SEO Earnings

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

In the past few months, SearchMonkey developers have told us they'd like to use Enhanced Results for site search. Yahoo! and other search engines have long had a site restrict operator (e.g. site:anysite.com) and other site search tools, but we decided to launch a new capability that lets you add a query parameter that automatically turns on the SearchMonkey Enhanced Result for the site you're searching. This is important for site owners because it makes it easier for their communities to get more complete answers when they search on Yahoo! Search. This new parameter will work with any app that's in the Yahoo! Search Gallery as well as any official app. (To make an app official, a site owner just needs to authenticate their site using Site Explorer and then associate their app with their site when they make it sharable in the Developer Tool) How it works To use this functionality, you just need to append a few parameters to a typical Yahoo! Search query string. Here's a quick example:

• Start with a standard query string: http://search.yahoo.com/search?q=u2
• Add the site restrict parameter: &vs=last.fm
• Add the SearchMonkey app ID parameter (case sensitive): &sm=xho
• Final result: http://search.yahoo.com/search?q=u2&vs=last.fm&sm=xho

This query string can be generated using whatever mechanism you choose, including a simple search box on your site or blog. It works with both Infobars and Enhanced Results -- as long as the app is either in the Gallery or is official. If you accidentally try a SearchMonkey app along with a site restriction that doesn't match, the results will look like a typical site-restricted search. Here are a few more examples: Site: Wikipedia App: http://gallery.search.yahoo.com/application?smid=knb SearchMonkey for site search query: http://search.yahoo.com/search?q=george+washington&vs=wikipedia.org&sm=knb Try a search: Site: Yahoo! Answers App: http://gallery.search.yahoo.com/application?smid=ylc SearchMonkey for site search query: http://search.yahoo.com/search?q=can+pigs+fly?&vs=answers.yahoo.com&sm=ylc Try a search: Site: java.sun.com App: http://gallery.search.yahoo.com/application?smid=Zq0 SearchMonkey for site search query: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=exception&vs=java.sun.com&sm=Zq0 Try a search: Before we continue work on this feature, please let us know what you think below or on the Developer group. We'd be particularly interested to hear what else site owners would like to be able to customize in order to make SearchMonkey a more valuable site search tool. The SearchMonkey team

It's been about a month since Yahoo! Search BOSS launched, so it seems like an opportune time to look at some of the mashups and search products that have been built using the BOSS APIs & services. As we've said before, our goal with BOSS is to remove as many of the barriers as possible to creating new search products. By providing deep access to Yahoo! Search's investment in engineering, sciences and core search infrastructure and removing key usage restrictions, we are encouraging a whole new level of innovation in search experiences. We are very excited to see the diversity in products that many of you have already created. What follows is just a small sample of what's being built -- we'll post again soon with a bunch more. 4HourSearch -- Built by Sam Pullara, 4HourSearch is a demonstration of the power of Yahoo! Search BOSS combined with a slick user interface. Aptly named, it took Sam four hours to build the site using a combination of the BOSS API and YUI design tools. PlayerSearch -- Ted Kasten and team are building a sports search engine that pulls in content from a host of sources, including BOSS. Fantasy sports fanatics, check it out here. NewsLine -- As part of the Daylife Developer Challenge, the folks from Dipity built a mashup using their timeline API, Daylife's news API and the BOSS API. The result is a really interesting way to visualize news for any topic. Congrats to the Dipity team on winning the BOSS mashup prize! Tianamo -- Tianamo is a 3D search visualization early prototype built by Lachlan James. It maps the relationships between the search results from the BOSS API and displays them visually. To check it out, you'll need to be running Windows with Java 1.6+. As you can see, the possibilities for creativity and innovation in search are almost endless. If you're building a mashup or product using BOSS, make sure to tag it with "bossmashup" on Delicious so we and the rest of the world can discover it. The BOSS team

