Archive for May, 2009

by Claudine Zap

Our top picks from the day's hottest searches.

1. Serena Williams (Searches increased by 4,328%). The tennis star survived the first round at the French Open. Sister Venus was not so lucky.
2. FAO Schwartz (+967%). Toys "R" Us, the mass toy store, took over the toy store of class. The fancy-pants flagship on Fifth Avenue in New York City will remain intact.
3. USS Vandenberg (+678%). The 10-story ship was sunk to the bottom of the sea. It will become an artificial reef off Key West.
4. Spelling Bee (+265%). Yes, a 13-year-old from Kansas can spell circles around you.
5. Summer getaways (+235%). Planning a trip this season? Looks like many of us will be traveling less for less money.

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by Mike Krumboltz

Spelling bees feature awkward teens competing for money by S-P-E-L-L-I-N-G words that most folks would have trouble even pronouncing. In other words, they're the ultimate reality show. Last night, a Kansas teen won the 82nd annual contest by successfully spelling the word "laodicean."

Immediately after 13-year-old girl Kavya Shivashankar won the contest, queries on "define laodicean" surged to the top of the Buzz. Its meaning, by the way, is "indifferent or lukewarm in religion or politics." And, yes, not only did we have to look it up, we needed spell check as well.

Though the winning word is always the one folks are most interested in, a variety of other big words made their presence known in Search. Interest in "antonomasia," "bouquiniste," "oriflamme," and "axolotl" (our personal favorite) all spiked for, we assume, the first time in history. Maecenas, the word that second place finisher Tim Ruiter missed, boasted particularly strong searches. It means: "Roman politician and patron of Horace and Virgil." When asked about his error, the 12-year-old mused, "I was just racking my brain for anything possible that could help me. I'll probably be spelling it in my sleep tonight."

But the lookups weren't only on the words. Curious viewers also searched on "why is it called a spelling bee." According to the contest's official site, this is "one of those language puzzles that has never been satisfactorily accounted for." For a long time, most folks believed "that this particular meaning had probably been inspired by the obvious similarity between these human gatherings and the industrious, social nature of a beehive."

Not so. Though nobody is certain, some language experts believe the term comes from the Middle English word "bene" or an English form of the word "been." Its meaning? "Voluntary help given by neighbors toward the accomplishment of a particular task." Tasks such as spelling words like "laodicean" to the amazement of millions.

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Today we welcome Yoelle Maarek to Yahoo! as Senior Director of Yahoo! Research. She will be leading the Yahoo! Lab in Haifa, Israel along with Ronny Lempel. Their teams help further Yahoo!’s commitment to discovering new technologies that deliver compelling experiences on the Web.

You might know Yoelle as the former engineering director at the Google Haifa Engineering Center, which she founded in 2006. Her team launched features such as Google Suggest, Searching Ads, and Interactive Annotations on YouTube. Prior to Google, Yoelle was with IBM Research, where she held series of technical and management positions, first at T.J. Watson Research in New York, and then at the IBM Haifa Research Lab in Israel. You can go to Yoelle’s website to read all about her impressive research experience in information retrieval, Web applications, and collaborative technologies.

Prabhakar Raghavan
Head of Yahoo! Labs and Yahoo! Search Strategy

The Open Stack enables users to take their identities and their data with them to the sites that they use, without having to re-register, set up a profile, copy data, and re-friend everyone every time they want to use a new site. The stack consists of a collection of complimentary Open Standards: OpenID, OAuth, and OpenSocial, which work together to enable portable identities. These standards make the web more open, social, and interconnected, with standard interfaces that allow sites to easily consume Open Stack identities.

Traditionally, websites were reluctant to accept 3rd-party identities because the overhead of accepting external identities did not justify the return. But now, as the web is becoming more interconnected and social, established identities are far more valuable than newly registered accounts. Not only do established identities have a username and password, they usually have a rich profile, reputation, and connections. In contrast, a user who registers for a new account starts off with a completely blank slate, and an impersonal and asocial experience on your site immediately after registering.

Not only are established identities more valuable than newly registered accounts, users signing into sites with their OpenIDs can bring with them massive referral traffic when their activities are broadcast to their connections through Activity Streams. In the future, when users sign into sites with their Yahoo OpenID, their onsite actions and activities can be broadcast (with user consent) to their Connections on Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger as Updates, with the potential of reaching well over 300 million active users.

The foundation of the Open Stack is OpenID, which lets users sign into websites and share a profile, making it possible for sites that accept OpenID to streamline, or even eliminate, their registration flow. All Yahoo!, Google, AOL, and MySpace users have OpenIDs, meaning that virtually all visitors to your site can share their name, email address, and profile with just a few clicks, without having to be coaxed into a registration flow.

Last week, Yahoo!'s OpenID team attended the eighth Internet Identity Workshop, a premiere "unconference" event for folks working on the Open Stack. The IIW brought together people from a variety of Internet communities and companies for an in-depth exchange of ideas. OpenID has been gaining lots of momentum lately: George Fletcher (AOL) and Luke Shepard (Facebook) led a session at IIW discussing their experience becoming OpenID Relying Parties. Today, users can sign into MapQuest (an AOL property) or Facebook using their OpenIDs.

The biggest hurdle to OpenID adoption is that the user experience (UX) of signing in with OpenID is not as intuitive as signing in the old fashioned way, with a username and password. For instance, to sign into MapQuest using using your Yahoo! account, you first click on the "Sign in" button, then on the OpenID tab, then enter "yahoo.com," then click the "Sign in" button.

