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Yahoo! Search BOSS Hits Tel Aviv

A couple of weeks ago, Yahoo! Search visited Tel Aviv, Israel as part of our international BOSS Hack Day series. Our goal with these Hack Days is to educate developers around the world on Yahoo! Search BOSS, share where the platform is headed and foster the development of innovative new search experiences using BOSS.

The BOSS team got together with 100 developers and entrepreneurs in Tel Aviv for a detailed presentation on the BOSS API, presented in Hebrew by BOSS Engineering Director Eran Palmon. After the presentation, developers had the chance to build their own mashup creations that were then reviewed by a panel of judges. We received 20+ mashups and judging is complete.

Drum roll, please...

The winning team, Get the Pic, wrote an addictive phrase guessing game (similar to Hang-Man), based on Yahoo! BOSS image, news and web search APIs.

The ingenuity and entrepreneurship exhibited at the Hack Day in Tel Aviv was encouraging, especially as we continue to forge our relationship with developers in this region. In fact, Delver, an Israel-based social search company, recently launched its search engine powered in part by BOSS. There's no doubt that we'll continue to see new and inventive search experiences from developers there.

For more details on our developer event in Tel Aviv, check out this recent post from the Yahoo! Developer Network. We've captured more photos of the event as well.

Farewell for now, Tel Aviv...see you in 2009.

Sophie Major
YDN International & Honorary BOSS Team Member

Gluing Together the Best Content on the Web

You may have heard about our experimental visual display of search results on Yahoo! India, called Glue(TM) Pages. Tonight we're launching a similar, but slightly different experience in the U.S. with Yahoo! Glue(TM) beta. This newest iteration is a standalone experience focused on assembling useful information from all over the Web, giving users a new place to discover and explore images, videos, articles and more.

We're starting with a limited set of topics (more will be added over time), pulling together content from the best places on the Web onto one Yahoo! Glue(TM) page. These pages are built using an algorithm that automatically places the most relevant modules on a page, giving you a visually rich, diverse page all about the topic in which you're interested.

To see it in action, check out some of the Glue pages on some popular people, places and things: New York Giants, Henry Paulson, Electoral College, Hugh Jackman, etc.

For those that may be wondering, our intention with Yahoo! Glue(TM) beta is not to replace the Yahoo! Search experience in the US. We're always challenging ourselves to explore innovative new ways to deliver great experiences. Glue is one of those experiments, with a goal of giving users one more visual way to browse and discover new things from across the Web. We'll be working to expand the number of Glue pages, improve the experience and incorporate your feedback into future versions.

We'll be rolling this out over the next few hours, so go ahead and give it a try at glue.yahoo.com. We think it's pretty sticky (we had to have one "glue" pun in this post), and we'd love your feedback.

Julie Demsey
Yahoo! Glue Product Management

Coming to Firefox and Safari: A companion to solve your puzzle mysteries

You puzzle lovers out there may remember that we launched a crossword puzzle game that combined the Search Assist feature to provide helpful hints from Yahoo! Search last Fall. After all, many of us aren't born with the natural "crossword gene" (myself included) and having a helping hand to unscramble the word simply doubles the fun.

Many users told us that they really enjoyed the game and were sad when it was removed after a brief period of time. That's why we teamed up with Yahoo! Games and worked hard to create two games that are refreshed daily - Daily Crossword and Hollywood Jumble. Following the recent launch on www.yahoo.com for Internet Explorer, we are thrilled to announce that they are now live for Firefox and Safari.

So take a break and give yourself a brain boost with the puzzle games powered by Yahoo! Search.

Good luck and have fun.

Christina Lee
Yahoo! Search

Yahoo! Search BOSS Releases Key Terms

Today we're pleased to announce the availability of the first of a series of new BOSS features called Key Terms.

We began opening up our search infrastructure four months ago with Yahoo! Search BOSS. Since then, we've heard again and again in our developer group and at conferences and hack days around the world that developers want more access to deep infrastructure assets.

Key Terms is derived from a Yahoo! Search capability we refer to internally as "Prisma." This is the same patented technology that powers Search Assist. Key Terms is an ordered terminological representation of what a document is about. The ordering of terms is based on each term's frequency and its positional and contextual heuristics.

How could it be used? Obviously it could be used as the basis for assistance and refinement technology (as we've done with Search Assist), but that's hardly the only possible application. Key Terms could be highly useful as input to semantic analysis or new relevancy models. They could also be used to analyze and cluster similar documents or as a vehicle for new visual experiences.

For an example of Key Terms in use check out Tartin3.com. It's a Parisian food search engine built by our very own epicurean developer Ted Drake. The "Related Terms" refiners under each result are pulled directly from Key Terms.