With 205 nations, approximately 10,500 athletes and 302 events in 28 sports, it's going to be tough to keep up with all that's going on at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. That's why Yahoo! Search is launching a series of shortcuts to Olympics-related information and news coverage. Starting with the torch-lighting at the opening ceremony on August 8th, there will be a ton of Olympics-related information out there, such as breaking news, results and medal counts. The shortcut will help you get a real-time snapshot of what's happening in Beijing each day in one search. If you're looking for a quick update on medal counts, just search for 'Olympics medal count' and you'll see something like this (once the games actually start): If you want a medal count for a specific country, just add the country's name to your query (e.g. 'Japan medal count'). If you're looking for info on a specific sport, like recent results and a schedule of upcoming events, do a search for 'diving + Olympics' and you'll see a shortcut like this: And if you're looking for the latest on a specific athlete, simply add his or her name to the query (e.g. 'Jingjing Guo Olympics') and you'll see something like this: So now you can keep better tabs on Michael Phelps' road to sweeping another eight medals or how the Russian track team will recover from their recent loss. With the Olympics shortcut, users can also play the news cast or interview video from Yahoo! Sports without leaving the search results page. And if you want to find out more information on a given topic, we'll of course include links to the relevant content on Yahoo! Sports as part of the shortcut. Try it with 'Olympics 2008' and click on the "Videos" link. Once you've caught the Olympics fever and want to be up-to-date and organized with your favorite teams and athletes, try it out and let us know what you think in the comments below. Please note that many of these shortcuts won't begin working until the games kick off in Beijing, but we just wanted to let you sports fans know before the mania sets in. Yuko Kamae Yahoo! Search

We'll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index, but expect the update will be completed soon. Please visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board to share your thoughts or check in with other Yahoo! Search users. Sharad Verma Yahoo! Search

Last month we opened up the Yahoo! Search Gallery to showcase all of the useful SearchMonkey applications that have been built by developers, site owners and Yahoo!. Today, we're turning on a few of those applications for all users. Now, the Yelp, Yahoo! Local and LinkedIn Enhanced Results will automatically appear in the search results, eliminating the need for users to go into the Search Gallery to add them. Why did we start with these applications? Before making an application "default on" we require a few things: access to the site's structured data through semantic markup or a data feed, a well-designed and broadly useful application and positive user metrics. To understand how a SearchMonkey app affects user metrics, we generally expose a small percentage of our users to a default-on experience and measure if and how it changes their usage. We started with Yelp, LinkedIn and Yahoo! Local because they were among our first partners to share structured data. Our tests uncovered that users found these apps useful; in fact, in some cases, we saw a lift in click-through rate of as high as 15 percent. In addition to testing a "default on" treatment, we also tested giving users the ability to add the LinkedIn Enhanced Result directly from the search results page. We'll continue to use this treatment as another way to promote high quality SearchMonkey apps to users. While these are the first apps to be automatically included in the search results, they will certainly not be the last. We'll continue to work with our SearchMonkey developers to increase the exposure of other high-quality applications to the search results page in the months to come (so, make sure to submit your applications to the Gallery). Making it easier to find and add SearchMonkey apps is an important step in improving and enriching the search experience for our users. In addition to turning these Enhanced Results on by default, we've also added "share-with-a-friend" functionality. By clicking the envelope icon on any Enhanced Result, users can now quickly send an email to their friends to share the app. Let us know how these Enhanced Results are working and others you'd like to see in the comments below. Amit Kumar Director, Product Management Yahoo! Search

Getting an international passport can be tough for the average monkey. But that's not the case with this SearchMonkey. Today we're proud to announce we've launched the Yahoo! Search Gallery in Latin America, so our friends in Argentina, Mexico and Brazil can now join the party. Since our initial launch two short months ago, the team has been busy releasing major enhancements to the Gallery, supporting new microformats, putting on developer events in Sunnyvale, London and Paris, and picking the winners of the SearchMonkey Developer Challenge from hundreds of novel submissions. Now that the Gallery is extended to Latin America, we're getting closer to finally seeing the output of an infinite group of monkeys with an infinite number of keyboards... well, maybe not quite, but it'll certainly be fun to see the innovative enhancements they build. And keep your eyes out for where SearchMonkey travels to next. Nick Cox Senior Product Manager Yahoo! Search

