Search Suggestion Enhancements for Yahoo! Taiwan and Yahoo! Hong Kong
We’ve enhanced search suggestion in Web search for Yahoo! Taiwan (Yahoo! Kimo) and Yahoo! Hong Kong. This feature helps users easily enter queries in traditional Chinese in the search box using Changjie and Cantonese Pinyin, which are language input systems used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, respectively.
Instead of having to switch the language input method from English mode to Chinese mode, taking several clicks, this new search suggestion feature allows users to enter the phonetic representation of a Chinese query while still in English mode. This saves key strokes and makes using Yahoo! Search more convenient for our Chinese-language users.
For example, to search for “Shanghai World’s Fair,” searchers can start typing the Cantonese spelling of the query while in English mode and see search suggestion in traditional Chinese.
In February, we made this enhancement with the Zhuyin system in Taiwan. The Zhuyin and Changjie systems are now available in Search Assist for Yahoo! Taiwan users. The Changjie and Cantonese Pinyin systems are available in Search Assist for Yahoo! Hong Kong users.
With today’s enhancement, we are continuing our focus on the needs of international markets and features that are useful for non-English users.
James Ying, Product Manager, Yahoo! Search
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May 11, 2010
Gooooooal! Get World Cup 2010 Coverage on Yahoo! Search
Are you ready for soccer fever? In a few weeks, just about the whole world will be wrapped up in one of the biggest global sports event: the FIFA World Cup 2010 in South Africa. Many of the games happen during the week when you might be stuck at work or school, but don’t fret: you can follow this exciting and emotional journey of international sportsmanship with our World Cup coverage shortcuts and toolbar on Yahoo! Search.
Get World Cup Schedule, Scores and News with Yahoo! Shortcuts
We’ve created some handy Shortcuts so you can keep up to date with match scores and World Cup news from Yahoo! Sports and elsewhere across the web. Simply type ‘World Cup’ in Yahoo! Search and you’ll see scores, schedules, photos, and videos in the shortcut:
After the games kick into high gear, we’ll be launching Shortcuts that give you schedules and scores for specific team, group or match. The Shortcut features will be available in 27 Yahoo sites globally. Type the name of the country, group, or match, and you will see shortcuts that look like these mock screenshots below.
Get World Cup Coverage on Yahoo! Toolbar
To give you more World Cup coverage at your fingertips, the Yahoo! Toolbar team just rolled out new features that let you show your team pride, and follow all of the latest soccer news. You can dress your toolbar in the colors and flag of your favorite team, search for your favorite team or play, and once the tournament begins we’ll have previews, live scores, and post-game wrap ups for every game. You also get live soccer news headlines right in your browser. Try out the toolbar with World Cup coverage here.
We just launched this in the U.S. and will be releasing it in 12 more countries throughout the month of May.
Click to enlargeClick the drop-down button on the toolbar to see a list of upcoming games and news.
We know that the World Cup isn’t just a series of soccer games. In the words of U2 front man Bono, the World Cup “closes the schools, closes the shops, closes a city and stops a war.” So go ahead and give our shortcuts and toolbar a try as you follow the coverage of this much-anticipated event.
All together now: “Goooooooal!”
Joseph Bou-Younes and Yuko Kamae
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May 10, 2010
An Insider Look From a Yahoo! Search Trend Spotter
What does your search say about you? Vera H-C Chan is one of a handful of Yahoo! Buzz Log editors who pores through Yahoo! search data to interpret trends and interests. Today, Vera shares with the Yahoo! Search Blog what trendspotting editors do at Yahoo!
When “American Idol” is on, it’s a busy day for a trend spotter like me.
I sometimes sport the fancy title of Web Trends Analyst: My job is to interpret search interest in pop culture and help develop news stories for reporters and readers like you. As you might imagine, a billion or so searches lend themselves to many narratives. Figuring out the “what-does-it-all-mean” goes beyond declaring the winner in an ever-changing popularity contest, or what’s on top of everyone’s mind day to day. (Although, I can tell you Sandra Bullock has lately beat out Lady GaGa as the most-searched celebrity, and “Twilight” leads in searches for the most anticipated movies of the season.)
Instead, I face questions like this: What does the rise in apocalypse-related searches following natural disasters say about our modern society? Are the lookups following Tiger Woods’ story prurient, or are we repeating our ancient fascination with the morality tale? And can search activity project what the masses will decide, even before the masses know themselves?
Fear not, I harbor no aspirations to be the next Nostradamus (who has measured in the top 30,000 searches in the past 30 days). While you can use search trends to gauge fan interest, you can’t use queries to predict who’ll win an Oscar or the World Series.
But queries can point to some interesting projections when it comes to reality shows, where the fate of a limited set of contestants is decided by a mass audience. American Idol presents an increasingly rare and unique confluence of such circumstances (as does “Dancing with the Stars” to some extent, but the judges’ scores also play into the ABC show’s formula.) By gauging who the core “Idol” voters are (generally ladies 30-54), determining the influence of hometown loyalties, and factoring in the tween factor, we’ve made 3 out of 4 correct projections. (Darn you, dark horse Kris Allen and America’s propensity for the underdog, even among underdogs.)