To provide API access to Key Terms, we're introducing a new universal parameter called "view." View is the argument that will provide a lens into deeper content. Appending "&view;=keyterms" to the BOSS Web Search API call will result in Key Terms being included in the response.

In the example below, we included Key Terms in a query for obama. Each result contains up to 20 terms describing the document. The terms below describe the first result, for Change.gov.

Check out the BOSS documentation for all the details of how you can use Key Terms and other BOSS functionality. Last but not least, we've added Romanian, Hebrew, and Turkish language/region support to the BOSS APIs - details are also included in the documentation.

If you have any questions or feedback, we encourage you to post them to the BOSS group. We're committed to continuing to open our infrastructure and technology to developers, start-ups and established Internet companies, so if you have any thoughts on what should be next, we're all ears.

Ashim Chhabra
The BOSS Team

BOSS Hack World Tour Heads to Europe

We just returned from two solid events on the BOSS Hack Day world tour. Last Monday's event in London drew a range of developers, including a few who were completely new to the platform along with a handful of experienced BOSS hackers (such as the developer from BuildaSearch).

After a successful stop in London, the team headed to Paris to prepare for another event on Wednesday.

The Paris event stood out for a couple of reasons. First, we were really pleased with the turnout. The event was held at a well-known Parisian coworking center called La Cantine, which seemed to be at the hub of the developer community in Paris... it was packed. Even more impressive was how engaged everyone was. We started with a one-hour overview and technical discussion, broke for sushi and beer and then split into two workshops -- one on the BOSS Mashup Framework and one on building niche search engines using the BOSS API.

Almost all of the developers stayed until 10:30 or later that evening to learn more about BOSS and shared some excellent feedback on where we should take the product. Although neither of us speaks a lick of French, we had some great conversations. We met with the folks from Veosearch, a BOSS-powered search engine that gives a percentage of its profits to charity, as well as the guys from Iminent, an IM add-on and contextual search company.

We'd like to thank all the developers who joined us. Hearing directly from you about new features you'd like to see will help us prioritize our efforts in 2009. Also, big thanks to the Yahoo! teams in London and Paris for all their help in setting up and running the events.

If you weren't able to join us, we'll continue to host developer events in the coming months. In the meantime, you can check out more photos and the slides from our presentation.

Graham Mudd & Vik Singh
BOSS Team

A Delicious Anniversary

With over 180 million unique URLs tagged, Delicious is celebrating its five year anniversary. To date, 5.3 million users have turned to Delicious to enhance their social search experience. Not only is it a free and easy way for people to discover, tag and share web content, it continues to evolve to provide greater value to the Delicious community through the introduction of new features, such as browser add-ons or an improved user interface.

Happy anniversary, Delicious, and here's to many more.

Yahoo! Search Blog Team

Yahoo! Search in Vegas for PubCon 2008

Las Vegas is about to get even wilder next week for the annual Pubcon Vegas 2008 show. Search and search marketing professionals are heading out to the Las Vegas Convention Center in droves and Yahoo! Search will be a part of the action. Participating in a number of panels, the team here will cover topics such as eliminating duplicate content and the current state of search. Attendees can also learn best practices for organic listings and have their sites reviewed live, at the show.

Wednesday, November 12th
Time: 10:15 - 11:30 a.m. (Salon B)
Session: Local and Mobile Search
Description: This panel will look at local search from the varying perspectives of search engines, wireless audiences and SEO/SEM marketers.
Yahoo!: Shailesh Bhat, Senior Product Manager, Yahoo! Local

Thursday, November 13th
Time: 10:15 - 11:30 a.m. (Salon C)
Session: Getting Rid of Duplicate Content Issues Once and For All
Description: This panel will look at the top issues relating to duplicate content and will explore what can be done to alleviate and address webmaster and site owner fears.
Yahoo!: Priyank Garg, Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Search

Time: 1:30 - 2:50 p.m. (Salon F)
Session: Organic Site Reviews
Description: Get your Web site reviewed live by a panel of SEO experts in a session focused on organic search.
Yahoo! (Moderator): Tim Mayer, VP, U.S. Search Business

Time: 4:10 - 5:30 p.m. (Salon A)
Session: Super Session - Search Engines and Webmasters (a.k.a. The Search Engine Smackdown)
Description: Experts from four major search engines will discuss current status, features and fresh offerings from their engines.
Yahoo!: Sean Suchter, VP of Engineering, Yahoo! Search

For the complete line-up, check out the conference schedule and feel free to stop by if you're in Vegas.

