Archive for February, 2009

by Vera H-C Chan

What lies ahead, and one last look back, through the Web prism...

Women's History Month can celebrate a woman in the White House--on this season's "24" (1-28)... Following Huckabee, Fred Thompson makes launching new talk show a trend among former presidential hopefuls (2) ... "American Idol" finally gets down to the Top 12 (5)... Mush for the Iditarod dog sled race (7) ... SXSW, anyone (13) ... Watch your back, it's Brutus out there (15) ... On the eve of March Madness (19-22), a DVD release of "Twilight" hysteria (19)... Spring's here (20) ... Light's out for Earthhour (28) ...

and now...

The Buzz That Was: A February Look Back...

In the year's shortest month...
...America had a big pill to swallow to get stimulated, but President Obama tried to talk us through it and bribe us with a puppy.
...Steeled for a win, but Super Bowl 2009 turned out surprisingly close. Strangest winning play: Denny's Grand Slam Giveaway.
...Michael Phelps' reputation held, but Kellog got punished. The sports world however had already moved on when the SI's Swimsuit Issue came in the mail.
...Joy over a miracle birth turned into recriminations as Nadya Suleman got villainized as "Octomom." Newest mom role model: giant stingray.
...Domestic violence became a musical issue with the Chris Brown and Rihanna fight
...Bobby Jindal aside, people have still been monitoring the "alaska volcano eruption" online.
...third lowest Oscars telecast rating, Jennifer Aniston shared camera angles with the ex, but to sum it up: Jai Ho!

 

Search Terms on Yahoo! with the Biggest Percentage Changes

1. Nadya Suleman (off the charts.)
2. Chris Brown and Rihanna Fight (off the charts.)
3. Elizabeth Wong (off the charts)
4. Obama Stimulus Plan Details (+46,422%)
5. Super Bowl Ads 2009 (+29,772%)
6. Valentine's Day Recipes (+28,937%)
7. Rihanna Pictures (+27,775%)
8. Bar Rafaeli Hot (+27,249%)
9. Economic Stimulus Bill 2009 (+20,644%)
10. Jade Goody (+19,274%)

by Michael Krumboltz

Much like high school, the Web can be a cruel place. Just when you think you're one of the cool kids, bloggers mock you until you want to go crying to the vice principal. After this week, Bobby Jindal and Gwyneth Paltrow can identify with all those who suffered teenage humiliation. The Louisiana governor and the wispy starlet were both panned recently, albeit for very different reasons. In other news, the first family finally chose a dog...sort of. Take a look back at their stories and more with the Buzz Week in Review.

Bobby Jindal channels Mr. Rogers
President Obama gave a speech to Congress this past week on the fledgling economy. Interestingly, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who gave the Republican response, was the bigger story. Viewing Jindal as a rising star in the GOP, fans had high hopes for his primetime address. Alas, his performance was widely panned, even by Republicans. Scientists also sounded off when Jindal mocked volcano monitoring, something many feel is a vital safety measure. Adding insult to injury, various blogs pointed out that Jindal seemed to sound exactly like Kenneth Parcell, the page from NBC's "30 Rock." Gee whiz, that's a low blow.

Enough already, Gwyneth Paltrow
Gwyneth Paltrow could have named her website something boring like, oh, say... "gwynethpaltrow.com." Instead, she went for the gusto and named it Goop. The site's name makes no sense (is her keyboard slimy?) and many find the content to be just as confusing. Visitors are encouraged to "nourish the inner aspect." A popular article from Yahoo!'s omg! reported that Paltrow's Web presence was even mocked by the "New York Times." Paltrow responded that she thinks the people who are criticizing her site "don't really get it." Regardless of whether anyone can make heads or tails of the site,  queries on "goop.com" and "gwyneth paltrow website" soared all week.

The Obamas pick a pooch
When Barack Obama won the election in November, he promised his two daughters a new puppy. Internet hysteria quickly ensued as folks speculated on what type of dog Malia and Sasha would get. Now it seems we're a little closer to knowing. This week, Michelle Obama announced they would be getting a Portugese water dog. Queries on the breed hit the roof as folks sought out pictures and traits. An article from AFP explains that Portugal is quite happy its canine was chosen. The dogs are supposed to have an excellent temperament, especially with kids. However, some are worried that the breed's sudden popularity "could mean a rise in shady breeders and fickle owners who don’t understand the dogs and eventually abandon them."