Today, our teammates across the way rolled out the newest version of the social bookmarking site Delicious (formerly known as del.icio.us), which offers enhanced performance and search capabilities along with a brand new user interface. The Delicious team has detailed the changes on their blog, but here's a quick look at what's new: Improved Performance -- With a new more scalable infrastructure, Delicious can better keep up with the growing traffic while still providing you with the same reliability and responsiveness. Powering Up Search -- By packing more power into the search engine, the overall performance has improved, delivering search results much more quickly. You can now also search within one of your tags, another user's public bookmarks, or your social network. New Design -- Since a picture is worth a thousand words, we'll just show you... Yahoo! has flipped the switch and we expect all users will be able to experience the new Delicious by this afternoon. Once you've had a chance to play around with the new site, visit the also-new discussion forum and let them know how things are working for you. Yahoo! Search Blog team

The Monkey has been out for a couple months and, since then, we've named the Developer Challenge winners and seen thousands of applications built -- more than 50 of which we've added to the Yahoo! Search Gallery. In the spirit of acknowledging developers' hard work, we want to share a few of our favorites. Remember, you need to click the "Add" button in the Search Gallery in order to see these in your Yahoo! Search results. The enhancement ShoppingNotes.com Combo How it works This Infobar was created by ShoppingNotes.com, a site that combines bookmarking with price alerts. The app covers a wide variety of shopping sites and allows users to set price watches that will send them an email if the price drops. Add it Add it, then try it out with: 'Canon SD1000' or 'KitchenAid mixer' The enhancement Java Documentation How it works This Enhanced Result is useful for developers because it gives you quick access to the Java docs for the version of Java you're using. Add it Add it, then try it out with: 'java HashMap' The enhancement eHow Application How it works eHow, a site with clear how-to instructions for nearly everything, built an Enhanced Result that integrates photos and descriptions. Add it Add it, then try it out with: 'red wine stain' or 'how to train a dog' The enhancement Merriam-Webster Definition How it works Developer Challenge grand prize winner, Marco Vitanza, developed an Infobar for Merriam-Webster that gives users definitions and pronunciations right on the Search Results page. Add it Add it, then try it out with: 'onomastics definition' These are just a few of the interesting apps already available in the Yahoo! Search Gallery. Stay tuned for more highlights to come... Yahoo! Search Blog team

Yahoo! Search recently made some significant enhancements for queries related to breaking news. The goal was to improve the freshness and recency of Search and show breaking news articles faster than before. Here's how we improved things:

• Based on the newsworthiness of each query, we're now displaying the News Direct Display (DD) in the most relevant position(s) on SERP
• We're also better able to detect queries that are newsworthy, which means we're showing more fresh News DDs than before

This improves the user experience in a few ways. First, because we're better able to detect when a query is about a breaking news topic, we're able to deliver fresher results when it matters most. Second, by displaying News DDs in multiple positions, we can deliver a more relevant search experience for users. For example, if you're an X-Men fan and you search for Stan Lee, you'll find the latest news about his cameo in the upcoming flick. But there's a good chance you might just be looking for background on the superhero comic book creator, so putting the News DD at a slightly lower position makes more sense. Give it a try by searching for a news topic that's top of mind for you and let us know your thoughts. Paul Yiu, Product Management, Yahoo! Search Jean-Francois Crespo, R&D, Yahoo! Search

If you've been frequenting the Yahoo! Search Blog, you've certainly read about our initiatives for a more open ecosystem. Complimentary to that, we've discussed semantic web standards and how Yahoo! Search is supporting this technology. Just last week, Yahoo!'s Peter Mika dug a little deeper into the semantic web and explored how it's helping to shape the next generation of search -- transitioning from syntactical search to semantic search. The article first looks at the current limitations in a syntax-based search engine before paving the way for semantic search. Peter outlines the two roads to achieving semantic search as Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology and semantic web technology and highlights the common denominator in both as access to metadata. The fundamental difference is the way in which content is obtained -- implicit metadata extracted from text (NLP) versus explicit metadata provided by publishers (semantic web). Sharing his view on the similarities, Peter suggests the best way to get to semantic search is a blended approach using both NLP and semantic web. And, as an integral member of the Yahoo! SearchMonkey team, Peter refers to the benefits that SearchMonkey is experiencing with the semantic web and calls out the opportunities to integrate with both NLP and semantic web technologies. It's an interesting read, so take a look. If you have any questions for Peter, feel free to drop them in the comments below. Yahoo! Search Blog team

