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.

While we know that many of you have faithfully used this service over the past few years, our goal has been to find a way to unify your social experience and connections across all of Yahoo!7 and anywhere you travel across the Web. So, while we’re sad to say that we will no longer be supporting Yahoo!7 360°, we’re excited about this larger plan and hope you’ll transition over and be a part of it, too.

We also want to reiterate our commitment to preserving your blog content. We have been working to make sure we put the right mechanisms in place so that you can move your content and minimise disruption. It is with this thought in mind that we’re happy to introduce a new blogging feature that is integrated into your profile. You can find more information on this below.

With your new profile on Yahoo!7 you’ll be able to connect with other people on Yahoo!7, and share your updates and activity with the people you meet on the Web.

While we know many of you are frustrated by this decision, we’d like to address some of the main questions you might have. If your question has not been addressed, please see our Help pages and list of frequently asked questions for more information. If you’d like to discuss this change, or, ask a question that was not addressed in the help pages or in the content below, please visit the Profiles News Blog at: http://www.yprofileblog.com/. Though, I can’t promise to answer every question, I can promise to create additional posts on common issues and trends to make sure “hot topics” are addressed.

Why is Yahoo!7 360° closing?

Though 360° gained a strong core of loyal users (you) who enjoyed the service, Yahoo!7 has been reprioritising some products to help us deliver the best possible experiences to consumers. The decision to close Yahoo!7 360° and transition users to Profiles is part of this larger strategy, but we had been waiting until we had an alternative solution that we could offer to our community of Yahoo!7 360° users until we officially shut down 360°.

It’s been almost two years since you first announced 360° was closing—why shut it down now?

Before we could retire 360°, we had to find a sustainable and adequate solution for your personal information. We know how important your blog entries and profile information is to each of you, and we wanted to be able to maintain the integrity of this content. Rather than rushing the process and risking data loss, we worked on a broader solution across Yahoo!7 that would meet our future goal of providing you the best possible social experience while at the same time protecting your privacy and data. We’re happy to say that we now have a solution that satisfies all of these requirements.

What is going to happen to my blog?

We know that many of you decided to blog in 360° because you enjoyed sharing your content with the people you met on Yahoo!7, which is why we’ve created two options for your blog and all of its content.

The first is: you can start blogging on your profile on Yahoo!7 — we’ve created an all new blogging tool that will let you post content and also allows you to integrate photos right from Flickr. Once you create an entry, your post is automatically pushed out in your updates stream to your connections, saving you the hassle of sending out links to your latest entries.

A second option that we’re providing you is the ability to export your blog and all of your content and to any of the supported blogging systems (don’t worry — they’re popular sites like WordPress, Blogger, and MoveableType). We’ll even generate an archive with all of your entries and photos and will send you a link to download the archive.

First you shut down Mash, now you shut down 360° — why should I give profiles a shot?

We understand you might have doubts — in the past few years, you’ve seen a couple of social sites come and go, and it means a lot to us that you’ve stuck around while we’ve tweaked each experience. Know that we’re committed to having a universal profile across Yahoo!7, and we’re committed to working with you to improve and evolve this profile to make sure it’s what YOU want to use. That doesn’t mean we can implement every piece of feedback you provide, but it does mean we’re listening, and we are going to do our best to make sure your interests are incorporated into future releases and versions of your profile.

What about customisation and photos? On 360° I can change the look and feel and upload multiple photos—can I do this with profiles?

At this time, your new profile does not have all the features and functionality of your 360° profile. However, we are looking at incorporating new ways of expressing yourself through your profile.

In regards to uploading multiple photos, your profile on Yahoo!7 allows for only one primary photo for now. This is also something we’re looking at improving/expanding based on your feedback.

We know that you will have lots of questions about 360° closing and how it will affect each of you. Be sure to check out the Customer Care help pages (including the FAQ’s) to help make this transition as smooth as possible.

Thank you.

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Community Manager