Yahoo! Search logs gave a revealing picture of what the King of Pop evokes for people as they mourned his passing today. Starting last night, searches for his legendary music surged. “Thriller,” “Man in the Mirror,” and “Billie Jean” were among the top lyrics, songs, and videos that people looked for on Yahoo! Search. As [...]

VoCampers Converge at Yahoo! Headquarters in Sunnyvale

An enthusiastic group of data geeks and Semantic Web enthusiasts met last week at our Sunnyvale headquarters where we hosted the latest edition of VoCamp. VoCamps are a series of informal events that provide a small setting where the Semantic Web community can discuss issues related to semantic interoperability and creating, managing, and publishing vocabularies. The [...]

Today, we are announcing two updates that make it easier for site owners and developers to share and use structured data within Yahoo! Search:  new enhanced results and the support of Google Base formatting for structured data feeds. Let’s take a look at these two updates. New Enhanced Results - Products, Events, News and More Back in [...]

Check Out The New Yahoo! Toolbar

The new Yahoo! Toolbar, already available on Internet Explorer, is now available on Firefox (beta) to make it easier for you to keep on top of your online world. You can get helpful suggestions in the search box in the Yahoo! Toolbar and jump right to search results on sites like Flickr, Wikipedia, and more. [...]

Today we are announcing our support of Common Tag, a new semantic tagging format for Web pages. Developed jointly by a group of Web companies including Zemanta, Metaweb, and Yahoo!, the Common Tag format adds semantic meaning to tags, making Web content more discoverable and enabling the community to create more useful applications for aggregating, [...]

Sitemaps Update

Starting today you will see some subtle changes we’ve made in Sitemaps, partnering with Microsoft and Google. First, we have updated the xsd files with the XML schemas for Sitemap or Siteindex files. The updated xsd files allow better extensibility of the Sitemaps protocol. All your existing Sitemaps will continue to validate so you don’t need [...]

Over the next few weeks, Yahoo! Search will be at Search Engine Strategies (SES) in Toronto and the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose, CA. Come by and hear more about what we have up our sleeves. SES Toronto Monday, June 8 2:30pm-3:45pm Panel: Universal and Blended Search: Comprehensive Visibility Challenges Nick Cox, Senior Product Manager, Yahoo! Search Semantic Technology [...]

Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Index Update

We’re rolling out some updates to our crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms over the next few days. During this process, you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index. To share your thoughts or check in with other Yahoo! Search users, please visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board. Dan Rampton Yahoo! Search

Today we welcome Yoelle Maarek to Yahoo! as Senior Director of Yahoo! Research. She will be leading the Yahoo! Lab in Haifa, Israel along with Ronny Lempel. Their teams help further Yahoo!’s commitment to discovering new technologies that deliver compelling experiences on the Web. You might know Yoelle as the former engineering director at the Google [...]

Follow Your Favorite Sports Team with Yahoo! Search

Working on the new Yahoo! Search sports team shortcut has made me a new sports fan (I’m still mourning over the Celtics’ loss). Being a new fan, I’ve also learned how hectic it can be to follow your favorite professional and college sports teams. That’s exactly why we developed the new sports team shortcut. Starting today, [...]

Amazon Web Services (AWS) evangelist Jinesh Varia presents Amazon's Elastic MapReduce, a web service that simplifies the complexity of large-scale data processing operations for a growing ecosystem of AWS users. The product utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and addresses use cases that involve data mining, bio-informatics, financial simulation, file processing, and web indexing.

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Developer Spotlight: Photobucket

Photobucket is a premier site on the Internet for uploading, sharing, linking and finding photos, videos and graphics. Photobucket's Alice Lankester provides an overview of their service, and their new app for Yahoo! Mail.

Cloudera co-founder Christophe Bisciglia takes a detailed look at the growth and evolution of Hadoop technology and community over the past year. Then he focuses in on the layers of tools and services that are being built now for a variety of implementations in more than one sector.

Thanks to Cloudera for their support for Hadoop Summit 2009.

