Archive for November, 2008

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

A couple of weeks ago, Yahoo! Search visited Tel Aviv, Israel as part of our international BOSS Hack Day series. Our goal with these Hack Days is to educate developers around the world on Yahoo! Search BOSS, share where the platform is headed and foster the development of innovative new search experiences using BOSS.

The BOSS team got together with 100 developers and entrepreneurs in Tel Aviv for a detailed presentation on the BOSS API, presented in Hebrew by BOSS Engineering Director Eran Palmon. After the presentation, developers had the chance to build their own mashup creations that were then reviewed by a panel of judges. We received 20+ mashups and judging is complete.

Drum roll, please...

The winning team, Get the Pic, wrote an addictive phrase guessing game (similar to Hang-Man), based on Yahoo! BOSS image, news and web search APIs.

The ingenuity and entrepreneurship exhibited at the Hack Day in Tel Aviv was encouraging, especially as we continue to forge our relationship with developers in this region. In fact, Delver, an Israel-based social search company, recently launched its search engine powered in part by BOSS. There's no doubt that we'll continue to see new and inventive search experiences from developers there.

For more details on our developer event in Tel Aviv, check out this recent post from the Yahoo! Developer Network. We've captured more photos of the event as well.

Farewell for now, Tel Aviv...see you in 2009.

Sophie Major
YDN International & Honorary BOSS Team Member

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.

You may have heard about our experimental visual display of search results on Yahoo! India, called Glue(TM) Pages. Tonight we're launching a similar, but slightly different experience in the U.S. with Yahoo! Glue(TM) beta. This newest iteration is a standalone experience focused on assembling useful information from all over the Web, giving users a new place to discover and explore images, videos, articles and more.

We're starting with a limited set of topics (more will be added over time), pulling together content from the best places on the Web onto one Yahoo! Glue(TM) page. These pages are built using an algorithm that automatically places the most relevant modules on a page, giving you a visually rich, diverse page all about the topic in which you're interested.

To see it in action, check out some of the Glue pages on some popular people, places and things: New York Giants, Henry Paulson, Electoral College, Hugh Jackman, etc.

For those that may be wondering, our intention with Yahoo! Glue(TM) beta is not to replace the Yahoo! Search experience in the US. We're always challenging ourselves to explore innovative new ways to deliver great experiences. Glue is one of those experiments, with a goal of giving users one more visual way to browse and discover new things from across the Web. We'll be working to expand the number of Glue pages, improve the experience and incorporate your feedback into future versions.

We'll be rolling this out over the next few hours, so go ahead and give it a try at glue.yahoo.com. We think it's pretty sticky (we had to have one "glue" pun in this post), and we'd love your feedback.

Julie Demsey
Yahoo! Glue Product Management

Is it just me or did Thanksgiving totally sneak up on us like a stealth turkey? Having just recovered from Halloween and a very intense Election Day, I’ve now officially got turkey on my mind.

Now, if the prospect of Thanksgiving has you feeling the holiday pressure to give up the gobble, I’m here to help ease your stress with a collection of feeds that’ll cover you from turkey (and all the fixings) to Black Friday, the biggest online shopping day of the year.

If you’re looking for comfort food holiday recipes, you’ll want to check out Simply Recipes. Not only are the food photos worth an ogle, the recipes are simple, sound delicious and have even been tested by the blogger and her family.

Though Thanksgiving is the infamous holiday when you can easily eat your weight in food, Cooking Light’s recipes can help lessen the guilt. Because their recipes are light on the fat, yet heavy on flavor, you’ll still be able to enjoy your turkey, mashed potatoes, and gravy, oh my!

Thanksgiving is about family, food, and fun. You can cover all this with FamilyFun.com’s Holiday Crafts and Recipe Ideas feed. This site has a wealth of Thanksgiving ideas and content—kid-friendly crafts, recipes, decorations, and games. It’s also a super resource for Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa.

Even though AAA says fewer people will be traveling over the Thanksgiving holiday, you’ll still have to contend with 4.5 million people traveling by plane. Avoid the headache of airport delays with FlightStats’s Current Airport Delays feed.

You can stay one step ahead of Mother Nature and her holiday weather threats with
The Weather Channel’s National Weather Outlook feed.

The news doesn’t even slow down on turkey day, so stay informed of the latest Thanksgiving news and headlines with Yahoo! News’ feed.

And even though holiday gift deals are everywhere, there’s still Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year. For the latest shopping deals, you’ll want to check out Deal Catcher.com’s feed and bargain deals flagged by a community of users at Dealigg.com.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Helen
- My Yahoo! Editorial

You puzzle lovers out there may remember that we launched a crossword puzzle game that combined the Search Assist feature to provide helpful hints from Yahoo! Search last Fall. After all, many of us aren't born with the natural "crossword gene" (myself included) and having a helping hand to unscramble the word simply doubles the fun.

