Archive for November, 2008

Over the last few months we’ve showcased a handful of innovative mashups that developers have created using Yahoo! Search BOSS. The creations have ranged in functionality and focus, but all have included interesting applications of Yahoo! Search’s index, infrastructure and technology. Today, we’re sharing another useful application of BOSS that TechCrunch just launched - a technology-flavored Web search engine. This new search engine enables TechCrunch users to search for technology-focused articles and company information across both the TechCrunch network of sites and the rest of the Web.

This partnership with TechCrunch illustrates a new BOSS capability called vertical lens technology, which enables partners, often with no search expertise, to create a truly comprehensive vertical search engine that complements their core user experience. Using BOSS, TechCrunch now provides a one-stop shop for all types of search. BOSS not only improves TechCrunch’s standard site search, it also integrates relevant technology content on people, products and companies from across the Web. And if a user conducts a non-tech focused search, they’ll see relevant Web search results.

BOSS vertical lens technology provides a handful of features that were implemented on TechCrunch:

• Real-time indexing of proprietary content

- Once TechCrunch content is added or a user comment is submitted, the search index almost immediately reflects the changes.


• Customized ranking

- The BOSS and TechCrunch teams worked closely to fine-tune the ranking algorithm to fit the TechCrunch audience and user experience.


• Structured search

- BOSS supports faceted refinement around TechCrunch’s structured content. This offers powerful tools for people who want to fine tune their searches or browse TechCrunch content - e.g. narrowing in on articles on Twitter written only by Michael Arrington, or only the most popular articles (popularity is determined by number of comments), or locating all companies that are founded in 2008.


• Blending Web with proprietary content in a single search display

- After querying both the TechCrunch and the Web indices, BOSS blends the results to produce one result set that is both relevant and comprehensive.

BOSS vertical lens is currently available to certain Yahoo! partners - but we’re working to share the technology more openly through the BOSS API. If you are interested in building a search product using BOSS vertical lens technology, please email us here. Our partnership with TechCrunch highlights the beginning of many more BOSS partner launches as Yahoo! continues to open up its search technologies and infrastructure to the world.

Take a look at TechCrunch’s article for additional background and insight.

Stay tuned.

YaJie Ying
BOSS Team

As the holiday shopping season draws near, we'd like to remind our merchants that FedEx is offering discounted shipping rates for Google Checkout stores. Through this program, Checkout stores can receive up to 21% off their FedEx® shipping. To learn more, please visit our signup page.

Posted by Christian Yee, Product Marketing Manager

Last week we announced Project Silk Road, our vision for delivering a broad suite of products and services for publishers and web developers, including a customizable Live Search API, rich content, multiple media and source types, and the ability to monetize through ad-serving.

Today we're expanding our toolkit with two important updates to Webmaster Center: the ability to detect malware on your site and the sites you link to, plus a greatly simplified authentication process that makes accessing our tools much easier. Together these updates help improve your site performance for Live Search, and protect you and your customers from inadvertent exposure to malware.

Here are just a things our tools can help you do.

Malware Detection

• Detect whether there is malware present on any of your webpages or on any of the webpages you link to (all these links will be disabled and flagged in the search results as malware).
• Download reports detailing which webpages on your website are affected and how to fix the problem.
• Ping our support team to get your sites re-scanned and re-included in Live results within days, not weeks.

Simplified Authentication

• One authentication code per user account can be used to authenticate multiple websites.
• If you already have an account with the Webmaster Center and previously used unique authentication codes for each registered website, no worries. Webmaster Center will continue to support all of your current authentication codes and methods.
• Bonus - the last successful authentication method becomes the default method. We keep track of it so you don't have to.

You can read more about this at the Live Search Webmaster Center blog.

The tools can be found at http://webmaster.live.com/. Give them a try and stay safe out there!

Angus Norton, Senior Director, Live Search

Last week we covered how you can use instant answers to find deals on travel.

This week we'll show you how to save on last-minute flights for Thanksgiving weekend.

 

Have a great holiday trip!

Joel Grus, Live Search Farecast Fareologist

Today we’re releasing a few updates - a new version of FoxyTunes for Firefox and several enhancements to FoxyTunes Planet.

Following our mission to support any media players you might be using, the latest FoxyTunes for Firefox now supports AIMP2 and The KMPlayer media players. Stay tuned for more popular players being supported in the near future

We are also launching several enhancements on the FoxyTunes Planet website – first, there’s a whole new Yahoo! Music Videos widget, so now you have a choice between YouTube and Yahoo! Music video catalogs. The Rhapsody widget has been enhanced to play the top artist tracks right there on the page using the FoxyPlayer. We also tweaked the page layout a bit, and while we had to disable the Yahoo! Image Search and Hype Machine widgets for now, we’re definitely planning to add tons of cool new stuff to the pages in the near future. Finally, you no longer need to create an account and login to persist your widget layout and settings – so if you want to tweak anything in the new layout, feel free to do it without logging in.

Hope you like the new Foxy stuff, let us know what you think!

We've been hosting most of the big powerhouse Javascript libraries and so far it's been a huge success. However, without YUI!, our collection has been incomplete. Well, I'm not saying that now we're complete and won't add more libraries, just that we're less incomplete than we were... you know what I mean.