Also buzzing this week...
• Ryanair, an Irish airline, may start charging passengers to use the toilet. Holy cow, those old Alaska Airlines commercials are coming true.
• Due to overcrowded prisons, Michael Vick may serve the remainder of his prison term at home.
• Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen were married in a small, private ceremony. They're gonna have beautiful kids...

by Claudine Zap

The Obama administration may be the new generation of government. But when it comes to their taste in soft drinks, they go for Coke.

This may leave a bad taste for Pepsi, which has been marketing itself as the hip alternative for a new generation of Americans.

Let's review. During the campaign, Obama was declared the "Pepsi candidate" compared to "Hillary's establishment Coke." The Democratic convention took place at the Pepsi Center in Denver. And the Pepsi logo bore a striking similarity to the "Obama 08" button.

Despite the Pepsi ad campaign that seems to link itself to the Obama message — you may have seen the "hope" billboards where you live — the message doesn't seem to have trickled down to the White House. Time reports that at recent meetings, it's the competitor Diet Coke, not Diet Pepsi, that's served.

We guess you can bring a brand to the president, but you can't make him drink.

We’ve rolled out some changes to our index with fresh web data and updates to our crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms over the last few days. We have had two updates since last November: one in December, 2008, and another in late January this year. We expect the update will be completed very soon. Throughout this process you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index.

While we didn’t do Weather Reports for the December and January updates, we heard loud and clear that the community still finds them helpful, so we’ll continue to provide these reports.

To share your thoughts or check in with other Yahoo! Search users, please visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board.

Sharad Verma
Yahoo! Search

Late last year, we announced the ability to track Adobe Flash applications using Google Analytics. Flash tracking in Google Analytics provides the same features as standard JavaScript-based tracking, including campaign, pageview and event tracking. It can be used to track Flash content such as embedded videos, branded microsites and distributed widgets, including online games.

Since the launch of Flash tracking, we've seen some great projects that make use of the technology. We wanted to give a shout out to Matthew McNeely from InsideRIA, who has created a step-by-step tutorial on how to configure Flash tracking for your site. This tutorial is geared toward advanced users, covering everything from terminology to code configuration. If you have a Flash application you'd like to track, this is a great place to start.

For more detailed information on Flash tracking in Google Analytics, visit the Google Analytics Code Site. Have a great weekend!

Posted by Sebastian Tonkin, Google Analytics Team

On Feb. 12, I flew through a window of clear weather to join 20 other Yahoos and 40 students at the renowned University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) for a one day training on Hadoop. The first half of the event was split into two consecutive classes. One was a high-level overview of Hadoop taught by Milind Bhandarkar, accessible even to complete newbies, such as me. The other was a thorough introduction to the Pig scripting language by Viraj Bhat. The second half of the event consisted of a dive into practical Pig programming. Attendees were split into two groups, students and Yahoos. Students worked on the UIUC cluster while Yahoos worked on a Yahoo! cluster. Below, I briefly touch on some of the topics from the lecture that stood out to me. This is not an authoritative, technical deep-dive into Hadoop, but rather a presentation of a few topics with links to more information. Please refer to the Hadoop site, the Hadoop mailing list, and the Hadoop blog on the YDN for official documentation, educational resources, and community support.

Hadoop is composed of two main pieces: a distributed file system, HDFS, and a framework to run code over a large set of data. It is currently used by a variety of companies from Amazon to Facebook, Joost to the New York Times, to efficiently run arbitrary processes on huge sets of data.

One of the problems Hadoop addresses is the bandwidth required to move data. For example, 100TB of data requires roughly 165 minutes to scan across a LAN versus 30 minutes to scan from local storage. Instead of pulling data to Hadoop, Hadoop processes the data in place. Put another way, the user imports a data set into a Hadoop cluster where it is split and stored across the cluster's nodes using HDFS. Processes are then run on the data by Hadoop running on each node. For more information on this idea, see “Moving Computation is Cheaper than Moving Data”.