Danny Sullivan's SMX Local & Mobile event starts Thursday, July 24, in San Francisco. We're peppering the show with a keynote from Yahoo! Local and a panel presentation from Yahoo! Connected Life. Kicking off the festivities, Frazier Miller, Yahoo! Local's General Manager, will focus on Yahoo!'s vision for weaving local information into users' primary Web starting points in his keynote address on Thursday at 9:15 a.m. Following, Michael Bayle, Yahoo! Connected Life's General Manager of Global Monetization, will participate in the "Mobile Advertising Opportunities & Tactics" panel on Friday at 9 a.m. And to give you a better sense of what you can expect from Frazier, the Yahoo! Search Blog team asked him some questions to give you a sneak peek. 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? Frazier Miller (FM): For the last several years, we've spoken about how expansive the local search market opportunity is, so I'm going to lay out how much progress we've made in fully realizing the market potential and where the industry is at large. I'll walk through which usage cases have caught fire with people, how we're doing in terms of monetizing on PC and mobile devices, and -- probably most interesting -- what it's going to take to get to the next level. YSB: What are you most focused on for Yahoo! Local today? FM: Over the last 12 months, we've focused heavily on making the site more social in eliciting user feedback and comments. We've introduced features that allow users to connect with each other by making comments on ratings/reviews and added the ability to subscribe to favorite reviewers. Also, earlier this month, we announced updates to Upcoming that include a new interface and greatly increased number of hyper-local events on the site to make it easier for new users to find things to do while maintaining the community aspects that regular users know and love. YSB: What kind of innovation do you see happening in local search today? What are some of your favorite up-and-coming sites? FM: I'm trying to be "greener" these days, so some of the sites that have really caught my eye fall into that category. Walkscore.com is a cool site that analyzes how well your community is laid-out for walking, rather than driving. Greenopia is one that rates businesses and services based on their environmental responsibility. There's a ton happening in the Mobile space too. Fire eagle is a project sponsored by Yahoo!, which enables users to register their location and share it with a number of other apps and services. There's going to be a lot happening on this front in the coming months. YSB: What about the local search market do you think offers solid potential? FM: I can't overstate the upcoming importance and growth of local search enough. For example, by 2010, mobile phones are expected to outpace PCs by three times and local info is the most sought after on mobile devices. We have a perfect storm brewing between user demand, advertising desire for targeting and mobile evolution that's going to make this an incredibly rich arena for the next few years.

Last week we launched our new search web services platform, Yahoo! Search BOSS, and pointed to a few folks that already started using BOSS. We mentioned that Daylife is integrating the BOSS API as part of the Daylife To-Go customization wizard. They're also encouraging participants in their DayPI Developer Challenge to integrate the BOSS API in their mashups. The challenge awards developers who build the most interesting, original and innovative applications using the Daylife API. As part of the challenge, Daylife will be also be awarding a bonus prize of $2,000 for the best BOSS / Daylife Mashup. If you have an idea to share, sign up for a Daylife account, build an app and submit your mashup. Make sure you tag your entry with 'boss' and 'contest08' to be eligible for both the Yahoo! BOSS-DayPI mashup prize and the Developer Challenge. The challenge ends on July 25th, so get your entries in quick! Yahoo! Search Blog team

