A few weeks ago, Yahoo! launched a brand marketing campaign called, “Be a Better ________” which was designed to inspire people to become better at whatever interests them and, in turn, explore how Yahoo! services can get them there. We hope Yahoo! users are inspired to fulfill their passions. Here at Yahoo! we’re taking our own advice and, as a result, have created the “Be a Better Planet” program to promote environmental dedication and to he

Every year, the Buzz log likes to pay homage to the woman who makes it all happen — Mom. After all she’s done for you, it’s heartening to see searches for Mother’s Day are higher than last year. Even better, you’ve cut back dramatically on looking at those “yo mama jokes.” Behind all the usual searches for roses, crafts and ideas, we can probe deep within the Search psyche. Where would you guess all the mama’s boys (and girls) live? The nation’

We recently added thumbnails of Flickr images for popular domestic and international landmark searches into Yahoo! Search. Now you can easily find amazing and unique photos of your favorite landmarks. Try it with Empire State Building, Chichen Itza, and Machu Picchu for example. With the help of Flickr Interestingness, we are now able to surface some of the most beautiful, creative, and popular photos from the Flickr community directly

We made the trek up north to the Banff Springs Hotel in Alberta, Canada to attend the WWW 2007 conference this week, which brings together the key folks that are shaping the future of the web. We’ll be attending various panel discussions and sharing the experience, but we’ll also be a part of the fun. If you’re around, drop by and meet some of the team. Prabhakhar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research, Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo! Advanced Developmen

Just a quick shout out to our friends at Yahoo! Travel who just developed a new mapping prototype using the Yahoo! Maps API. They’ve essentially layered off-network maps of national parks and airports on top of the maps already incorporated into the Travel Guides. It doesn’t change any of the other mapping tools like panning, zooming and satellite view, but does add a bit more detail. Check out this example of the Grand Canyon: The full

I love music but I’m terrible at understanding what a singer is saying and given how popular lyric searches are on Yahoo! Search, I’m not the only one with this problem. Finding a reliable lyrics source can be difficult and frustrating for music lovers. Thankfully, Yahoo! Music recently launched a lyrics web site that includes hundreds of thousands of song lyrics. It’s the first ever free and legal lyrics site. To coincide with this, Yahoo! S

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Talks between Microsoft Corp. over a possible combination are no longer active, according to a media report late Friday. The Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site that in recent months the two companies discussed a possible merger, but that the discussions are no longer active. The two companies may still explore other ways of cooperating, the Journal reported. Yahoo shares closed 10% higher at $30.98 on Friday following earlier reports that the company was in talks to possibly be acquired by Microsoft in a $50 billion deal

NEW YORK, May 4 (Reuters) - U.S. stock futures pointed to a higher open on Friday on deal news, including a report Microsoft (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile , Research) is intensifying its pursuit of a deal to buy Yahoo Inc. (YHOO.O: Quote, Profile , Research) and before jobs data.

The widely anticipated monthly U.S. payrolls report, due at 8:30 a.m (1230 GMT), will be scrutinized for further clues about the outlook for interest rates. It is forecast to show employers created 100,000 jobs in April, compared with 180,000 in March.

Yahoo’s shares rose 15 percent in Europe after the New York Post reported Microsoft, the world’s biggest software company, has asked the Web media company to reenter formal talks

Just a quick pointer to some nice work done by our colleagues on the Yahoo! Maps team. The recent collapse of a section of I-580 onto I-80 in Oakland, CA (affectionately known as the MacArthur Maze), got a lot of attention and is definitely a commuter’s nightmare right now. To help ease some of the commuting frustrations, the Yahoo! Maps team has removed the connector ramp from the mapping system and is offering some alternative routes to consi

We recently returned from our annual rendezvous at SES New York and, like always, learned a lot from our webmasters. The ‘Robots.txt Summit’ generated some healthy discussions and support for adding a tag to parts of a page that do not relate to the main content, such as navigation, menus repeated across the entire site, boilerplate text, or even advertising. We heard what people were asking for so we did a little homework and are now happy to i

Normally our posts on the Yahoo! Search blog include new product launches, Yahoo! Search weather reports and feature the occasional guest blogger. But today we wanted to tip our cap to our brand marketing team, who just launched a new Yahoo! advertising campaign, “Be a Better _____.” Over the next few weeks you’ll see some TV spots highlighting how Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! oneSearch (our new mobile search offering) can help you be a better wha

No idea is a bad idea. Ok, I don’t believe that either. But if you think you’ve got a good one for Yahoo! Toolbar, please share it on our new Toolbar Suggestion Board. You can also visit the forum to read and rate other people’s suggestions. The more votes a suggestion receives, the more likely it’ll attract our attention. And who knows, you may even bump into real folks from the Toolbar team who will chat with you about the suggestions. So, if