Anyways, after getting legal approval (people actually read those licenses), we pushed it live. We are equally as excited about this as Yahoo! and the Javascript community.
So let's take a look at how you use it:

<head>
  <script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi" type="text/javascript"
          charset="utf-8"></script>
  <script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
  google.load('yui', '2.6.0');
  function init() {
    var loader = new YAHOO.util.YUILoader({
      require: ["button", "calendar"],
      base: "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/yui/2.6.0/build/",
      onSuccess: function() {
        // start playing with buttons and calendars!
      }
    });
    loader.insert();
  }
  google.setOnLoadCallback(init);
  </script>
</head>
<body>
  <div id="calContainer"></div>
</body>

That code will load the YUI loader which then loads the button and calendar widgets (combined as one script) and calls onSuccess when they are loaded. If lazy loading scripts isn't your thing, then you can use the dependency configurator to configure the perfect script URL. In my case, to achieve the same results as above, I would use:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/yui/2.6.0/build/button/assets/skins/sam/button.css"> 
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/yui/2.6.0/build/calendar/assets/skins/sam/calendar.css">
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/yui/2.6.0/build/yahoo-dom-event/yahoo-dom-event.js"></script> 
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/yui/2.6.0/build/element/element-beta-min.js"></script> 
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/yui/2.6.0/build/button/button-min.js"></script> 
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/yui/2.6.0/build/calendar/calendar-min.js"></script>

Also, we've updated script.aculo.us to the new minor release version 1.8.2. For those of you who are using our aliases, you've already been updated!

As always, stop by in our group or IRC channel to give us a piece of your mind.

Ahh...once again the holidays are approaching. Once again we're thinking of family, gifts, travel, and at least some of us are dreaming about snow-covered slopes. Time for joy, family, fun, and lots of web searches.

The Live Search team has made the last part quicker and easier. Here are a couple of instant answers that will simplify some of your holiday tasks.

Shopping

How about a new digital camera for your dad? Simply type in the name of the camera you have had your eye on (say, a "Canon PowerShot"). You'll see an instant answer with the images and prices of several popular models.

You can also type in the exact model (such as a "Canon PowerShot SD1000 Digital ELPH") and then see an image and a summary of the reviews and specs.

Travel

Finding travel deals is one of the most frustrating parts of the holidays. Airfares seem to be more fickle than the stock market. I never know the best time to buy my tickets. Thanks to Farecast joining Live Search, you can find out whether airfares are climbing or dropping. Just type "Flights from (point A) to (point B)." You'll see an instant answer with the current price of a flight between those two points and a prediction of whether prices will rise or fall.

Farecast pulls data from millions of trips from several sources, and then they run the data by an algorithm developed by several PhDs from the University of Washington. In the end, you save money.

Our Instant Answer blogging team will be taking some time off during the December holidays, but check back in January for more news about instant answers.

Theo Vachovsky, Instant Answers Product Manager, Live Search

Several Blogliners reported some intermittent issues with the service over the weekend. AJ and team have been delving into the servers to resolve any problems to make sure Bloglines is up and running for everyone.

- Eric Engleman & The Bloglines Team

Name: On-Screen Ruler
Author: Edwin Lee
Description: Ruler on your desktop to help you align your on-screen elements, and measure the number of pixels between them.

More information | Download gadget

Each week this blog features a recently added Google Desktop gadget that looks promising. If you'd like to see all new Desktop gadgets as they're published, subscribe to the RSS feed. 

Posted by Kathy Walrath, Technical Writer

The announcement of IE8 Beta 2 started an important and public phase of the product development cycle getting broad public feedback. The team is providing detailed information and answering questions about the product in many different places. Now’s a good time to talk about what comes next.

Since the release of Beta 2, the team has been absorbed in the data we get from real people about the product. We have combed through instrumentation of over 20 million IE sessions and hundreds of hours of usability lab sessions. Together with IE MVPs, we have scrutinized thousands of threads from user forums and examined the issues that people are raising (not to mention all the times users opt to “Report a Webpage Problem…”). We have also spent hundreds of hours listening and answering questions in meetings with partners and other important organizations. We simply could not deliver IE8 the way our customers and developers want us to without all this information. We also received a lot of feedback about how we transitioned from the IE7 beta releases to the IE7 final release, and as a result, we want to be clear about the plan for IE8.

We will release one more public update of IE8 in the first quarter of 2009, and then follow that up with the final release. Our next public release of IE (typically called a “release candidate”) indicates the end of the beta period. We want the technical community of people and organizations interested in web browsers to take this update as a strong signal that IE8 is effectively complete and done. They should expect the final product to behave as this update does. We want them to test their sites and services with IE8, make any changes they feel are necessary for the best possible customer experience using IE8, and report any critical issues (e.g., issues impacting robustness, security, backwards compatibility, or completeness with respect to planned standards work). Our plan is to deliver the final product after listening for feedback about critical issues.

We will be very selective about what changes we make between the next update and final release. We will act on the most critical issues. We will be super clear about product changes we make between the update and the final release.

The call to action now for the technical community is to download beta 2 (if you haven’t already) and let us know about your experience. Next, please prepare for final testing with public update so you can let us know – quickly, loudly, and clearly – if you find absolutely critical issues with it before the release of the final product.

Thanks –

Dean Hachamovitch
General Manager, Internet Explorer

P.S. If you’re a developer, or service provider, or IT professional, how do you prepare for the final release of new software? Leave a comment – we’d like to know.