Back in May, we kicked off the SearchMonkey Developer Challenge. After hundreds of submissions over the course of a month, the contest came to a close a few weeks ago. Our all-star judges picked their favorite apps and today we're announcing the five winners: Innovative Structured Data - The StumbleUpon team won this category for an Infobar they built that draws in ratings and tags as well as links to other users who like the page. Best Infobar - The team from BooRah, a restaurant review site, took home the prize for an app that deep links and reviews to local restaurants, helping to get users to the dinner table faster than ever. Best Enhanced Result - Greg Schechter, a computer scientist from Deerfield, Illinois, built an Enhanced Result that spices up search results for Xbox.com with photos, prices and release dates for Xbox games. Best Data Service - David Hinckley, who owns a genealogy web hosting site, wrote a data service that allows other SearchMonkey developers to showcase rich results from his site in their own apps. Grand Prize - Marco Vitanza is taking home $10,000 for his Blogspot Infobar, which displays links to recent posts for all Blogspot search results. Thanks, Marco, we here at SearchMonkey HQ are all loyal users of your app! In addition to all of the participants in the Challenge, we also want to thank our judges (Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, Rasmus Lerdorf of Yahoo!, John Musser of ProgrammableWeb, and Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand) for their help picking winners. Congratulations to the winners and a huge thank you to all who submitted SearchMonkey apps! The SearchMonkey Team

Today, Yahoo! Search is taking another step in extending the Yahoo! Open Strategy with the launch of Yahoo! Search BOSS, 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. Our goal with BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is simple -- foster innovation in the search landscape. As anyone who follows the search industry knows, the barriers to successfully building a high quality, web-scale search engine are incredibly high. Doing so requires hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in engineering, sciences and core infrastructure -- from crawling and indexing technology to relevancy and machine learning algorithms, to stuff as mundane as data centers, servers and power. Because competing successfully in web search requires an investment of this scale, new players have effectively been prohibited from delivering credible alternatives to Yahoo! and Google. We believe the BOSS platform will begin to change that. So what is BOSS? BOSS is a new, open platform that offers programmatic access to the entire Yahoo! Search index via an API. BOSS allows developers to take advantage of Yahoo!'s production search infrastructure and technology, combine that with their own unique assets, and create their own search experiences. While search APIs have been available for some time, BOSS removes many of the usage restrictions that have prevented other companies from using them to build innovative new search engines. Here's a quick summary of what's available today:

• Ability to re-rank and blend results -- BOSS partners can re-rank search results as they see fit and blend Yahoo!'s results with proprietary and other web content in a single search experience
• Total flexibility on presentation -- Freedom to present search results using any user interface paradigm, without Yahoo! branding or attribution requirements
• BOSS Mashup Framework -- We're releasing a Python library and UI templates that allow developers to easily mashup BOSS search results with other public data sources
• Web, news and image search -- At launch, developers will have access to web, news and image search and we'll be adding more verticals soon
• Unlimited queries -- There are no rate limits on the number of queries per day

These capabilities are really just a first step -- we're already working on expanding the API functionality and providing more access to Yahoo! Search Technology. In addition to a self-serve API, we're also partnering with a handful of Internet companies with large user bases or unique assets to collaboratively develop next gen search products using Yahoo!'s full suite of search technology. To learn more about BOSS Custom, click here. What's in it for Yahoo! and partners? Why would Yahoo! open up its search infrastructure and technology to developers, entrepreneurs and companies who could use it to compete with us? It's really quite simple. First, we believe that being open is core to Yahoo!'s future success -- opening our network, opening our own search experience via SearchMonkey, and now opening our search infrastructure via BOSS -- will lead to innovation both on Yahoo! and powered by Yahoo!. For BOSS, we see a virtuous circle in which partners deliver innovative search experiences, and as they grow their audiences and usage we have more data that can be used to improve our own Yahoo! Search experience and as a result, improve the quality of results our BOSS partners and their users get. Second, we do see new revenue streams from BOSS. In the coming months, we'll be launching a monetization platform for BOSS that will enable Yahoo! to expand its ad network and enable BOSS partners to jointly participate in the compelling economics of search. What's in it for users? More choice. BOSS will enable a range of fundamentally different search experiences. These new search products will provide value to users along multiple dimensions, such as vertical specialization, new relevance indicators and ranking models, and innovative UI implementations. Our hope is that the resulting expansion in user choice will have the effect of fragmenting the increasingly consolidated search market in much the same way that cable TV dramatically increased programming choices for television viewers. Kick the tires and get started Want to kick the tires on what BOSS-powered search could look like? As part of an alpha program, we've been working with a handful of start-ups and developers who have already begun using BOSS. Here are a few early examples of what's possible with BOSS:

