Last year, Yahoo! Search launched Search Assist to help users find what they're looking for quickly and easily by providing query suggestions and related concepts in real-time. Today, Yahoo! Search is embracing the Mac community and offering similar search assistance features with the acquisition of Inquisitor software, a Safari browser plug-in.

Inquisitor 3, a search technology that auto-completes queries and delivers results right in Safari Web browser, is similar to Yahoo!'s existing Search Assist technology. Simply type in your query and websites will appear immediately, as well as suggestions for refining your search. Just as with Search Assist, the goal with Inquisitor is to help users find exactly the site they're looking for as quickly as possible.

The new version of Inquisitor removes affiliate ad links, simplifies the search provider selection interaction and refines the preferences user interface. Additionally, the new version provides quick access to Yahoo! Search however, existing users may still utilize their current default search engine or a different search engine entirely, such as a vertical alternative like Amazon or Flickr, if they prefer.

While search interface design has remained fairly utilitarian over the years, David Watanabe, founder and developer of Inquisitor, has done a fantastic job designing a simple and elegant UI. David and our team of macphiles will continue to innovate on both form and function for Inquisitor.

Mac users have been using the Inquisitor plug-in already and they seem to like it. It's a free download, so whether you're familiar with it or just trying it out for the first time with Yahoo! Search, let us know what you think in the comments below.

Ariel Seidman
Director of Product Management
Yahoo! Search

On Nodalities blog today, Paul Miller posts his podcast interview with Peter Mika, a SearchMonkey from Yahoo! Research. Peter's speaking at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose May 18-22, so the two dove into what Peter will be presenting on as well as the innovation and direction behind SearchMonkey. Check out their conversation.

Yahoo! Search Blog team

Two weeks ago, we announced SearchMonkey, a new open developer platform that lets developers and site owners use semantic markup and structured data to enhance Yahoo! Search results and make them more useful, relevant and visually appealing.

We wanted to remind you that we're kicking off this launch in true SearchMonkey style with a Developer Launch Party next Thursday, May 15. If you're a web developer, come get the inside scoop on SearchMonkey, see live demos, deep-dive on the Developer Tool, and meet with our product managers and engineers over tasty (read: free!) food and beer.

When: May 15, 2008, 5:30 -- 8:30 p.m.

Where: Yahoo! Headquarters @ URL's Cafe, 701 First Ave, Sunnyvale, CA 94089

RSVP: Email your full name and company name directly
to searchmonkeyevent@yahoo-inc.com. Space is limited.

For more information on the agenda and logistics, check out the event page. Be there or be a... banana.

Yahoo! Search Blog team

Today, we're announcing the beta release of SearchScan, a new feature from Yahoo! Search that helps protect users from viruses, spyware and spam. We've heard from users that security and privacy continue to be major concerns when they are online. We've also learned that solutions that require downloads and constant updating are less than ideal. To tackle the problem, we partnered with McAfee to build a feature that provides a safer and hassle-free search experience to all users.

How does it work? SearchScan leverages McAfee's SiteAdvisor technology to alert users if risky websites appear in Yahoo! Search results. Starting today, SearchScan will be turned on by default for all users in the U.S., Canada, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Spain, and will scan for three types of risks in our search index:

• Browser Exploits -- These are sites that can stealthily harm a user's computer or install malware simply by visiting the site. Beginning today, any such sites or pages included in McAfee's data will be removed from search results automatically.
• Dangerous Downloads -- SearchScan will display warnings next to search results for sites that offer potentially dangerous software, such as viruses, spyware or adware. Users often may be unaware that these can be passed along with the screensavers, games and other software downloads.
• Unsolicited Email -- SearchScan will alert users to scanned sites that send unsolicited emails or inappropriately share email addresses with third parties.

With SearchScan, our goal is to protect users by allowing them to make a more informed decision about the websites they visit. By displaying prominent warnings next to search results for sites with potentially dangerous downloads or unsavory email practices, users are aware that while visiting the site may be safe, downloading a file or sharing an email address could be risky. Browser exploits, which include drive-by downloads, are different. Since just visiting these sites can cause harm, they will not appear in Yahoo! Search results if they've been identified by McAfee.

While SearchScan will be on by default, users have control over how they use the feature. In preferences, users can choose to turn the feature off or choose to filter out all sites with warnings from their search results.

SearchScan will continue to evolve and improve, but in the meantime, let us know if you have any feedback in the comments below.

Priyank Garg, Director, Product Management
Graham Mudd, Product Marketing Manager
Yahoo! Search

The del.icio.us team has been working on a new beta add-on for the also-still-in-beta Firefox 3 to give users easier and quicker access to information. While maintaining full compatibility with the previous add-on for Firefox 2, the latest version offers a few new features, which they've detailed in their post.

Give it a try and if you want to share your experience, thoughts, or have questions, visit the delicious-firefox-extension group that is focused exclusively on the Firefox add-ons.

Yahoo! Search Blog team

In February, we began talking about our plans to open up Yahoo! Search to Web site owners and all third party developers. This new developer platform, which we're calling SearchMonkey, uses data web standards and structured data to enhance the functionality, appearance and usefulness of search results. Specifically, with SearchMonkey:

As Ari Balogh, Yahoo!'s new CTO, will discuss in his Web 2.0 Expo keynote this morning, we're rolling out a limited preview of the SearchMonkey Developer Tool starting today. With this online tool, developers can build data services that can be used to present richer, more useful search results. These data services can be constructed using structured data either from the Yahoo! Search index or from publicly available sources (such as APIs).