Another problem Hadoop addresses is fault tolerance. In a cluster composed of thousands of nodes, the mean time between hardware failures is less than a day. Hadoop tracks and coordinates jobs using a central controller called the JobTracker. Should a task fail, the JobTracker will schedule the task to run again. Additionally, all data is stored in triplicate as a precaution against hardware failures.

Hadoop's native API is written in Java. There are also wrapper libraries for the Java API written in C and C++ for those more comfortable with these languages. The API is composed of three major pieces: JobClient, MapTask, and ReduceTask. For more information on the API, see the Hadoop docs.

The Hadoop architecture is composed of a NameNode and several DataNodes. NameNodes do not contain data, but instead map file names to locations, coordinate processes, and replicate corrupted files. DataNodes, as the name suggests, perform calculations on locally-stored portions of the data set.

The Hadoop file system is horizontally scalable, meaning the user can add more processing capacity by adding more machines. Nodes running Hadoop are available for both storage and processing. A typical cluster node using commodity hardware would have a terabyte of storage and a couple cores. HDFS is managed using Hadoop's FileSystem class and individual files are accessed using URIs. Several file systems are supported natively: HDFS, Amazon's s3, Kosmos, FTP, HTTP, and HTTPS.

A typical, introductory use case of Hadoop might follow the following steps:
- the user loads a set of data to the distributed file system (DFS).
- the user submits a job to the Hadoop client
- the client splits the job into several tasks that can be performed in parallel
- the client uploads each task to the DFS and registers the task with the JobTracker
- each task sends a "heartbeat" to the JobTracker when complete
- this cycle repeats until all tasks are complete

Hadoop is designed for one type of operation called MapReduce, which is most efficient when the input and output are composed of key-value pairs. Some common use cases are log processing, search indexing, generation of "you might also try" search suggestions, and machine learning. In general, Hadoop jobs are performed in advance and the results stored for later reference, although there is a Hadoop On Demand (HOD) component of the project.

The oft-used example from the Hadoop documentation is that of counting words in a large amount of text. First, the text is broken up into chunks. Then, each chunk is associated with a "mapping" operation, e.g., "the" goes in the "the" list, "so" goes in the "so" list, and so on. This list is then quick-sorted. When all mapping operations are complete, each list is "reduced" by a set of operations that count all the items in each list. For example, if there are ten occurrences of "the" in the text, the reduce operation associates "the" with 10, quick-sort the list of sums, e.g., "the"->10, "so"->3, "this"->7, and merge-sort the data into a master list. In the end, Hadoop outputs one list of key-value pairs, etc., which represent the quantity of each word in the text.

There are three ways to use Hadoop: define tasks in Java, C, or C++, compile them, and load them in Hadoop; define tasks in an interpreted language and "stream" output from Hadoop through a script written in an arbitrary language, e.g., sed, python, perl, etc.; use the Pig interpreted language. The UIUC training did not dive into programming with the Hadoop API as it was an introductory course, but we did cover streaming and Pig in depth, as these provide the easiest way to get started.

When streaming, Hadoop passes the input of each task as text into a script, to perform an arbitrary operation on the text, and output the result to stdout as text in the format "key \t val \n", which is then read by Hadoop. Streaming can be thought of as a wrapper around MapReduce.

Pig can be described as a procedural language, similar in a functional sense to SQL, that is processed by the Pig interpreter into a set of calls to the Hadoop API. To be semantically correct, the actual language is called "Pig Latin" and Pig is the interpreter, that is, Pig processes Pig Latin. In its most basic state, Pig Latin is limited to the pre-defined functionality of the API. However, the user is free to define and compile custom operations in Java, specify a path to the .jar files in the Pig Latin script, and then call the functions within Pig Latin. Viraj went so far as to state that user-defined functions (UDFs) are the most important feature of Pig. For Eclipse users, there is an eclipse plug-in called Pig Pen. Pig Latin can also be combined with streaming to perform "Pig streaming". "PiggyBank" is the name of Pig's UDF repository.