• Me.dium, a start-up that's built an innovative collaborative browsing product used BOSS to build a web-scale search engine that leverages its real-time surfing data. By combining the depth of the Yahoo! Search index with its insight into where users are browsing, Me.dium can provide its users with a unique buzz-based search experience.
• Hakia, a semantic search start-up, is using BOSS to access the Yahoo! Search index and dramatically increase the speed with which it can semantically analyze the web. With BOSS providing this important infrastructure, Hakia is able to deliver a language search experience that isn't available from any of the "big three" search providers or other semantic search engines.
• Daylife To-Go is a new self-service, hosted publishing platform from Daylife. Anyone can use this platform to generate customizable pages and widgets. Daylife To-Go uses the BOSS API platform to power its web search module.
• Cluuz, a next-generation search engine prototype, generates easier-to-understand search results through semantic cluster graphs, image extraction and tag clouds. The Cluuz analysis is performed in real-time on results returned from the BOSS API.

To learn more about BOSS and get started using the API, visit the Yahoo! Developer Network. BOSS is open to all -- so check out the documentation, get a BOSS app ID and start building the next generation of search. The BOSS Team

Upcoming has a new look and is ready to help you get out there and explore more. The team has launched a revamped version of the site, which showcases a sleek new interface and an increased range of event types. The new interface makes it easier for new users to find things to do, but still lets existing users tap into the Upcoming community you're used to. So you can continue to connect with friends and find out what's going on nearby. We're also increasing the number and types of hyper-local events available so you can find smaller-scale, more local events even closer to home. We've added events like farmers' markets, craft fairs and street festivals to the tens of thousands already available. Our events cover more than 8,000 cities worldwide and they're still integrated into other Yahoo! sites like Local, My Yahoo!, Travel Guides, and Music. So if you're still looking to make plans for the Fourth of July, give it a try on Upcoming by typing in 'fireworks' and 'San Francisco Bay Area' on the site. You'll be one step closer to eating good local barbeque and wearing outlandish America-flag-printed apparel on Friday. Or, for a Yahoo! Search shortcut to other events over the long weekend, try 'Chicago festivals.' Vince Maniago & the Upcoming Team

We'll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days, but 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. To share your thoughts or check in with other Yahoo! Search users, please visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board. Sharad Verma Yahoo! Search

Yahoo!'s plans to "open up" really started circulating at the beginning of this year. Not long after, Yahoo! Search announced its plans to support semantic mark-ups, specifically our crawler support for markups like RDFa and eRDF, as well as provided a glimpse into our open approach to search. As Yahoo! prepares to support standards, like RDFa for example, we've continued to work closely with the best and brightest in the semantic markup community. We were thrilled to have Ben Adida visit the Sunnyvale campus a few weeks ago. Ben is a member of the Faculty at Harvard Medical School and at the Children's Hospital Informatics Program, as well as a research fellow with the Center for Research on Computation and Society with the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is also the Creative Commons representative to the W3C and chair of the RDF-in-HTML task force, focusing on bridging the semantic and clickable webs. Ben was kind enough to submit himself to a barrage of questions on RDFa, its development and the opportunities it provides. Take a look and feel free to drop questions you have in the comments. We'll do our best to cycle them through to Ben. Lawrence Kim, Yahoo! Search & Peter Mika, Yahoo! Research Yahoo! (Y!): RDFa has been long in the making... is it ready now? Ben Adida (BA): Indeed it has been long in the making, and for good reason. We had to make sure we didn't step on other specifications' toes, that we respected existing design and uses of HTML, that we enabled the expression of enough flexible data to be useful in a number of current and future use cases, and that we had a valid processing model with test cases to help implementors. We have all of that now. So yes, RDFa is ready. It has just been approved by the W3C as a Candidate Recommendation, with the specific text of the specification and a brand new Primer published on June 20th. Y!: What can I do with RDFa? BA: You can tell the world what various components on your web page mean by marking up things like:

