Our team at Yahoo! Search has been speaking at various shows about SearchMonkey, Yahoo!'s new developer platform that uses data web standards and structured data to enhance the usefulness of search results. If you're interested in getting the details of those talks, take a look at some of our presentations featured on SlideShare.net. The folks over there were kind enough to feature a handful of recent SearchMonkey presentations on their homepage. In addition to the presentations produced and uploaded by Yahoo!, other presentations from our SearchMonkey community have been posted as well.

If you have a SearchMonkey tutorial or presentation that you'd like to share, SlideShare is a great place to do it. Just mark your presentation with the "searchmonkey" tag and you'll automatically be included in the SearchMonkey repository: http://www.slideshare.net/tag/searchmonkey.

Yahoo! Search Blog team

Yahoo! is joining Michael Arrington as a major sponsor at TechCrunch50, TechCrunch's second annual conference, at the San Francisco Design Center Concourse Monday through Wednesday, September 8 - 10.

More than 50 early stage companies will pitch their products and ideas in front of a host of respected VCs, execs and entrepreneurs. A panel of judges will also award $50,000 to one of the startups. Yahoo!'s Ash Patel, Head of the Audience Products Division, will serve as one of the TechCrunch50 judges this year.

The Yahoo! Search BOSS team will also be exhibiting, so if you're a start-up or interested in starting a business in this space, stop by our booth to learn more about our open search web services platform, meet the team and see a demo of the product. We'll be there from 8 a.m. - 6 p.m. all three days. We'll also be giving away some swag and maybe a prize or two.

But what's a TechCrunch gathering without some socializing? Yahoo! is sponsoring the closing cocktail reception on Wednesday from 6 - 8 p.m., so don't miss it.

For more details on TechCrunch50 2008 and Yahoo!'s presence at the show -- including Ash Patel's panel on Monday from 2:15 - 5 p.m. -- check out the conference site.

Yahoo! Search Blog team

It's been two months since we began "opening up" the Yahoo! Search infrastructure with the launch of Yahoo! Search BOSS and we've already seen some great products created. We shared a handful with you last month, and we're excited to see that the creativity hasn't slowed down. From new vertical search engines to a personalized search platform, developers are using BOSS to come up with a range of new products. As we promised, below are a few more examples of the interesting products that have been built using BOSS.

123People.com: Currently focused on the European market, 123People.com delivers comprehensive and centralized profiles including images, videos, phone numbers, email addresses, social networking, and Wikipedia profiles related to an individual. The site uses the XML BOSS interface to query Yahoo! Search's image and web search index in real-time. Based on the geographic location of the user and semantic analysis, 123people applies ranking algorithms and presents results tailor-made to people search.

askBOSS: One of our very own, Saurabh Sahni, explored the use of natural language processing in image search, which has historically been limited to text search. His mashup, askBOSS, is an extension of Vik Singh's QNA mashup and works by using the Mashup Framework to predict the answer to a user's question and then queries the BOSS image search API for corresponding images.

BuildaSearch: Using the BOSS Web Search API to generate customizable search results, BuildaSearch takes all the complexities out of building a search engine and allows you to control the name, look and feel of your search engine. For example, one of our team members designed a search engine to look for dog friendly activities in the bay area in just a few minutes. Engines built using BuildaSearch can be hosted on either their site or elsewhere on the web using an API provided by BuildaSearch.

Remember, if you're building mashups, make sure to tag them with "bossmashup" on Delicious so we can discover them. We'll continue to share new products that we come across. Hopefully, these examples will help to get your wheels turning. Happy building!

If you're feeling inspired to start building today, sign-up for Yahoo!'s Open Hack 2008 and join your fellow developers. Please mark your registration with "Yahoo! Search" so we can save you a space.

The BOSS team

To help promote web innovation and openness, Yahoo! is hosting Open Hack 2008 for developers next Friday and Saturday, September 12 & 13, at our Sunnyvale campus and we invite you to join us.

In our SearchMonkey- and Yahoo! Search BOSS-focused sessions, we'll share where the platforms are headed, gather important feedback and give you time to get creative and build apps.

We're calling all SearchMonkey and BOSS developers and partners. But space is limited so head to our Hack Day sign-up page as soon as possible to reserve your spot. If you sign up, please mention "Yahoo! Search" in your submission form and we'll make sure there's a ticket waiting for the first fifty who apply.

Check out the schedule below for SearchMonkey and BOSS sessions. Hope to see you in Sunnyvale.

Friday, September 12

10 - 10:50 a.m.
SearchMonkey Workshop (C2)

3 - 3:50 p.m.
BOSS Workshop (C3)

Yahoo! Search Blog team

The Yahoo! Search team was in San Jose last week at Search Engine Strategies, and in addition to participating in panel discussions on semantic search, shopping search tactics and searcher behavior, we also took part in the SES Awards.