Yahoo! Search Blog Team

Experimental Monkeys Now Available

We often talk about the growing number of interesting SearchMonkey applications that have been built by developers. Many of the applications live in the Yahoo! Search Gallery, but quite a few aren't accepted for various reasons. Today, we're introducing SearchMonkey experimental applications to give developers a way to share their apps with early-adopting users. We think the early feedback that these users can provide will be extremely helpful for developers. This also gives users who opt-in an even wider variety of apps from which to choose.

When developers submit their app to the gallery in the SearchMonkey Developer Tool, it will be reviewed by our team. The parameters for inclusion in the gallery are relatively straightforward, but often minor details such as a missing logo or a non-conditional display can keep innovative apps from reaching the gallery. Starting today, even if an app doesn't meet all of the gallery guidelines, it will still be quickly approved as an experimental app provided the basic functionality operates as designed and we don't initially see any other major issues with it.

To view experimental applications, simply click on the 'Show Experimental Enhancements' link at the bottom of the application directory pages in the gallery.

Once you've opted in, you can access all the experimental SearchMonkey applications and provide direct feedback as well as feature requests to the developers. You can also get automatic upgrades to the latest versions when changes are made to the applications.

Let us know what interesting applications you've discovered!

Nick Cox
Yahoo! Search

Yahoo! Search Tracks the Road to the White House

Election Day is fast approaching and the presidential race has certainly been interesting. As the race heats up, we've been collecting and analyzing some fascinating data about how voters are using search during this election. While searches aren't votes, they do provide insight into what's on the collective mind of the electorate. Here are a few highlights: In the past week, Senator Obama has drawn more than twice as many queries as Senator McCain. That's not necessarily all positive, as the nature of the queries indicate that people still have a lot of questions -lookups range from questions about his biography to his birth certificate, from his grandmother to his gun control platform. Interestingly, last week we saw six times as many queries for Cindy McCain compared to Michelle Obama.

As for who's doing all the searching, we often run geographical heat maps to track the queries by state. The map below traces the past week's searches for John McCain in each state in terms of queries per capita. As you can see, Washington, D.C. is intently following his progress, followed by Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina and Ohio.

Washington, D.C., Georgia, Florida, Virginia and North Carolina have been scrutinizing Barack Obama most closely.

Since the heat maps compare relative search volume among states for each candidates' name, they can't be compared to each other. So, here's a look at how the candidates stack up against each other in a few key battleground states:

Whatever the outcome of the presidential race, perhaps the most encouraging news has been the surge in look-ups for information pertaining to voter registration. Patriotism may come with bureaucracy, but at least search can help with the paperwork.

Remember to exercise your right to vote on November 4th and share your "Road to the White House" search experiences in the comments below.

Vera Chan & Graham Mudd
Yahoo! Search

Search Assist: A Look Back and Ahead

Last October we launched Search Assist, taking a significant step toward making searching smarter on Yahoo! Search. Over the past year we've made strides in improving our search assistance technology with one goal in mind: to intelligently guide users to the answers they seek.

In a recent survey¹, we learned that 83 percent of searchers want and value assistance with their searches; and 85 percent aren't finding what they're looking for in their first search. As we look back on the year since launching Search Assist, we thought we'd share some of the developments and enhancements that have helped make it one of our most used and useful features.

July 2007 - Search Suggestions Launch on Yahoo.com:
We kick things off with search suggestions on Yahoo.com to give users a quicker way to get to their answers - delivering suggestions as they type.

October 2007 - Search Assist Launches:
Kicking things up a notch, for the first time users can get query suggestions and related concepts directly from the search results page as well as on Yahoo.com. Search Assist's smart triggering technology detects when customers have difficulty formulating a query and displays suggestions or related concepts only when they're helpful.

March 08 - Search Assist goes global:
Search Assist is extended to users in 15 markets and 7 languages, including: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Spain, UK, and Vietnam.

May 08 - Inquisitor joins the Yahoo! Search family:
We acquire Inquisitor to further deepen our strength in assistance technology with this slick Safari browser plug-in.

August 08 - Search Assist on Mobile
Search Assist extends to mobile devices (Nokia) via the Yahoo! oneSearch shortcut.

October 08 - Inquisitor Extends to Firefox and Internet Explorer
In addition to Safari, we roll out Inquisitor across Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers.

On top of the visible enhancements listed above, behind the scenes we've added billions of suggestions to Search Assist, improved our understanding of the world's languages and worked to make the technology more comprehensive. Here are a few examples of what it all adds up to for our users:

1. Overall user engagement:
User engagement on Search Assist has increased by 60x post launch - thanks to improvements in suggestion quality, increased coverage and better interaction design. Simply put, Search Assist has become part of the way that users search at Yahoo!.
2. Query formulation:
Our data shows that users find Search Assist convenient and reassuring. Search Assist will check spelling of difficult terms, so instead of typing in a word like "Schwarzenegger," which is likely impossible for any non-Austrian to spell, all you have to do is enter "Arnold" and Search Assist completes it for you.