• The title of a photo
• Your name and contact information
• The license under which you're distributing your latest MP3
• The ingredients of a cooking recipe
• The price of an item
• A gene on which you recently wrote a paper
• ... Anything that you want to make more machine-readable

With RDFa, you can reuse existing concepts, e.g. the title and price of an item, no matter what that item is. If there's a field you need that doesn't exist, you can create it. This level of granularity encourages you to mark up your content as fully as possible, while letting applications consume only as much of the data as it needs. Y!: Who is supporting RDFa? BA: Creative Commons and Digg are two early adopters of RDFa, and there are a number of smaller web publishers who have begun adding RDFa markup to their pages. We’ve also just heard that the UK National Archives are committed to adopting RDFa. Y!: What advantages does RDFa provide compared to microformats, eRDF and AB Meta? BA: Microformats, eRDF and RDFa share a common goal: to make it easy for HTML authors to add machine-readable tags to express the meaning of their web data. So before we get into a fight, it's important to realize that all three share this important common goal. Microformats work well for well-defined items, such as contact information (hCard) and calendar items (hCal). They tend to become more complicated when the data gets more varied. Fields can't easily be shared across microformats, and all microformats must go through a centralized approval process to make sure no conflicts arise. RDFa doesn't have vocabulary conflicts: data fields, e.g. "title" can be reused by anyone, and there's never any confusion as to what a given field means, since fields are, in fact, URLs. Entirely different types of data can share fields, which is exactly what applications need for extensibility. Multiple data items can be published on a single web page and, in contrast with microformats, relationships between the data items can be easily expressed. eRDF has a similar vocabulary approach to RDFa, but it cannot express nearly as much data as RDFa. In particular, expressing relations between multiple items on a page is more complicated, and describing inline PDFs or images is not always possible. Also, eRDF is not quite as modular: vocabularies can only be imported in the HEAD of a document, so a widget-ized page would have an easier time using RDFa over eRDF. AB Meta, which is new to me, appears to be a small subset of the intersection between RDFa and eRDF. Because it is a limited subset, it suffers a bit from the limitations of microformats: who gets to extend AB Meta? I would recommend sticking to the collaborative efforts such as RDFa and eRDF. If you need more complete expressivity and the modularity required in a widget-ized web world, then you need RDFa. Y!: What would you say to the critics who say that RDFa is too difficult to author? BA: It's a matter of taste and finding the right compromise. In my opinion, RDFa and eRDF have similar levels of complexity as far as authors are concerned. I prefer writing RDFa, and I'm sure Ian Davis prefers writing eRDF. But I don't think either one of us would seriously argue that one is much easier than the other. It's a little bit more complicated to write RDFa than it is to write microformats, but that's not surprising given that microformats are more limited in scope, and there are notable extensibility costs to using microformats. In general, we expect that web publishers will write RDFa in HTML templates, rather than every time they have an item to publish. Most microformat deployments work this way, too, few people write them by hand each time. So the increased complexity is negligible in the bigger picture. Y!: Unlike microformats, RDFa depends on the availability of shared vocabularies (ontologies). Is that a problem? BA: A number of vocabularies are already available and particularly stable: Dublin Core for documents, FOAF for people and their networks, Creative Commons for document licensing, hAudio and hVideo for online media. Then there are highly specialized vocabularies, like Uniprot and the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) for the life sciences. In my opinion, this is a huge win for RDFa. You really want vocabularies developed by experts in the appropriate field. Bio-informaticians develop vocabularies for biomedical research, musicians develop vocabularies for music, and lawyers develop vocabularies for copyright licensing. Y!: What's next for RDFa? BA: For the next few months, we're going to focus on helping publishers produce RDFa and tool builders parse it correctly. Yahoo! is playing a pivotal role in this space with SearchMonkey. We hope to see Yahoo! properties publish RDFa soon! Y!: Where can I learn more about RDFa? BA: Our wiki has all the relevant material: http://rdfa.info/wiki And you should join our brand new users' mailing list: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdfa/