — the spirit moves you.

Also cool is the way the Y!Q Greasemonkey script came about: Jayanth, a former member of the Y!Q team who is now working on another project at Yahoo!, hatched the idea and ran with it on his own, one of many cool hacks coming from the team lately born from the vision and passion of one individual or small teams of like minded developers.

While we're on that subject, the Term Extraction and Contextual Search Web Services (Y!Q's close cousins over at the Yahoo! Developer Network) continue to fuel the imagination of internal and external "hackers" alike. Check out TagCloud.com (the evolution of a cool idea that we blogged about earlier this year), the Local Events Browser, a really slick, internally developed mashup that showcases a whole range of Yahoo! APIs (including the amazing new Yahoo! Maps APIs), and Matt Biddulph's intriguing use of term extraction to identify and visualize relationships expressed in unstructured Web content.

Stay tuned for more exciting news from the Contextual Search team in the coming months. In the meantime, don't be shy — we welcome your thoughts and suggestions for Y!Q, and would love to hear about your innovative uses of our Web Services.

Gray Norton
Product Manager, Contextual Search

Two months ago we launched Site Explorer, a tool to explore the pages from your site in the Yahoo! Search index and the inlinks to those pages. Many of you have been using the tool actively and we appreciate the positive response and feedback we have received. It was gratifying to see the panelists at Webmaster World using the tool for site reviews. We have now launched it as a Beta on our International destinations, including Argentina, Australia & NZ, Brazil , Canada (English and French), France, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Singapore, Spain and UK as part of the Services and Tools.

Site Explorer also tries to make it easy for you to tell us what we don’t know about your site. To make it even simpler, we now accept site submissions in the following formats.

• RSS 0.9, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0, such as CNN Top Stories
• Atom 0.3, such as, Yahoo! Search Blog
• A text file with a list of URLs, each URL at the start of a new line
• A single webpage

Note that for any URL (submitted directly or obtained from a feed), we will extract links from it and find pages we have not discovered already.

We’ve also added something many of you have asked for, the ability to filter out internal inlinks when exploring the inlinks to your site or to particular pages. Please try out these new features and let us know, as many of you already have, what you think about Site Explorer. Even though we can’t respond to all your emails, every piece of feedback is appreciated.

Enjoy exploring!

Priyank Garg
Product Manager