Earlier this week at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Jeff Weiner met up with John Battelle. Jeff is the new head of the Yahoo! Network Division and in his conversation he touched on a variety of items including search, Yahoo!’s media and partnership strategies, and the competitive landscape. CNET has a great clip of that chat we thought you might enjoy. Yahoo! Search

Today we’d like to announce the next progression of Upcoming.org, Upcoming.yahoo.com. Yep, it’s official, we have moved into our new home inside Yahoo!, so from this point forward you’ll be able to login to your account with your Yahoo! ID. For you Upcoming old-schoolers, please don’t fret, all of your friends and settings are saved. We also used this transition as an opportunity to implement several new ideas and enhancements that Upcoming us

I tend to use the same online shops over and over again for convenience. I don’t like having to enter my shipping, billing and credit card information multiple times, and using the same shops means I have fewer passwords to remember. Additionally, there’s peace of mind knowing my credit card info isn’t being scattered across multiple merchants. The downside of this behavior is pretty obvious: I rarely get the lowest price on things and I often ha

The AIIM Conference & Expo, one of the largest annual gatherings of information management professionals, is taking place next week in Boston and we’ll be there! The Yahoo! Search team, along with IBM, will be co-leading a SuperSession presentation entitled “Beyond Traditional Search: Unlocking Value from Web and Enterprise Information.” With search functioning as the dominant method for finding and accessing information today, it was inevita

Since working with Google and Microsoft to support a single format for submission with Sitemaps, we have continued to discuss further enhancements to make it easy for webmasters to get their content to all search engines quickly. All search crawlers recognize robots.txt, so it seemed like a good idea to use that mechanism to allow webmasters to share their Sitemaps. You agreed and encouraged us to allow robots.txt discovery of Sitemaps on our su

It’s been nearly two years since we first made Site Explorer available . How time flies! Since its inception, we’ve added a number of new features to Site Explorer, including Feed Submission, Site Authentication and more data for webmasters. And today, we’ve got a few more additions to share with our users. Site Explorer offers Mobile Submit
Enhancing our Mobile Site Submit feature, publishers can now submit mobile sites and feeds to Site Exp

I’ve always had success finding the information I was looking for on the Web. The challenging part was finding a way to bring this information with me once I left my computer. It usually involved scrounging for a piece of paper, jotting down my addresses, directions or whatever I was searching for and just hoping not to lose it. Working with the mobile team, I realized that a lot of our users experience the same pain. With this in mind, we’ve

I’ve always had success finding the information I was looking for on the Web. The challenging part was finding a way to bring this information with me once I left my computer. It usually involved scrounging for a piece of paper, jotting down my addresses, directions or whatever I was searching for and just hoping not to lose it. Working with the mobile team, I realized that a lot of our users experience the same pain. With this in mind, we’ve

Pingdom has done an accounting of the uptime of the top 20 websites on the internet (according to Alexa). Their results show that Google has suffered a mere 7 minutes of downtime thus far in 2007, or 0.00540123332% downtime, and can thus boast uptime of an impressive 99.9945988%.
Of course, that isn’t the best uptime in the biz. Google, with the second biggest single website on the internet, had more downtime than #1 website Yahoo, which

Google has officially changed the look of AdSense ads and the most prominent type of AdWords ad, and the change isn’t going to be perfect for everyone.
First, Google has initiated the change in AdSense it has been working on for a while, removing the “Advertise on this site” link, moving “Ads by Google” to the bottom right-hand corner, and giving it a nicer graphical look. Here’s an example of the new look, v

Back in October we launched the new Yahoo! Bookmarks and Yahoo! Toolbar to make it easier for users to save, organize, and find their favorite websites. Key features included the ability to easily organize with folders or tags, and the ability to instantly find bookmarks directly from the Yahoo! Toolbar searchbox. Today, we’re announcing the general availability, on Firefox and IE, with a few new updates including integration with popular Yahoo

Back in October we launched the new Yahoo! Bookmarks and Yahoo! Toolbar to make it easier for users to save, organize, and find their favorite websites. Key features included the ability to easily organize with folders or tags, and the ability to instantly find bookmarks directly from the Yahoo! Toolbar searchbox. Today, we’re announcing the general availability, on Firefox and IE, with a few new updates including integration with popular Yahoo

Browsing and browsers go hand in hand, so it was an easy decision to use Mozilla’s add-on system for Firefox to seamlessly integrate del.icio.us into the Web browser. Since we launched the first version of our del.icio.us Bookmarks add-on in October, many users utilize our extension daily to manage and remember their favorite bookmarks. With features like integrated tagging, a custom toolbar and a browser-integrated sidebar so you can search yo