All the interpretative dance we do around search data is actually more important than figuring out the winner. Analyzing search trends helps us understand the impulses and processes of why people make their choices at that particular moment in time. About the only other comparable phenomenon is, well, the presidential elections. Back in April 2007, when party candidates were just raising money for their presidential campaigns, I ranked the Democrats and Republicans by Search popularity. The order adhered pretty closely to the amount of money they brought in. Back then, a largely unknown Barack Obama edged out Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose first-quarter fundraising was separated only by a mil.
Who we are, as a collective culture, is what fascinates me. As a former features and entertainment reporter, I love having at my fingertips the curiosity of the masses (anonymous and in aggregate). The typical trend story relies on a handful of interviews, and a (hopefully) savvy reading of repeating occurrences or underlying themes. A better trend story pinpoints which specific groups of people practice the trend and maybe throws in some robust poll data or study results. The best ones recognize the historical context in which the trend has (re)emerged and gets to the “why.”
For me, I’m getting to the why. My job is to read the Search tea leaves, distill the narratives that fit the fact and context, and serve up my brew. You can get a sip of what we trendspotting editors do throughout Yahoo! from the Buzz Log, our annual Year in Review and on Twitter via Yahoosearchdata. Keep searching — I’ll be looking out for all of you.
Vera H-C Chan
Senior Editor
Yahoo! Buzz
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April 29, 2010
Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Update
The Yahoo! Search engineering teams are rolling out updates to crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms. Similar to previous updates, you may notice some ranking changes and page shuffling during the process, which we expect to complete over the next few days.
Thank you for the feedback, letting us know the community still finds these Weather Reports helpful. To share your thoughts on this latest update, please visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board.
Dan Rampton
Program Manager, Yahoo! Search
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April 28, 2010
Get the Dish That You Wish
I had a yen for tuna sashimi after watching Iron Chef the other night, but I didn’t know where to go to satisfy my craving. Starting today, we are introducing a new feature that makes it easier to search for specific menu items for the times when you know what you want to eat but don’t know where to go.
By extracting structured content – in this case, menu items – from unstructured web pages and matching them to restaurant entities, Yahoo! Search can return results of restaurants near you that serve the dish you crave for when you enter the name of the dish in the search box. You can also try this experience in Yahoo! Local.
For example, to find a nearby restaurant serving tuna sashimi, I type “tuna sashimi San Francisco” in the search box. You can type the name of the city and state, or just use the zip code of your location. You’ll see a list of restaurants that serve tuna sashimi on the menu. I can then narrow down the results by my neighborhood or read more about the business in the overview tab. I can also discover more menu items that I might be interested in.
Yesterday folks around the office were hungry for biryani, so we quickly searched for “biryani palo alto”:
Go ahead, give this feature a try by searching for your favorite menu items near you. We are continuing our efforts on improving our overall local intent experiences on Yahoo! Search, so let us know what you think.
Nitzan Achsaf
Product Lead, Vertical Intent ExperiencesPermalink | Comments (3) | Yahoo! Buzz| Delicious |
April 23, 2010
Earth Day on Yahoo! Search
We are celebrating Earth Day’s 40th birthday this week, but searchers on Yahoo! are looking for ways to be green every day of the year. This year, especially, people are taking matters into their own hands and looking for information on DIY green practices, from reusing everyday items to finding organic household goods.
People are asking questions about how to be green at home on Yahoo! Search. We’ve seen questions like, “how to compost,” “how to build a solar panel”, and “how to build a green PC” spiking on Yahoo! Search this year. In fact, searches for solar power-related queries are popular — “home solar panels” are up 11% on Yahoo! this month, and “solar oven” searches are up 14%.
Reusing goods is a big component of the green DIY movement, and people are looking for all kinds of creative ways to reuse and recycle. Searches for “recycled crafts,” “recycled art” and “recycle decorating” are hot on Yahoo! Search this month, as are searches for “reusable snack bags” (up 117%) and “reusable metal toothpick” (up 1200%).
If you’re looking for even more ways to be green, check out the Yahoo! Search green trivia game (don’t peek at the answers in the comments section!) Or take a look at Yahoo!’s Earth Day microsite to learn global warming myths and facts, how to turn your electronics into cash and more.
Yahoo! Search Blog Team
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April 22, 2010
Earth Day: Search for Answers to Earth’s Biggest Puzzles
Every year, Yahoo! gets into the spirit of Earth Day and educates our community about all things green. This year, our focus is on giving you fun new reasons to search on Yahoo! for green information.Yahoo! Search is featuring a bunch of green trivia questions like “What’s the difference between brown eggs and white eggs?” or “Which city has the highest gas prices?. If you need a cheat sheet, you can find the answers to these puzzles and more by searching on Yahoo!. Yahoo!’s Earth Day site also highlights trending green topics that people are searching for on Yahoo! as well as great tips and tricks for what really matters when it comes to living a greener lifestyle.