The OpenID Foundation is deeply committed to improving the OpenID user experience, and our goal is to make OpenID sign in the easiest way to sign into a website. At the Internet Identity Workshop, the OpenID User Experience Working Group released an implementor's draft of the OpenID UI Extension, as well as actual reference implementations of the improved "popup" UI from MySpace and Google. Yahoo product designers Steven Jackson and Barry Crane have been contributing wireframes and mockups as reference designs. For now, the infamous OpenID NASCAR UI, as coined by OpenID Foundation Board Member Chris Messina still seems to be the most common UI, but the community is experimenting with email addresses and other innovative UIs to streamline the OpenID sign in UX.

We made tremendous progress building out the Open Stack at IIW, and we enjoyed collaborating with colleagues from around the industry who are also working on OpenID, OAuth, Activity Streams, OpenSocial, and other identity technologies.

Open Stack, FTW!

Allen Tom
Architect, Yahoo! Membership

Have you been itching to try out Bing? Looking longingly at the screenshots around the Web wondering how those lucky few got early access? Wondering who you have to know to get an invite code to check out all your favorite queries?

How about the next best thing? Head over to the BehindBing site at http://www.discoverbing.com/behindbing/ and get all the cool-kids info to help you get ready for Bing's public launch. You can see some behind-the-scenes videos (shot with soft lighting so you know they are serious) featuring some of our engineers, way too much Stefan, live Twitter and Blog feeds so you can see what the world is saying about us (that sounds so narcissistic) and most importantly for some — the Product Guide. It has a bunch of great info on all the features, how to use them once Bing is alive for all, screenshots, and screencasts featuring...yes...more Stefan. It's like I'm a video virus. Get it here!

Enjoy!

Stefan Weitz, Director, Bing

Dear Bing (the Author),< ?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

We couldn’t help sit up and take notice of your offer of services from one Bing to another.  We were moderately surprised and mildly excited. As you might have guessed, today is quite a big day for us.  Even so, we dropped everything when we saw your press release this morning.  After an emergency meeting (three people were invited, all declined), we’ve decided to take you up on your offer.  We’re not certain what exactly this would involve. We’re not certain it would pay much (nothing, actually) but we look forward to starting a dialogue and hope we can work together soon.  Let’s do lunch. In the meantime we are sending you a case of moderately priced cigars.

Your pals,

Bing.com

by Claudine Zap

The plot is a tightly held secret. The title gives no clue. And that, just like "Harry Potter" buzz, is the nifty marketing formula to make the newest Haruki Murakami tome a hit in Japan—before it's even hit the shelves.

Except unlike the boy-wizard series, this author writes esoteric epics like "The Wind-up Bird Chronicles" and "Kafka on the Shore." Not exactly the stuff of summer blockbusters. According to the AP, the Japanese writer is a ringer for the Pulitzer Prize in literature. Just to be clear, this is the country that brought us "Godzilla" and "Hello, Kitty."

Although a marketing campaign to sell a literary novel seems contrived, it's actually in response to the last time the author released a book, five years ago. Fans complained that the impact of the novel was diminished by too much press coverage, the Christian Science Monitor reports.

This time around, it's very hush-hush—and the secrecy has only fueled pre-order book sales. The publisher had to rush another 100,000 copies into print to keep up with the reading frenzy. Theories abound on the title, the not very helpful "1Q84." An homage to George Orwell's "1984?" One thing's for sure: The writer's not talking.

Maybe the bookworms will celebrate the novel's arrival by dressing up as their favorite characters and showing up at bookstores at midnight. While there's no telling when the book will be translated into English, who knows—a movie based on the book could already be in the works. Take that, wizard boy.

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Dear Bing (the Author),

We couldn’t help sit up and take notice of your offer of services from one Bing to another.  We were moderately surprised and mildly excited. As you might have guessed, today is quite a big day for us.  Even so, we dropped everything when we saw your press release this morning.  After an emergency meeting (three people were invited, all declined), we’ve decided to take you up on your offer.  We’re not certain what exactly this would involve. We’re not certain it would pay much (nothing, actually) but we look forward to starting a dialogue and hope we can work together soon.  Let’s do lunch. In the meantime we are sending you a case of moderately priced cigars.

Your pals,

Bing.com

This morning, Steve Ballmer is speaking at the D Conference where he’s unveiling our new search service — named Bing. Bing is rolling out internally to Microsoft employees worldwide today and will be available to you and your friends in the coming days.

We spent lots of time listening to you, learning how you use search today and what you’re trying to accomplish with search. We found that search is no longer just a tool for mapping a keyword to a document. If you’re like many people, you’re increasingly using search to help you make decisions: from everyday decisions, like which restaurant to eat at, to complicated decisions, like which digital camera to buy or when to fly and where to stay on your next vacation.

Problem is: search engines themselves haven’t evolved all that much to address the new ways that people like you are using search today.

So today we’re introducing a new kind of search that goes beyond traditional search engines to help you make faster, more informed decisions. It will do this by combining a great search engine (with powerful new features to improve your results for any query), more organized results, and unique tools to help you make important decisions. We think of Bing as a Decision Engine.

So why did we pick Bing as the new brand name? We needed a brand that was as fresh and new as our approach. It needed to be like the product — optimized for the Internet. A name that was memorable, short, easy to spell, and that would function well as a URL around the world. We like Bing because it sounds off in our heads when we think about that moment of discovery and decision making — when you resolve those important tasks. And frankly, the name needed to clearly communicate that this is something new, to invite you to come back, to re-introduce you to our new and improved service and encourage you to give it a try.

In the coming weeks we’ll be using the blog to update you on Bing and provide an inside look at how we’ve designed it to cut through the clutter on the Web and deliver more relevant results to help you make better choices. In the meantime, we encourage you to check out our press release, visit http://www.decisionengine.com, and follow us on Twitter (@Bing) for all the latest news.

Looking forward to sharing Bing with you very soon!

Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President, Online Audience Business Group