Search Pad helps you track sites and make notes by intelligently detecting your research intent and automatically collecting sites you visits. Search Pad turns on automatically when you’re doing research, tracking sites to make document authoring a snap. You can then quickly edit and organise your notes with the Search Pad interface, which includes drag-and-drop functionality and auto-attributed pasting.

For example, if you are planning a trip to Kakadu National Park, Search Pad detects your research intent and asks if you’d like to take notes. Search Pad then saves the sites you’ve visited, like the tourism office or an adventure tour operator, and lets you take more notes on the information you’ve found.

You can save your documents using your Yahoo! ID so you can access your documents from anywhere on the Web.  This helps you save any research you’ve done so you needn’t do the same searches over and over again.

After you’ve done your research, you can publish your document to a permanent URL to share with friends and family so they can check out your trip itinerary and chime in with tips. Using Search Pad, you can share research on that new digital camera that you are checking out, things to do this weekend, or any other research you might do on the Web. You can even share Search Pad documents on Facebook, Twitter, or Delicious.

Search Pad can help you save your work across an entire session or even multiple sessions. Our intent detection allows us to offer Search Pad during sessions where it is most needed, and stay out of the way when it’s not. Of course, you can also opt to use Search Pad directly at any point during your research.

At Yahoo!, we’re always looking for ways to innovate in search by challenging the model that search is just about a keyword and 10 blue links. We are constantly improving our technology and experience in ways that people need most — Search Pad is just the latest result of those efforts.

Search Pad went live today in Australia, along with 14 other countries including the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina.  See for yourself how Search Pad can help you save time, share information easily, and make the hardest search research tasks more manageable.

Give it a try. We look forward to hearing your feedback.

Tony Kinner
Search Product Manager

However, in Search we noticed something unusual. Sure Michael Jackson was big news, and we were seeing big spikes in traffic, but Jeff Goldblum searches were proving way more popular. In fact, on Friday June 26th, there were over three times as many searches on Jeff Goldblum as on Michael Jackson. So how could this be?

By 8am Michael Jackson was pretty much blanket coverage across all online major news sources but things were strangely quiet around Jeff Goldblum on the major news sites. With the advent of Twitter rumours of this nature have the ability to spread rapidly. Traditional news sources, rightly, need to check their facts before publication; but this leaves a period of time where there is effectively an information void.

As the public looked to answer the question “Is Jeff Goldblum dead?” they turned to Search for the answer. After all, who doesn’t love the thrill of being amongst the first to find out the true story?

Have a great weekend everyone.

Tony Kinner
Search Product Manager, Yahoo!7

There are two options to set this up:

1. Via “upload by email” to use your unique email upload address to post your new Flickr content.
2. By setting up the “blog this” feature to share your existing Flickr content.

Here’s an example of what a tweeted photo looks like:

For more info on setting up Flickr2Twitter check out the following three FAQs:

• How do I Twitter my Flickr photos?
• Can I post to Flickr and Twitter from my mobile?
• How do I Twitter from Flickr?

Tim Nunn
Community Product Manager, Australia

Being an anniversary of sorts, I was inspired me to look back as to how the company and indeed the internet has evolved during the past six years. Our Frontpage looked like this six years ago…

These days, the creativity and beauty of what we find is somewhat advanced…

Beauty can be considered only skin deep, but the amount of content, personalisation and creativity that goes behind the presentation layer really sets the user-experience apart from the internet as it was those years ago. Web Search is so far advanced into delivering me answers (even when I’m not sure what questions I’m asking), communication has advanced beyond plain text emails into social networking, and pages don’t just show me flat content, they update themselves as I interact with them: more like an interactive application than a printed page. If I have an opinion on information I find, I can share my thoughts on the subject and see what others might have to say.

More and more, the internet is about allowing me to access the kind of information I want, when I want it, and it makes me wonder what more can change to my data more accessible and easier to consume. When it comes to having a ymax chip inside our heads with a head-up-display inside our retinas, I’ll probably be an early adopter, but I do have a couple of opinions in how the internet could be speeding up progress in the shorter term (comments welcomed btw).

1. Pages should be fast! These days I expect instant response from interaction I engage in. It is so last century to click on something and put the kettle on before I get a response. Tools like YSlow, building pages with speed in mind, and generally simple rules like using CDNs, limiting HTTP requests per page and optimising the hell out of the delivery of pages are not just desirable, they are a must!
2. Content should (where financially possible) be open. What I mean by this is that although there are some big internet companies out there with some pretty clever people working for them, this pales into insignificance compared with what the millions of developers worldwide can create using open APIs and open data that the large companies can provide. If a company opens its APIs, it gets feedback and innovation in what can happen with that content online. The internet is far better off for these innovations, and it inspires the big internet companies to improve.

So whilst people’s computers increase in performance and (wow, even Telstra in Australia) home/business internet access improves, in my mind the one thing that the internet can really improve on is global innovation through technology that companies like Yahoo! are sharing.  Try the Performance, Yahoo! User Interface library and Yahoo! Query Language for ways that performance, user experience and innovation through data can be achieved.