So how many answers to green trivia questions did you find? Answers will be revealed in the Comments section tomorrow, so stay tuned!
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April 12, 2010
Search Terms Reflect Spring is in the Air
With Spring weather warming up, people are heading to Yahoo! Search to get ideas for outdoor activities. From “chicken coops” to “lawn care tips,” search data indicates that there is a high interest in home repairs and getting in touch with nature. Here are some spring fever searches on Yahoo! this week:
- Searchers are asking, “When do hummingbirds return?”
- Searches for “chicken coops” on Yahoo! are up 711% and 56% of those users are women
- When it comes to plants, “strawberries,” “ potatoes,” “ flowers” and “tomatoes” are the most popular on Yahoo!
- “Square foot gardening” searches are up 298% and “container gardening” searches are up 32%, while searches for “raised bed gardening “ on Yahoo! are off the charts
- Searchers are asking, “How are baby carrots made?”
- “Lawn care tips” are up 105% and searches for “lawn mowers” are also up 302%
- “How to build a deck” and “sleeping bags” have spiked this week
Whether you’re planting a garden or camping, Spring is a time of renewed energy and excitement, especially for all things outdoors! What will you be doing this Spring?
Yahoo! Search Team
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April 01, 2010
Searching Locally: Recap from O’Reilly Where 2.0
We mentioned yesterday that Yahoo!’s Tom Wailes took part in a panel discussion called “The Big Picture from the Big Players” at the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference. The panelists talked about many interesting opportunities in local search, including user participation, social search, and mobile search in the local space. Check out the video to see Tom’s recap of his discussion on where local search is headed and the major themes that evolved from the conversation among Yahoo!, Bing, Google and Yelp.
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April 01, 2010
Brand New Look for Yahoo! Sports Search and News Search
We are unveiling a new look for Yahoo! Sports Search and News Search today, featuring a new layout, handy new filtering tools, related search suggestions and rich results that help you find what you’re looking for quickly and seamlessly.
New Look for Sports Search Results Page
We’ve packed some great features in the brand new left column on Yahoo! Sports search results pages to help you explore the latest news, commentaries, scores, photos, and videos that matter most to you.
Since the spring weather has ushered in the professional baseball pre-season, let’s use the New York Yankees as an example. Type team names like “New York Yankees” or player names like “Alex Rodriguez” in the Yahoo! Sports search box and you can filter for photos or videos about the Yankees quickly from the left column. You can also see what’s buzzing on Yahoo! Sports in the Popular Searches section.
Another cool feature in the left column is Related Searches, which features conceptually related topics. For example, when you search for New York Yankees, you can also see information about the team’s main rivals (Boston Red Sox), other professional sports teams in the area (New York Mets and New York Giants) or the team’s fan network (YES network). If you are doing research about stats and players for Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball, be sure to also check out the iPhone apps we just launched today.
In addition to the new tools in the left column, we’ve added new rich sports results on the top of the page. For example, as this year’s NCAA basketball tournament gears up for the final four this weekend, you can keep up with the latest action by searching “ncaa tournament” on Yahoo! Sports. You’ll see NCAA tournament coverage, featuring scores, schedules, brackets, and March Madness news at the top of the search results page.
New look for Yahoo! News Search Result Page
Many of the new features you see on the new Yahoo! Sports search results page are also now available on the revamped Yahoo! News search results page.
On the left column, you’ll see that we introduced a tool to filter your searches by popular news sources. This new filter is easy to use and lets you see only stories from specific news sources.
You can also use the Filter by Time tool on the left column to narrow the search results by time and see stories published within the last hour, day, or week. Choose “Past Day” in the news search result page for the query “obama,” you’ll see only results published within the last day. The document count next to the news sources on the left column will update to reflect the number of results published within the last day. Of course, our rich results for news images and news videos are also updated with the past day’s results.
Beyond the features on the left column of the Yahoo! News search results page, we are introducing more enhancements in the main results page:
- Scrollable image results
- More rich results with enhanced News Topic shortcuts
- Twitter shortcuts showing the latest relevant tweets about the news topic you’re exploring
To see these news search enhancements, try searching for topics like “barack obama” or “health care reform.”
The Yahoo! Search team has been hard at work to revamp our vertical search experiences. This time, we have launched redesigned Yahoo! News search results pages in 12 countries: United States, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, Canada, India, United Kingdom, Singapore, Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, and Malaysia.
Try these newly redesigned search experiences today by searching on Yahoo! Sports and Yahoo! News. Or go directly to: sports.search.yahoo.com and news.search.yahoo.com.
Arah Cho and Paul Ko
Yahoo! Search
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