Yahoo! is expanding its mobile reach to a few more countries. We just launched Yahoo! oneSearch Beta in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. We're now in 14 countries, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Canada (launched on 5/3) and the U.S.

Users in these countries can now access News, Finance, Weather, Web, Mobile Web, Flickr, and Image search results on their mobile devices. And, for UK and Canada users, local search results are a part of the oneSearch experience. Accessing all of this information is easy for folks across a number of geographic locations. Folks in the UK, for example, can now look for curry in the West End, while travelers in India can find the temperature in Jaipur. Quick news headlines in Singapore are also just a click away.


We hope you enjoy the product. Let us know what you think.

Paul Yiu
Yahoo! Search

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 help affect climate change. The program invites everyone to participate in making a better planet, by doing one of three things: visiting Yahoo! Green and taking the "Green Pledge" to commit to lowering carbon emissions; contributing to the growing collection of knowledge and advice about environmental issues, by joining the conversations at Yahoo! Answers; or proactively looking for opportunities to live a greener life by performing "green" searches on Yahoo! OneSearch. Based on the total number of points earned for each green action, participants will receive a free energy-efficient compact fluorescent light bulb and contribute to their hometown's overall ranking for a chance to win a fleet of hybrid taxis for their entire city.

For more details on how you can help "be a better planet," click here.

Anne Edwards
Yahoo! Search

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's capitol Washington DC leads the states in "mother's day" queries, which goes to show that even a politician deserves a mother's love.

On a more regional level, the cities of Austin, San Diego and Houston have been way ahead of the search game for weeks. You know those types -- they've already hand-picked the hardiest heirloom roses, arranged a family reunion catered by Rachael Ray, and updated the genealogy website complete with mash-ups. The rest of us are sweating over our keyboards, ordering "pajama gram," "vermont teddy bears," and "digital photo frames" (the latest gift craze following the "digital camera" trend).

Search is the last refuge for procrastinators, as this week's surge for "e-cards" attest. The craftier among you have been seeking gifts from the heart and by the hand, such as "homemade mother's day gifts," "homemade cards," and "mother's day poems" (don't forget to attribute borrowed phrases). As for the care and feeding of moms, people have that covered with look-ups for "breakfast in bed brunch recipes," with fixings of "pancakes," "French toast" and "strawberry shortcake." Ambitious cooks have been downloading the instructions for "fruit flowers." Brilliant move as far as I'm concerned, that's two gifts in one.

Give Mom an extra hug for me!

Vera H-C Chan
Senior editor, Buzz offline

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 into the search results. Clicking on the thumbnails will take you to Flickr where you can explore further, set up your own account, and share your best shots too. This feature adds to the popular Flickr integration for funny photos and interesting photos on Yahoo! Search.

Whether you are planning a trip to see the Colosseum, Seattle Space Needle, or Pyramids, want to rekindle memories of past trips to the Sydney Opera House, Mount Shasta, or Tower Bridge, or have pride for your local landmark (for me it's the beauty of the Golden Gate Bridge) we think you'll be awed by the Flickr community's photos.

We plan to continue the expansion of this experience and very much welcome your ideas and thoughts.

Carlos Teran
Yahoo! Search

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 Development Division and Andrew Tomkins, Yahoo! Research, will be participating in the following discussions:

"Web N.0: What sciences will it take?"
Prabhakhar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research
May 10 @ 8:30-10a.m.

"The Changing Face of Web Search"
Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo! Advanced Development Division
May 10 @ 10:30-11:15a.m.

"Tagging and Metadata for Social Information Organization"
Andrew Tomkins, Yahoo! Research (panelist)
May 12 @ 1:30-3p.m.

Hope to see you there!


Melissa Rische
Yahoo! Search

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 capability isn't in alpha yet, but it'll be interesting to see how it evolves. You can play with a couple of the map prototypes here and here.

Also check out the Yahoo! Local/Maps Blog for more detail.

Raj Gossain
Yahoo! Search

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! Search added a new shortcut that will help music fans find lyrics from their favorite artists quickly and easily.

For example, try some old school favorites like The Ramones lyrics, The Beatles lyrics, or Stevie Wonder lyrics. Or, some current chart toppers like Avril Lavigne lyrics, Gwen Stefani lyrics, or Arctic Monkey lyrics. Looking to get a specific song stuck in your head? Try Nelly Furtado Say it Right lyrics, U2 Beautiful Day lyrics, or The Clash Rock the Casbah lyrics (it's not rock the cash box??).

Have fun and let us know what you think!

Carlos Teran
Yahoo! Search

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 consider for the next few months. Here's a sample route from Walnut Creek to San Francisco.

Raj Gossain
Yahoo! Search

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 introduce the 'robots-nocontent' tag.

This tag is really about our crawler focusing on the main content of your page and targeting the right pages on your site for specific search queries. Since a particular source is limited to the number of times it appears in the top ten, it's important that the proper matching and targeting occur in order to increase both the traffic as well as the conversion on your site. It also improves the abstracts for your pages in results by omitting unrelated text from search result summaries.

To do this, webmasters can now mark parts of a page with a 'robots-nocontent' tag which will indicate to our crawler what parts of a page are unrelated to the main content and are only useful for visitors. We won't use the terms contained in these special tagged sections as information for finding the page or for the abstract in the search results. Note: Using a "nocontent" tag to mark explicit sections of content is not considered "cloaking" because all of the content on the page is available to protect the relevance of the results (unlike "cloaking" where we may be served content that is different from what visitors see).

So for example, the header and boilerplate on Yahoo! Answers might be useful to visitors, but it's probably not helpful when searching for this particular page. The 'robots-nocontent' tag allows you to identify that for our crawler in order to improve the targeting and the abstract for the page.

Applying the "class=robots-nocontent" Attribute:
Here are a few examples of how to apply this attribute for various uses and different syntax options:

<div class="robots-nocontent"> This is the navigational menu of the site and is common on all pages. It contains many terms and keywords not related to this site</div>

<span class="robots-nocontent"> This is the site header that is present on all pages of the site and is not related to any particular page</span>

<p class="robots-nocontent"> This is a boilerplate legal disclaimer required on each page of the site</p>

<div class="robots-nocontent"> This is a section where ads are displayed on the page. Words that show up in ads may be entirely unrelated to the page contents</div>

We're rolling out an index update tonight for this change. As usual, you'll see some changes in ranking along with shuffling of the pages that are included in the index. Let us know what you think and share your thoughts on other forms of support you'd like to see down the road on our suggestion board.

Update: Addressing some comments and questions, with regards to links, the 'robots-nocontent' does not in any way affect how links are treated. All links will continue to be used to find targets and will carry attribution to the target if they do not have the 'rel=nofollow' tag on them, whether or not they are inside a 'robots-nocontent' section.

We deploy various algorithms and mechanisms to understand your website and pages including headers, navigation, footers, etc. However, using this and other markup such as the 'rel=nofollow', you can ensure we have more information to understand your site correctly.

On standards, we would be happy to make this into a microformat and are already reaching out to that community. We chose this mechanism because we saw that it was compatible with existing standards and microformats and that makes it easier to gather broader support, including from the other search engines.

Priyank Garg
Yahoo! Search

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 whatever you want to be. Last fall our brand marketing team's "Garden" spot was rated the third funniest commercial in the U.S. We here at the search blog and Greg Sterling over at Search Engine Land seem to think this year's batch is pretty funny as well.

So if you want a quick break from a Monday morning, check out the ads and hopefully you'll get a quick laugh before you get back to Outlook / PowerPoint / Excel or whatever a Monday morning brings to you.

Raj Gossain
Yahoo! Search