The awards honor 15 search marketers and search engines, and the mission is to inspire innovation and encourage new ideas. Judges look at four key areas across all award categories: innovation in methodology and execution, achieving measurable success goals, excellence in tactical execution, and overall approach and category relevance. Yahoo! Search was evaluated in the "Search Engine with the Most Relevant Results" category by a panel of industry experts and the SES Awards editorial staff. We're happy to report that Yahoo! took home the top prize. We firmly believe that opening up our search ecosystem with platforms like SearchMonkey and BOSS, and adding features like Search Assist, will continue to enable us to focus on creating the best and most relevant search experience on the Web for users. But, a pat on the back is always nice!

As many know, foosball has long been a tradition here at Yahoo!. So, when we learned that there would be a foosball competition at SES, we knew our pride was on the line. On Wednesday night, Yahoo!'s Jake Rosenberg and Daniel Wong dueled with the major search engines to take home the Foosball title. Jake's snake shot was what secured the victory. Congrats Jake and Daniel!

Overall, it was a memorable event. For more on the foosball competition, check out Yodel Anecdotal and Google's Webmaster Central Blog.

Yahoo! Search Blog team

The Yahoo! Mobile team has continued to develop new enhancements to make Yahoo! oneSearch easier and more effective for our users on the go. Today, we're further enhancing the mobile search experience by rolling out a Yahoo! oneSearch shortcut for Nokia devices. This new shortcut provides users with one-click access to Yahoo! oneSearch through our downloadable client. Once installed, it only takes one click on your phone screen to initiate a search. Simply click on the pencil key or right shortcut key on your device, and you no longer have to hunt through your cell phone menu to conduct a search.

If you have a select Series 60 Nokia device (e.g. N70, N95, N73, 6120, and E65), give it a try. The Yahoo! oneSearch shortcut is currently available for you in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and South America. If you don't have a Series 60 Nokia, we're hoping to bring the oneSearch shortcut to you soon.

One of the key features of the Yahoo! oneSearch shortcut is the integration of Search Assist, which made its mobile debut in April at CTIA. Mobile Search Assist is powerful on the go when you're having to type on small keyboards or "triple tap" phone buttons; it reduces the time it takes to enter a search term through real time search suggestions and related concepts for more refined results. For example, as you type in 'Dark Knight', Search Assist may recommend suggestions such as Darth Vader or Olympian Dara Torres to help guide your search.

For more information, visit http://mobile.yahoo.com/onesearch/shortcut on your PC, or http://m.yahoo.com/shortcut on your mobile device. And let us know what you think in the comments below.

Joy Ghanekar
Yahoo! Mobile

A few years ago, we launched Site Explorer with the goal of providing site owners with better visibility into how we index their websites and what data we use in our search service. Over the years we've moved beyond simply providing information to webmasters to allowing them to tell us what to do with their site, using functions such as submitting feeds, deleting URLs or reporting spam. Our most successful function among all has been Dynamic URL Rewriting. We've had thousands of site owners enter rules for their websites and webmasters auto-rewrite an average of 25,000 URLs per rule, with some sites rewriting millions of URLs in 1 shot.

Today, we launched a new look and feel for Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/new) that provides a more dynamic interface to accommodate future feature roll-outs. The new interface also includes a new Site Summary page to provide statistics for authenticated sites. On top of this, we're also increasing the number of rules for Dynamic URL Rewriting that you can enter from 3 to 10.

The new site is located at a special URL to give you some time to play around with it and update your tools that use our interface. We will make this the default experience soon, so please use this time to update your tools. And, as always, please give us feedback on your new experience. We want to hear from you!

Priyank Garg
Yahoo! Search

With Search Engine Strategies starting this week, we get a sneak peek from Vice President Larry Cornett on his panel on how searchers interact with search engines on Wednesday at 1 - 2:15 p.m. Also you'll find a glimpse of where the entire Yahoo! Search team will be throughout the show.

Be sure to check out the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog for more details on other Yahoo! speakers at the event.

We hope to see you there.

Yahoo! Search Blog team

Yahoo! Search Blog (YSB): Can you give us a sneak peek into what you plan to talk about at the show?

Larry Cornett (LC): I will be on a panel at SES entitled "Search User Behavior Update." The title of my talk for that panel is "Thinking Beyond the Search Results Page." What I mean by that is most of us in the Search industry have historically been focused on the performance of the search results page, referrals and conversion. We need to step back to consider what people are really trying to accomplish in the real world, which extends well beyond the Web and into their daily lives. I plan on sharing what we at Yahoo! Search do to better understand our users and how they experience Search end-to-end within the context of their larger tasks. This includes the great work done by our Customer Insights and Metrics & Analysis teams, which ranges from ethnographic field studies to eye-tracking research. We are really interested in helping users more easily craft better searches and get straight to the answers they are looking for.

YSB: What are you most focused on for Yahoo! Search today?