The internet is never going to stand still; neither should the innovation that fuels it.

Wilf
Yahoo!7 Technical Director

Wilf will be giving the Uni students, researchers and academics an intro to Yahoo!’s Open strategy, with focus on YQL (Yahoo! Query Language). He’ll also give an overview of YQL and will do demonstrations of building mashup’s on the spot.

No pressure Wilf!

More info on the day is below.

Macquarie University, 27-28 July
http://www.hcsnet.edu.au/workshops/mashups09

HCSNet, the ARC Research Network in Human Communication Science, is sponsoring a hands-on workshop on building mashups at Macquarie University on the 27th and 28th of July. This is a practical workshop with extensive tutorials on how to use the interfaces to the Google and Yahoo!  Mashup services.  Participants will gain first-hand knowledge on how to build mashup’s and put this to immediate use.

This is a unique opportunity to learn how to build high impact web applications at low cost.  Contact Diego Molla (Email: diego.molla-aliod@mq.edu.au; Tel: 02 9850 9531) or visit http://www.hcsnet.edu.au/workshops/mashups09.

Amanda Millar
Communications Manager, Yahoo!7

Yes, it can mean all those things but I’m only going to talk about Search Engine Optimisation here, because that’s what I do at Yahoo!7.

By definition, SEO is the art and science of increasing the quality and quantity of traffic to a web site from the ‘organic’ results of search engines. This is achieved by ensuring the content and code is ’search friendly’ and the pages are effectively linked.

The ‘organic’ results (also referred to as ‘algorithmic’ or ‘natural’ results) are those that a search engine displays and orders based on their proprietary relevance algorithm, rather than the auction-style paid ads which are ranked depending on how much the advertiser bids per click (plus other factors).

Simply put, if you want more people to visit your web site you HAVE to think of search engines as your most valuable visitors – and if you’re not, you can be sure your competitors will be, if they’re not already.

I’d hope you don’t need much more convincing, but just in case:

• 100% of searchers view the top 3 organic search engine results, but only 20% reach the 10th site in the list.
• 49% of US internet users use a search engine every day
• Even CPG sites (Consumer Packaged Goods – generally the sort of stuff you buy in a supermarket) are reached using search engines: 60% for baby products and 47% for food sites.
• 63% of people bought things from offline shops following online searches
• Web searches led to 10 million travel purchases in the UK in just 3 months

You may even have found this page via a search engine, but have you ever wondered exactly how the results are ordered in the way they are? This question obsesses all search engine optimisers and much as I’d love to give you a simple answer, there really isn’t one. Let me give you a brief history of web search to put this into context.

Back in the pre-Cambrian era of the internet (the early 90’s) search engines had only a few million documents in their indexes and it wasn’t very challenging to spoof your way to a high ranking for almost any keyword phrase with a little effort. As the World Wide Web became available to ‘normal’ people (well, mostly) and broke free from the educational, research and scientific community, the number of pages on the internet grew exponentially – driven by commerce and increased access to connected personal computers. No longer could relevance based on meta data assigned by the author (such as the meta keywords tag) be trusted, making it difficult for search algorithms to sort the spam from genuine content. At this time you were more likely to find better results using a human edited web directory (such as the Yahoo! Directory or DMOZ, the Open Directory Project). Web search technology was struggling to cope with the deluge of new data and high proportion of low value content.

Clearly, it wasn’t feasible to solve this problem using humans to classify every page so the ever-growing processing power of computers, coupled with the availability of increased bandwidth, was applied by some of our era’s brightest brains to reverse the decline in search result quality. As ways to monetise search were proven, investment increased. Algorithms became much more complex and ‘off-page’ factors (for example recognising the relative importance of links from other pages, where your site is hosted and calculations of how relevant inbound links are) made spamming the search index much less successful.

Let’s jump back to the present. Modern search engines now assess hundreds of individual factors to determine what a document is about and where it should be rated against others for a given query. I use the term ‘document’ because PDFs, Word documents, video files and other bodies of information can appear in a search result, not just HTML pages. It’s a significant challenge to spoof your way in and the penalties of getting caught doing so are costly. Of course, the cat and mouse game played by spammers will probably run for a long time, but it pays to play by the rules (for example, you should understand the Yahoo! webmaster guidelines).

With so many moving parts it’s impossible to reverse-engineer search algorithms to find the perfect recipe for success; the constant flux of competing sites, search engine servers that update at different times, the personalisation of results based on previous activity and your geographic location are just some of the factors that obfuscate the underlying process. This is why using an experienced SEO (search engine optimiser) or search marketing agency to help increase your search traffic can be the best investment you’ll make.

Over time I’ll write more about how to get started with your optimisation process and will include some useful tips, tricks and tools. If you have any specific questions or would like me to cover particular topics please let me know by leaving a comment.

If you have any questions leave a comment!

Aidan Beanland

Regional SEO Manager