In addition to signing up for the preview, head over to the Yahoo! Developer Network booth at Web 2.0 Expo (#901 in the Expo Hall) to check out a demo.

And what's a new product without a party to kick it off? We're celebrating this component of our open platform with a Developer Event at our Sunnyvale Campus on Thursday, May 15. If you're interested in joining us, here's more information. Hope to see you there.

Amit Kumar
Chief SearchMonkey

Time is of the essence, so looking for that new restaurant or finding a local spa shouldn't add to your busy day. The Yahoo! Local team had that in mind when they rolled out a new feature to help everyone from the consummate explorer to the geographically-challenged find local businesses quicker and more easily. Now, you can make refinements to your local queries in real-time, directly on the map, based on a specific geographic radius.

So, let's say you want to find some great Mexican food in the San Francisco area. You start by searching 'Mexican Restaurant, San Francisco' and a laundry list of Mexican restaurants pops up. But, perhaps you love the vibe along the water and want to find a restaurant in that specific area. To take your search a layer deeper and save you time, hit the 'Expand Map' in the map window and a circle will now appear. You can then shrink, expand or move the circle around to concentrate on a particular area on the map. Without havng to run your search agan, the map will automatically re-populate based on your modifications.

Give it a test drive and let the team know what you think here.

Yahoo! Search Blog team

Over the next few days, we'll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. While we expect the update will be completed soon, as you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.

Also, some of you pointed out some issues with Deleting URLs in Site Explorer a few days ago. This has now been addressed and your Deletes should continue to work on Site Explorer.

To share your thoughts on this with other Yahoo! Search users, please visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board.

Priyank Garg & Sharad Verma
Yahoo! Search

We're sending a number of our top technologists up the road to the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this week. Among the 11 speakers across Yahoo!'s properties who'll be there, here's where you can find Ari Balogh, Yahoo! Chief Technology Officer, Neal Sample, Chief Architect of the Open Platform, and Dustin Whittle, Technical Yahoo! and symfony evangelist.

Wednesday, April 23rd
Time: 10:50 -- 11:40 a.m.
Location: 2nd Level Lobby
Topic: A Symfony Answer
Yahoo!: Dustin Whittle

Dustin will discuss how to work with open source tools to create a complete framework (PHP, JS, CSS) for the enterprise. He'll use his experience redeveloping Yahoo! Answers with symfony and Yahoo! User Interface libraries as a case study.

Thursday, April 24th
Time: 10 -- 10:15 a.m.
Location: 3rd Level Keynote Ballroom
Topic: Yahoo! and Open Platforms
Yahoo!: Ari Balogh

Ari, Yahoo!'s new CTO, will give a 15-minute keynote presentation on Yahoo! and open platforms.

Friday, April 25th
Time: 1:30 -- 2:20 p.m.
Location: Expo Hall
Topic: Yahoo! and Open Platforms -- A Deeper Dive
Yahoo!: Neal Sample

Neal will expand on Ari's keynote by giving a deeper dive into Yahoo! and open platforms.

If you can't attend the presentations, please feel free to stop by our Yahoo! Developer Network booth (#901) in the Expo Hall. Yahoo! Search, along with a number of other product teams, will be on hand to answer questions and do demos of our latest products.

Yahoo! Search Blog

Over the past few weeks, we've been preparing for the latest version of the Yahoo! Search crawler with some infrastructure updates, which recently caused a variance in our crawl behavior.

With everything now in place, the rollout has officially begun. The new Yahoo! Slurp 3.0 recognizes the same user-agent and all robots.txt directives for 'Yahoo! Slurp,' though it'll identify itself as Slurp 3.0 in your web logs.

As the new software undergoes a phased rollout to our production crawlers over the next several weeks, you'll see the following changes:

a) The crawlers will start crawling from a different and much smaller set of IP addresses, but it'll still be from the crawl.yahoo.net domain. Any reverse DNS checks to identify our crawler will continue to work. Please note that if you're using IP-based recognition of our crawlers, you might see a drop in crawl/coverage from Yahoo! We strongly recommend that you move to reverse DNS-based identification of Yahoo! Slurp if you're using any other method to avoid this problem. The current set of IPs will disappear from your web logs in the next several weeks.

b) The crawlers will also publish a new user-agent, 'Yahoo! Slurp/3.0.' Existing robots.txt directives for 'Slurp' or 'Yahoo! Slurp' will continue to work, but if you have directives specific to 'Slurp/2.0,' they won't be recognized by the new crawler (though usage of the 'Slurp/2.0' user-agent is very rare on the web, so you won't likely be affected). We recommend specifying the shorter version of: User-agent: Slurp. Check out "How do I prevent my site or certain subdirectories from being crawled?" on our Help page for more details.

These changes will affect the main Yahoo! Web Search crawlers. Crawlers that similarly respect the Yahoo! Slurp directive but identify themselves more specifically, such as Yahoo! Slurp China and others, will not be impacted.

Let us know if you have any questions or observe anything unusual.

Sharad Verma & Yoram Arnon
Yahoo! Search