We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve created a brand new mobile site and it’s ready for you to use. Everything you love about Yahoo!7 Answers is now available on-the-go.

Will it work on my phone?
The new mobile-optimised version of Yahoo!7 Answers makes it easy for you to keep track of points, open questions, and stay on top of what people are asking wherever and whenever the mood grabs you. Our new mobile site will work with most phones but you’ll see it at its very best on the newest phones, such as iPhone, Android and the latest Blackberrys.

See it in action
We’ve put together this short video, to show you why we’re so excited…

Yahoo! Answers Goes Mobile @ Yahoo!7 Video

What does it do?
With Yahoo!7 Answers optimised for mobile, you can:

• Ask, Answer, and Discover questions as you would on the computer
• Vote and select a best answer
• Easily access your profile, points, and open questions to check on your activity
• Check out new open questions being asked every second
• Rack up more points when you’re out and about

We hope you’re as excited about the mobile version of Yahoo!7 Answers as we are. Give it a try today!

This year, Yahoo!7 Answers has gone through millions of questions and answers; from shark attacks and devastating bush fires to celebrities and Australian heroes passing away, from sporting triumphs and defeats to worldwide panic as swine flu took hold. It’s a time to look back at the year that was in the world of Yahoo!7 Answers and see the questions and answers that made the Australian psyche tick in 2009.

The Yahoo!7 Answers Team has put together a FREE eBook for you to download and share with your friends and family. It features the top questions and answers from 2009, as well as reviews and insights from staff, contributors and featured sponsors.

• Download it here!

This will prompt you to download a small PDF file.

We hope you enjoy it!

Kate
Community Manager

We’re now enhancing shortcuts to include business listings in the Yahoo!7 Search results page to get you to your local business information faster.

A significant proportion of our queries have a local intent, where users are looking for busines details, organisations, events, and other information within a specific geographic area. The new Yahoo!7 Local Shortcut gives users the local info they need to make decisions about where to eat, stay, shop and play, even faster than before.

For example, if you search for "Restaurants Manly", a range of results are returned ordered by a number of factors including distance from search location, category and rating. For example, give it a try now: restaurants manly.

For business chains, we’ll show up to three stores nearest the search location.
For example: Bunnings Melbourne.

If you are looking for a nice restaurant that had been recommended to you by a friend, say Strangers with Candy Redfern (one of my favourite restaurants!), you’ll see a "business card" display for the business, with relevant information such as address, phone number, ratings and number of reviews.

We’ll be activating more and more of these "business card displays" as time goes by, so stay tuned!

The business data displayed is provided by our data partner, TrueLocal.com.au, so if you’re looking to have your business found in Yahoo!7 Search, make sure your business is included. If it’s not already, you can add it here.

So give the Local Shortcut a try. As always, we’re keen to hear what you think!

Justin O’Neill
Product Manager, Yahoo!7 Local

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

It was yet another opportunity for we Yahoo!7 Engineers and the local geeks to mingle and to share the huge knowledge base.

The event started with a welcome speech by Neil Wilkinson, Technical Director, Yahoo!7. He welcomed the geeks and, I should say, inaugurated the ceremony officially.

Allan Shone and I, who are both engineers here at Yahoo!7, spoke about Yahoo Query Language (YQL). I did the presentation introducing YQL to the geeks, showing its awesomeness using examples. Allan showed a working demo of his mini project and got the wows from the crowd!

Here is the slidecast for this presentation.

The lightning talks were very cool with Georgi Knox talking about “Gaming”, Candace Wong about “Automated User Interface Testing”, Jenny Gordon about “Configuring a Cisco Router” and lastly Thomas Given-Wilson gave a very amusing talk about “Recovering from Linux”.

The evening went on in an exciting and geeky fashion. There was plenty of food, drinks and gaming on Guitar Hero and Foos. Yeah it’s not a Yahoo! event without Foos!

A big applause should be given to my fellow Yahoos, Karen Williams, Jay Buasri and last but not the least, Claudia Jayne Mikaelian, who organised the event and made sure all the strings pulled together on the night.

Looking forward to the YOS session on Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) in July.

Pratibha Gannavarapu
Technical Yahoo!

Since launching SearchMonkey last May and Yahoo! Search BOSS last July, the global Yahoo! Search team has reached some impressive milestones: BOSS is now serving 30 million queries a day, and SearchMonkey is celebrating its first anniversary with 70 million enhanced results viewed daily.

Along the way, we’ve made great headway in opening up Yahoo! Search by accelerating the adoption of structured data across the Web and empowering developers to innovate in search. Here’s a look at some of the important initiatives we’ve accomplished with SearchMonkey and BOSS.

With BOSS, we’ve made key updates including allowing developers to monetise through third-party platforms and enabling access to SearchMonkey structured data. The BOSS API is on track to hit 1 billion monthly queries in May, without even including the volume from traditional Yahoo! Search syndication. This is more than three times the queries served just six months ago, and ranks ahead of the combined searches on Ask and Facebook, and just behind Microsoft1.

With SearchMonkey, we’ve launched numerous valuable initiatives over the last year. In Australia we have turned applications default-on for results from sites such as Wikipedia and Facebook to improve reference and social searches.   We‘ll also be enabling publishers to more easily display enhanced results for video, games, and documents.  Additionally, as a part of efforts to promote a more meaningful understanding of the Web, Yahoo! Search continued to support semantic tech gatherings such as VoCamp.

SearchMonkey is currently live in Australia along with 22 other markets around the world, reaching some significant global milestones:

• 70 million enhanced SearchMonkey results are viewed by users every day.
• Site owners have seen a more than 15% increase in the click-through rates of their SearchMonkey search results when tested against non-SearchMonkey results.
• 200 people enter the developer tool and start creating an application each day.
• Over 15,000 developers have registered to build applications, with over 70 applications available to Australians for customising results for sites such as Twitter, MySpace and flickr.
• RDFa structured data driven by SearchMonkey has increased by 413% since October, 2008.

In the coming months with SearchMonkey, we will be driving efforts toward increasing structured data on the Web, more uses for existing structured data, and easier ways to display enhanced results for some data types. We’ll throw in a little fun, too, with some open customization of the Yahoo! Search results page. With BOSS, you can look forward to more specialised searches that will help consumers reach their content more easily than ever

We want to extend our thanks to the developer communities within both SearchMonkey and BOSS and to partners including Facebook, LinkedIn, for joining us in our efforts to make search richer and more open, and for helping us reach these milestones. We’re pleased with what we’ve done in this past year. More importantly, we’re excited about and focused on where we’re taking you next.
1comScore qSearch April 2009. Queries delivered via the BOSS API and served by Yahoo! partners are not counted as Yahoo! Search queries by comScore or other metrics providers.