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Search for a Cause
As part of Yahoo!'s Breast Cancer Awareness Month initiative, Yahoo! Search is announcing a new Infobar built on the SearchMonkey platform that will help Search users make donations to help find a cure for breast cancer without spending an extra dime. We teamed up with the non-profit organization Susan G. Komen for the Cure to build a SearchMonkey app that is displayed under Yahoo! Search results for dozens of popular shopping sites like Amazon, HP and REI.com. If users click "Shop" and complete a purchase, the affiliate commission will go directly to Susan G. Komen for the Cure -- 7.5% of the purchase price, on average. And to encourage folks to use the enhancement, called Search for a Cause, Yahoo! will donate a dollar for every user that adds the application up to $25,000.
The country's challenging economic situation is making the already difficult task of fundraising even tougher for non-profits. We're hoping Search for a Cause will provide a way for concerned people to donate to a great cause by simply adding the SearchMonkey app and using it when you shop online. And if you want to donate directly to Susan G. Komen for the Cure, here's the link.We're also hoping people will tell their friends and family about Search for a Cause. You can tell them to search for terms like "breast cancer," "Susan G. Komen" or "pink ribbon" at Yahoo!. Come tomorrow, they'll see a pinkified results page and a pink ribbon to click on and add the app.
Working with a number of teams here at Yahoo!, including SearchMonkey, Yahoo! for Good, Yahoo! Health, and front page, it's been a group effort to build awareness around breast cancer and we're happy to be a part of it. A special thanks goes out to Susan G. Komen for the Cure. Graham Mudd & Hilda ChanYahoo! Search
SES: Panels, Award & Foosball Victory, Oh My
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
Building with BOSS — New Products to Share
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
Not-So-Smart Answers at AskJeeves
The latest additions to AskJeeves "Smart Answers" were reported by Gary Price in his August 22 Search Engine Watch blog. Although the latest additions expand on the existing Jeeves collection of sources that are pre-selected to handle queries for many common factual searches, they remain, like so many other "answer" capabilities of the major search engines, pretty mundane. Search Portfolio's research team tested many popular topics (e.g. marijuana, botox) to see if Smart Answers would deliver pre-selected content, and it didn't. Surely those sample searches are as common as one for burkina faso, which in AJ turns up through Smart...
Yahoo! Search Hits the Airwaves
A little over four years ago, we launched our own search engine and became a principal in the search business. Our focus since then has been the same - building the best search experience to give users a fast, easy and intuitive way to get straight to their answers. Over the past year, we've launched a number of new features that deliver against that goal: Search Assist, a tool for helping users refine and expand their search queries; SearchScan, which helps users steer clear of dangerous sites; and SearchMonkey, which allows developers and publishers to customize how their search results are presented, enabling users to customize their search experience.In addition to these three examples, along the way we've developed and launched hundreds of improvements to our search engine - index expansions and updates, new ranking models, performance tuning, etc. - all designed to improve our search quality and deliver a more relevant search experience to our users. Yahoo! is committed to innovating in search and tens of millions of users choose Yahoo! Search every day. But, we don't think that's enough. So today we're launching an integrated, nationwide, on and offline marketing campaign to remind the rest of the world (or at least everyone in the United States) that it's time to give Yahoo! Search a try.Soon you'll begin to see display ads like the one below running across the web. You'll also hear radio ads on many of your favorite programs. Here's one of our favorites:While we kept the ads lighthearted and true to the Yahoo! brand, we also didn't pull any punches. We believe in our product and are convinced that when users take it for a spin, they'll like what they find.Raj GossainVP Marketing, Yahoo! Search
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