Browsing and browsers go hand in hand, so it was an easy decision to use Mozilla’s add-on system for Firefox to seamlessly integrate del.icio.us into the Web browser. Since we launched the first version of our del.icio.us Bookmarks add-on in October, many users utilize our extension daily to manage and remember their favorite bookmarks. With features like integrated tagging, a custom toolbar and a browser-integrated sidebar so you can search yo

We just took a step deeper into the linguistic mire that is the Internet, and launched a Tagalog interface for our Philippines search site. Users can access the new interface through a language toggle on the regular Philippines site or pull it up directly at pht.search.yahoo.com. Tagalog (known in its standardized form as Filipino) is one of the official languages of the Republic of the Philippines. It’s estimated that upwards of 40-60 million

We just took a step deeper into the linguistic mire that is the Internet, and launched a Tagalog interface for our Philippines search site. Users can access the new interface through a language toggle on the regular Philippines site or pull it up directly at pht.search.yahoo.com. Tagalog (known in its standardized form as Filipino) is one of the official languages of the Republic of the Philippines. It’s estimated that upwards of 40-60 million

I received an interesting email from our Yahoo friends in Australia. It appears that, as a result of a Hack Day project, they’ve created a customized search engine that allows you to select your own content options and offers a nifty interface.
It’s currently pulling results from Yahoo!7 (their Australian unit) and the customization is a little limited, but it has the potential to be Yahoo’s answer to Google Co-op.

Just a quick pointer to a creative new mashup that uses Yahoo! Pipes and the Yahoo! Answers API to help automatically discover unanswered questions about, well, pretty much anything. Patrick Hunt, Yahoo! Architect and the creator of this mashup shared the details this week on the Yahoo! Answers blog. What about you — have you created or used any interesting pipes? We’d love to hear about ‘em! Raj Gossain
Yahoo! Search

Just a quick pointer to a creative new mashup that uses Yahoo! Pipes and the Yahoo! Answers API to help automatically discover unanswered questions about, well, pretty much anything. Patrick Hunt, Yahoo! Architect and the creator of this mashup shared the details this week on the Yahoo! Answers blog. What about you — have you created or used any interesting pipes? We’d love to hear about ‘em! Raj Gossain
Yahoo! Search

We are in the process of rolling out some changes to our search results. As usual, you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index throughout this process. This update will roll out this evening and will be complete very soon. Keep the feedback coming or share it with the Yahoo! Search team directly at SES in New York next week! We’ll be presenting at the following panels, so come by f

We are in the process of rolling out some changes to our search results. As usual, you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index throughout this process. This update will roll out this evening and will be complete very soon. Keep the feedback coming or share it with the Yahoo! Search team directly at SES in New York next week! We’ll be presenting at the following panels, so come by f

Mountain View, CA – Google announced today that soon customers of their Gmail service will have their storage size increased to “infinity plus one.” The announcement comes shortly after Yahoo’s announcement that their Yahoo mail customers would be given unlimited storage.

Greg Tomkins, an engineer at Google, is credited with coming up with the “infinity plus one” idea. “I was out in the yard when my kids ran up to me yelling at each other. My son said to my daughter, ‘I hate you to infinity.’ She replied, ‘I hate you to infinity plus one.’ And right then I knew I had the solution to competing with unlimited storage,” said Tomkins.

Two years ago this Sunday, Google introduced two gigabytes of email storage for Gmail, with the amount of storage ticking up slowly, what they called their “Infinity + 1″ system. The idea was that since the counter went up continuously, you really had near-infinite storage. It was a great idea, except for one thing: Infinity + 1 implies better than inifinity, but it’s not.
See, Yahoo has announced that, as of this May, Yahoo

There’s, no doubt, a plethora of knowledge-sharing at this week’s ETech Conference, with a solid line-up of sessions to spark creative thinking and introduce new ideas for building successful technologies. If you’re lucky enough to attend this year’s event, we encourage you to attend a session led by Yahoo!’s Joshua Schachter who is sharing lessons learned in scaling and building social systems. Here are the details: Track: Products & Services

There’s, no doubt, a plethora of knowledge-sharing at this week’s ETech Conference, with a solid line-up of sessions to spark creative thinking and introduce new ideas for building successful technologies. If you’re lucky enough to attend this year’s event, we encourage you to attend a session led by Yahoo!’s Joshua Schachter who is sharing lessons learned in scaling and building social systems. Here are the details: Track: Products & Services

Anyone who has seen their web server logs, has seen the Yahoo! crawler come by and leave its mark. It identifies itself as ‘Yahoo! Slurp’ and its domain is inktomisearch.com. For those of you who follow the search space, you can easily guess that this is one of the last historic remnants from our acquisition of Inktomi a few years ago. Well, the crawler finally decided to move and find a new home. We are moving our crawler from inktomisearch.com