Many users told us that they really enjoyed the game and were sad when it was removed after a brief period of time. That's why we teamed up with Yahoo! Games and worked hard to create two games that are refreshed daily - Daily Crossword and Hollywood Jumble. Following the recent launch on www.yahoo.com for Internet Explorer, we are thrilled to announce that they are now live for Firefox and Safari.

So take a break and give yourself a brain boost with the puzzle games powered by Yahoo! Search.

Good luck and have fun.

Christina Lee
Yahoo! Search

The 0.10.3 release of Google Gadgets for Linux is out, with bug fixes and major feature enhancements. Most notably, now Linux gadgets can use most of the features introduced in the 5.8 release of Google Desktop for Windows.

If you have a previous version of Google Gadgets for Linux, we encourage you to upgrade to this version. Just download and install the binaries for your platform.

With the 0.10.3 release, gadgets can run seamlessly within KDE4's Plasma environment, as the following screenshots show. For more information on KDE4 and gadgets, see the KDE4 Plasma page in the google-gadgets-for-linux project.





Thanks for reading this, and remember to download Google Gadgets for Linux!

Posted by James Su and Kathy Walrath, Google Desktop Team

Today we're pleased to announce the availability of the first of a series of new BOSS features called Key Terms.

We began opening up our search infrastructure four months ago with Yahoo! Search BOSS. Since then, we've heard again and again in our developer group and at conferences and hack days around the world that developers want more access to deep infrastructure assets.

Key Terms is derived from a Yahoo! Search capability we refer to internally as "Prisma." This is the same patented technology that powers Search Assist. Key Terms is an ordered terminological representation of what a document is about. The ordering of terms is based on each term's frequency and its positional and contextual heuristics.

How could it be used? Obviously it could be used as the basis for assistance and refinement technology (as we've done with Search Assist), but that's hardly the only possible application. Key Terms could be highly useful as input to semantic analysis or new relevancy models. They could also be used to analyze and cluster similar documents or as a vehicle for new visual experiences.

For an example of Key Terms in use check out Tartin3.com. It's a Parisian food search engine built by our very own epicurean developer Ted Drake. The "Related Terms" refiners under each result are pulled directly from Key Terms.

To provide API access to Key Terms, we're introducing a new universal parameter called "view." View is the argument that will provide a lens into deeper content. Appending "&view=keyterms" to the BOSS Web Search API call will result in Key Terms being included in the response.

In the example below, we included Key Terms in a query for obama. Each result contains up to 20 terms describing the document. The terms below describe the first result, for Change.gov.

Check out the BOSS documentation for all the details of how you can use Key Terms and other BOSS functionality. Last but not least, we've added Romanian, Hebrew, and Turkish language/region support to the BOSS APIs - details are also included in the documentation.

If you have any questions or feedback, we encourage you to post them to the BOSS group. We're committed to continuing to open our infrastructure and technology to developers, start-ups and established Internet companies, so if you have any thoughts on what should be next, we're all ears.

Ashim Chhabra
The BOSS Team

We just returned from two solid events on the BOSS Hack Day world tour. Last Monday's event in London drew a range of developers, including a few who were completely new to the platform along with a handful of experienced BOSS hackers (such as the developer from BuildaSearch).

After a successful stop in London, the team headed to Paris to prepare for another event on Wednesday.

The Paris event stood out for a couple of reasons. First, we were really pleased with the turnout. The event was held at a well-known Parisian coworking center called La Cantine, which seemed to be at the hub of the developer community in Paris... it was packed. Even more impressive was how engaged everyone was. We started with a one-hour overview and technical discussion, broke for sushi and beer and then split into two workshops -- one on the BOSS Mashup Framework and one on building niche search engines using the BOSS API.

Almost all of the developers stayed until 10:30 or later that evening to learn more about BOSS and shared some excellent feedback on where we should take the product. Although neither of us speaks a lick of French, we had some great conversations. We met with the folks from Veosearch, a BOSS-powered search engine that gives a percentage of its profits to charity, as well as the guys from Iminent, an IM add-on and contextual search company.

We'd like to thank all the developers who joined us. Hearing directly from you about new features you'd like to see will help us prioritize our efforts in 2009. Also, big thanks to the Yahoo! teams in London and Paris for all their help in setting up and running the events.

If you weren't able to join us, we'll continue to host developer events in the coming months. In the meantime, you can check out more photos and the slides from our presentation.

Graham Mudd & Vik Singh
BOSS Team

Name: VTM Wheater Map
Author: Stefan vd
Description: Show the VTM Wheater Map from Belgium.

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