3. Reformulation and Exploration:
Usage of the "related concepts" section for Search Assist peaks when users need new ideas. We've seen a 3x jump in engagement for this feature, and we're the first and still the only search engine offering it. The beauty of this technology is that it reveals facts or connections that a user may not be aware of. For example, if you're looking for information about climate change, Search Assist lets you know that climate change is related to greenhouse gases.

Looking ahead, we'll continue to focus on improving the sophistication and usefulness of our assistance technology. Feel free to drop us your feedback and comments below.

Tom Chi
Senior Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Search

BOSS Hack Day Hits the Road

The BOSS team recently participated in Open Hack 2008 to promote innovation and openness in search. Developers came out in full force to create hacks and mashups using Yahoo! Search BOSS. With the success of our event in Sunnyvale, we decided to take Hack Day on the road.

We're inviting developers to take part in one of our Hack Days around the world. We'll be sharing where the platform is headed, leading technical discussions and encouraging developers to start building innovative new search experiences using BOSS.

Our first Hack Day kicks off in Tel Aviv on November 6th. If you're interested, sign up here. We'll be hosting or participating in Hack Days throughout November, so check out the schedule below and join us if you can:

• Sao Paulo: November 8 - 9, 2008 @ SENAC University


• London: November 10, 2008 @ Wallacespace


• Paris November 12, 2008 @ La Cantine

We'll also be hosting events in South East Asia and India in the near future, so check back here for more details on where we'll be

We hope you can come hack with us!

The BOSS team

Inquisitor Expands to Firefox and IE

Earlier this year, we launched Inquisitor 3 for Safari. Since then, users have been asking (demanding) that we make Inquisitor available on other browser platforms. This evening, we're doing just that with the launch of Inquisitor Firefox 2 and 3 and Internet Explorer 7 and 8. This means that the majority of Internet users can now access Inquisitor's fast, smart, and flexible search experience from their browser search box.

The look and feel of the IE and Firefox versions bear a striking resemblance to the original Safari version, but there are some important improvements to note.

Building on the work by the Yahoo! Research team in the paper "Information Re-Retrieval: Repeat Queries in Yahoo! Logs," the algorithm that generates the personalized results has been enhanced to return more targeted results.

We've also included a bookmark-based retrieval feature for IE. So, if you are looking for a page you bookmarked a few months ago, say an expense report guide on your local Intranet, you won't need to fumble around your hundreds of bookmarks and folders to find that page. A simple search in Inquisitor will bring it right up.

Beyond these enhancements, the focus of Inquisitor, regardless of browser platforms, remains squarely on providing you with instant web results that get you to your destination faster, the best query formulation assistance and a richer, more personalized search experience. Now you don't have to decide between your favorite browser and your favorite search experience - you can have both.

Try it out on Safari, Firefox or IE and let us know what you think in the comments below.

Ariel Seidman & Inquisitor Team

BOSS Challenge Winner Profiled on Mashable

As we announced on October 14, Kallout, a contextual search product, won the BOSS Mashable Challenge. Part of the first prize for the Challenge was a guest post on Mashable, which was posted today. Kallout is a great example of how BOSS can quickly be integrated into products and mash-ups to power next generation search experiences - so give their article a read.

The BOSS Team

The BOSS Team Goes Back to School

A few weeks ago, the BOSS team invited a handful of the top academic minds in information retrieval to join us at our Sunnyvale campus for the BOSS Academic Research Day. In addition to the professors and grad students from Stanford, MIT, UMass, University of Illinois and Purdue, we also invited ten senior researchers from Yahoo!.

We had several goals for the day: to share knowledge, exchange ideas and gather product feedback. Our researchers presented their vision for where search is headed and summarized a number of the toughest research challenges we face as a company and industry. The academics shared summaries of how they're currently using BOSS in their research as well as how they'd like to use it in the future. That's where the product feedback came in.

Our academic colleagues didn't hold back when it came to sharing how we could expand and improve their access to our technology and we were glad they didn't. For example, they told us which elements of our index would be particularly helpful in conducting research and how challenging it is to conduct research without access to real query traffic.

In a recent article, CNET summarized the event and why we think working with the academic community is so important. Here are a couple pics from the day - the rest are on flickr.

We'd like to thank our academic partners for making the trip and sharing their perspectives - they will serve as important feedback into our roadmap for the next year.

Graham Mudd
BOSS Team