Maybe 2007 will be the year that mobile finally reaches the tipping point. If the recent flurry of mobile news is any representation, it could just be the year that mobile reaches the masses.
Today we have two partnership deals to share with you.
First, LG Electronics will start shipping select LG handsets with Google apps already installed. The phones will offer one-click access to Google search via an icon on the application menu and will come

A couple of quick announcements for you. As of May, every Yahoo Mail user will have unlimited email storage. Will they still delete your account if you don’t sign in for 3 months?
Meanwhile, YouTube will launch a mobile version of its web site in June. Pilgrim Partners: Buy Text Links - Buy text links and increase your site’s traffic!

If you have a good memory, you’ll recall Yahoo’s sweet click fraud settlement deal, which would hold the company to just $5m in legal fees and a review of click fraud activity back to 2004. If you don’t have a good memory, that’s why we’re here!
Anyway, the courts have made the settlement final - at a breathtaking pace of 9 months - and the settlement will stand, “as called on the field.” The settlement

How many U.S. small businesses have websites? Is it 30%, 40%, 50%? Answering that question gets quickly into debates over the definition of a “website.” For example, is a “landing page” or a “profile page” a website? Do the small business data provided by InfoUSA, Axciom, Localeze, TruelLocal (and now iBegin Source) constitute being online? Does being on Citysearch or InsiderPages or Kudzu or Yelp effectively substitute for a website? In a way

I noticed this week that at some point Yahoo released a version of its Yahoo Go for Mobile 2.0 that works on my wife’s T-Mobile SDA phone (a version for my MDA is forthcoming, they tell me). Naturally, I downloaded it and checked it out, and I like what I see. First impressions: The interface is pretty smooth, with a scrolling icon bar along the bottom for various pages of features.
You can sign in to your Yahoo account, but if you don&

CNET has a great interview with Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, in which she discusses how big companies like Yahoo - her new boss - can innovate and develop great products, in the same way as a small start-up.
Of interest is Fake’s comments on what it takes to build an online community.
We very carefully built the community on Flickr, person by person. The team and I greeted every single person who arrived, introduced them around, hung ou

It’s official, we are definitely in the middle of a massive multi-industry war on the level of the RIAA/filesharing and other major technology wars of recent memory. Today, the war entered its third major stage, with many of the opposition joining forces to announce a YouTube competitor, coming this summer.
The chronology:
Pre-war ops: Various companies and startups enter the video sharing arena. YouTube (2/15/2005), Revver (11/2005), Br

I am so sick of the news on this blog being, on average, a week old. Its my fault. I let these tabs build and build and build, and I don’t have time to write because I’m too busy amassing tabs, and when I finally do write something, it’s a week old. Dammit! I am so not doing this anymore. I hate missing news, but it is beyond stupid to have late and irellevant news because you don’t want to miss anything.
And because

Now that Yahoo CEO Terry Semel has gushed we expect to see “some very exciting numbers” in Q1 from Yahoo, in part due to the launch of Panama, the company has decided it’s time to tackle click fraud head-on.
Yahoo has today announced the promotion of Reggie Davis to a new position within the company - vice president of marketplace quality. Basically, his role will be to reduce the amount of click fraud on the Yahoo search networ

Despite many believing mobile marketing to be a “non starter”, the search engines continue to invest heavily in mobile search. With $11.4 billion expected to be spent on mobile search advertising by 2011, Yahoo is at the top of the list of companies staking their future on the tiny web browser.

Earlier this year, Yahoo launched their mobile oneSearch technology for Yahoo Go and today the number two search engine will announce their expansion of oneSearch. For those of you needing a primer, oneSearch is designed to make searching for and finding information as quick as possible for consumers by providing relevant results right on the page such as news headlines, images, business listings and more as well as easy navigation to other web sites. Effectively, oneSearch anticipates the type of information you are looking for, and does away with the arduous task of navigating ten blue links in a mobile browser (see the “pizza” example, right).

It’s that time of the year again where office pools make their rounds in the spirit of friendly competition and folks everywhere partake in the madness of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. With sixty five teams competing within three weeks for the top slot, it’s no wonder this tournament has so many inspired nicknames

After two and half years, the Yahoo! Search Blog team thought it was time for a little pick-me-up, so we went under the html knife and added a couple of new features to help you navigate through the site better.  Okay, so it’s not exactly a traditional facelift, but it’s a refresh and we hope you like it.  A couple new things we added include:  MyBlogLog, one-click links to save a post to Yahoo! Bookmarks, del.icio.us and digg, a new archive dropdown to quickly get to past posts and category search