LC: First, we have continued to focus on our mission to help get users from "to do" to "done" as quickly and as safe as possible when they use Yahoo! Search. That includes continuing to advance the great Search Assist technology that we recently launched and SearchScan a feature launched in May 2008 that helps protect users from viruses, spyware and spam. Second, we've added a really exciting new development platform called SearchMonkey which allows publishers, site owners and developers to leverage structured data to enhance the functionality, appearance and usefulness of search results in our Search experience. We are continuing to evolve the Monkey and work with publishers and developers to bring more enhanced results to our users from sites like Yelp, Yahoo! Local, and LinkedIn. It's a great way for users to more quickly find the information they need to complete their real world tasks. And recently we've launched Yahoo! Search BOSS, which is a web services platform that allows developers and companies to create and launch web-scale search products by utilizing the same infrastructure and technology that powers Yahoo! Search. We are continuing to work with startups and developers like Me.dium, Hakia, Daylife, and Cluuz to bring entirely new search experiences to life.

YSB: What kind of innovation do you see happening in Search today?

LC: Well, of course I am a little biased, but I have to say that both Yahoo! SearchMonkey and Yahoo! Search BOSS are two of the biggest innovations in the Search landscape today. We are encouraging and enabling innovation on a whole new scale. But, there are a number of other companies doing very interesting things in the Search space as well.

Yahoo! Search Speaker Schedule

Monday, August 18th

Universal & Blended Search
9:45 - 11 a.m.
Cris Pierry, Senior Director of Product Management

Semantic Search -- How will it change our lives?
11:15 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
Amit Kumar, Director Product Management

Tuesday, August 19th

Shopping Search Tactics
11 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
Greg Hintz, General Manager, Yahoo! Shopping

Wednesday, August 20th

Searcher Behavior Research Update
1 - 2:15 p.m.
Larry Cornett, Vice President, User Experience and Design

Thursday, August 21st

Organic Listings Forum
1:30 - 2:30 p.m.
Sharad Verma, Senior Product Manager

The opening ceremony has come and gone and the 2008 Summer Olympics are well underway. Every day moments of achievement, defeat and disappointment are captured and if you're lucky, you witness them first hand. If you're not so lucky, don't fret, Yahoo! Image Search has just rolled out a new image carousel to make finding those history-making moments easier.

Now when you do a search on Yahoo! Image Search for Olympics-related content, you will see a carousel of some of the freshest, most comprehensive photos from Yahoo! Sports coverage of the Olympics. The carousel images will appear above the regular search results, with arrows in the right hand corner to make toggling through the images easy. So, if you want to peruse images of Michael Phelps as he makes Olympics history or view photos of Yang Wei, who just brought home the gold medal for China in Men's Gymnastics, here's what you'll see:

Accessing the photo carousel is simple. To get the latest of Olympics photos, search 'Olympics' and you might get a glimpse of the intensity between Brazil and Latvia in the women's basketball games or catch the concentration at the Shunyi Olympic Rowing and Canoeing Park. You can also hone in on more specific photos. Try a search for a particular athlete, i.e. 'Roger Federer' or your sport of preference, like 'Olympics diving.' And, to get photos of a featured event, search it in conjunction with Olympics, like 'Olympics opening ceremony.'

And don't forget the Yahoo! Shortcuts for Olympics-related information. To get a real-time snapshot of what's going on at this year's games, try one of the following:

• Olympics Medal Count: To get a quick overview of the ranking in this year's games, simply search 'medal count.' And, if you're more interested in your team, just add your country before the search, 'USA medal count'
• Game Updates: For a first-hand look at who's leading a specific game, do a quick search like 'Olympics swimming'
• Athlete Stats: To learn the latest on a specific athlete, search their name and Olympics. Tough to keep up on how your favorite Indian American gymnast is doing? Search 'Raj Bhavsar Olympics'
• Olympics Results: For a real-time overview of the games, search 'Olympics results'
• Olympics Schedule: To keep up with what's when, search 'Olympics schedule'

Give 'em a try and enjoy the games. Happy Olympics!

Yahoo! Search Blog team

A few months back we announced the acquisition of Inquisitor software, which helped to extend our query suggestion features, similar to Yahoo!'s Search Assist, to the Mac community. We've been quietly working on enhancements since, and today we're rolling out a new look, a few performance improvements and we're also going global.

To start with we tapped into the Yahoo! Search infrastructure, using the recently announced Yahoo! Search BOSS, our open search web services platform, in order to speed up the search results delivered in Inquisitor. You should notice a significant improvement in the speed of your query results in Yahoo! Search. We also gave Inquisitor a little facelift with a new, refined, yet simple home page (inquisitorx.com) and a cleaner user interface of the Inquisitor client.

You can now also utilize Inquisitor in different languages, eight to be exact, including Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German.

Great design will continue to be a pillar of Inquisitor. We hope you enjoy these changes, and as always, let us know what you think in the comments below.

Ariel Seidman
Director of Product Management
Yahoo! Search