Hadoop trainings occur with some regularity. For anyone interested in attending a training, please refer to the Hadoop site and mailing list for the most up-to-date information and schedules. There are also Hadoop user groups that meet in several locations around the world. At the last one in Santa Clara, CA, Matei Zaharia spoke about the Fair Share scheduler developed in large part by Facebook. Another talk walked through a method for running Hadoop with SQL using JDBC.

Please post all questions about Hadoop directly to the Hadoop mailing list. For questions about the UIUC training or the this post, please leave a comment below.

Erik Eldridge
YDN Engineer-Evangelist

by Mike Krumboltz

The world is full of cooking experts, but there's only one Clara Cannucciari. The 93-year-old chef has become a Web sensation thanks to her Web series, "Depression Cooking With Clara."

Ms. Cannucciari was recently profiled on "Good Morning America," and searches on the suddenly famous foodie rose like soufflé on steroids. Folks want to know more about her, as well as where they can see the chef strut her stuff. Lookups on "clara cannucciari videos" are through the roof, and related queries on "clara cannucciari biography" are also on the rise.

According to the interview with "GMA," Ms. Cannucciari learned her style of cooking from her mother during the Great Depression. Her mother was an expert at making tasty and healthy meals for not much money, and that's the kind of knowledge Ms. Cannucciari imparts to her audience. These days, such tips especially come in handy. For those looking to stretch their budget she recommends pasta, and lots of it.

The cooking sensation is currently working on a DVD that compiles all her videos with some help from her grandson. In the meantime, you can check out her delightful recipe for pasta and peas. As Clara puts it, "It's a very simple dish, but it's very tasty and good for you." Bon appétit!

by Claudine Zap

Our top picks from the day's hottest searches.

1. Goop (Searches increased by 6,749%). Not the slimy stuff — Gwyneth Paltrow's blog on "nourishing the inner aspect." Mockable? Highly. Paltrow told her critics that they just "don't get it." Um, no.
2. Footprints (+1,603%). Our ancestors have left us more clues: this time in footprints found in Kenya that date back 1.5 million years.
3. Jerry Seinfeld (+1,574%). The comedian who gave us a show about nothing is coming back to produce a reality show called "The Marriage Ref." We guess it can't be any worse than Dr. Phil, and, we hope, more funny.
4. World's largest animal (+363%).The obsession of the week continues. Largest in water: the blue whale. Largest on land: African elephant.
5. DialIdol (+197%). "American Idol" fans can keep this tool handy to get around the busy signal when phone voting for their favorite songster. Here's the latest "AI" Buzz Log recap.

by Vera H-C Chan

No one's objecting to this jet expense.

As if seeing "Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience" in pulsing, in-your-face detail wasn't enough, the Disney-backed threesome is jetting coast-to-coast as part of their "Surprise Theater Invasion Tour." Since an invasion is by nature secretive, the surprise lies in which theater the JoBros will drop by in the flesh. 

The JoBros' first stop was, unsurprisingly, Hollywood, but besotted fans—and there are shrieking gaggles of them—with V CAST-enabled phones can track the invasion. If Blackberrys go missing this weekend, you know why.

The question isn't whether JoBros beats down its sole competitor and gameboy fantasy, "Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li." (Don't worry, fans of the first female "Streetfighter" trailblazer: The title's pulling in decent searches, which means decent attendance, high torrent activity, and a DVD release party down the line.) THe question is whether they can beat Miley Cyrus' movie's $31.1 million opening weekend take. Yah, not fair: Cyrus booked 683 theaters, while the boys get almost double at 1,271 locales.

The flight plan has already been set, but the JoBros might want to hit joints in Connecticut, which leads California, Pennyslvania, New York, and Illinois in "3D" search madness. And Street Fighter's Chun-Li travel tour's first stop? Arizona is the number one state checking out her movie. The Copper State loves those female trailblazers.  

Myself as well as some other people from the team recently sat down with Charles Torre from Channel 9 to talk about IE8.  We thought you might enjoy these:

Accelerators with Jon Seitel

Developer Tools with John Hrvatin

Search with Sharon Cohen

Web Slices with Jane Kim

You can check out all the IE8 related videos on Channel 9 here.  There are also some interesting IE8  “How Do I” videos on MSDN. 

Thanks!
Sharon Cohen
Program Manager