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Juan Carlos Soto on the Sun Cloud and Hadoop

Juan Carlos Soto from Sun leads the business and marketing group for Cloud Computing. Here he speaks about the Sun Cloud and how it's an ideal service for Hadoop users. Juan Carlos presents Sun's perspective on the benefits of cloud computing for developers across the industry, in a startup or a large enterprise environment.

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Rod Smith is an IBM Fellow who leads IBM's Internet Emerging Technology team. In this presentation, Rod discusses Hadoop from the enterprise perspective. His team works with customers, and looks at emerging technologies to see if there's a fit with the problems his customers are trying to solve.

He believes Hadoop can provide the framework for a new class of applications that are on the horizon, apps that unlock insights from vast quantities of data.

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Hadoop Summit: The State of Hadoop

Owen O'Malley, Eric Baldeschwieler, and Yahoo!'s Hadoop team talk about their work with Hadoop over the last year, including core capabilities and related sub-projects, deployment experiences, and future directions:

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Tune in to the first in a series of talks from Hadoop Summit '09, a conference focused on advancements made in the development and deployment of Apache Hadoop and related technologies. Watch Shelton Shugar, Yahoo's SVP Cloud Computing, as he kicks off the event with a welcome address:

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Dev Spotlight: Snooth on My Yahoo!

Snooth, a leading wine site on the Web, has launched What's Cookin': Food & Wine Pairings, a new open app for My Yahoo!. Users are now able to peruse thousands of recipes from recipe hub MyRecipes.com and get automatically-generated wine pairings based on each individual dish. Learn more about the Snooth and their latest app:

The GreatSchools app on My Yahoo! allows people to find the right school for their children, track its performance, and stay involved in their kids’ education every step of the way. Built on YAP, the app pulls data from different educational sources to present comprehensive information about school quality. Learn more about the GreatSchools app:

Developer Spotlight: Drugs.com

Drugs.com provides free, accurate and independent advice on more than 24,000 prescription drugs, over-the-counter medicines & natural products. Last week, Drugs.com launched My Medication Record, a new app on My Yahoo! powered by Drugs.com Mednotes. Special guest Alison Rhodes, the Safety Mom, provides an overview of the app:

Mint.com, the leading online personal finance management website, recently developed an open app for My Yahoo!. Built on the Yahoo! Application Platform, Mint.com Personal Finance provides My Yahoo! users with a secure view into their financial essentials. Mint's VP of Products, Aaron Forth, provides an overview of Mint and their new app on My Yahoo!:

Developer Spotlight: kaChing

kaChing provides a realistic online trading environment that allows community members to manage a virtual portfolio, compete with friends, and follow some of the world's smartest investors. Founder Dan Carroll provides an overview of the new kaChing app on My Yahoo!:

Today is World Environment Day and we're happy to announce the availability of Mokugift Green Lifestyle, a new open app for My Yahoo!. Founder Hans Chung explains how Green Lifestyle raises environmental awareness through its social and educational features:

Developer Spotlight: Mint.com, Part 1

Mint.com, the leading online personal finance management website, recently developed an open app for My Yahoo!. Built on the Yahoo! Application Platform, Mint.com Personal Finance provides My Yahoo! users with a secure view into their financial essentials. Mint's VP of Engineering, David Michaels, provides an overview of Mint and their new app on My Yahoo!:

Where 2.0 took place in San Jose just a few weeks ago. Everybody was pretty excited about the launch of Yahoo! Placemaker and the open release of GeoPlanet data. Gary Gale, who leads the Yahoo! Geo Technologies engineering team in the UK, spent a little time chatting with attendees on the showfloor to get different perspectives from the geo-community and a sense of why people were there.

Developer Spotlight: Glenn Jones- Identify, Part 2

Glenn Jones is the creative director of Madgex, a company that delivers sites and web-based applications for the publishing and recruitment sectors. We had a chance to talk to Glenn about Identify, a Firefox extension that combines identities across various social network/media sites and provides you with a profile about an individual.

Identify makes extensive use of Google’s Social Graph API to find out about which sites an individual has profiles on, and then uses YQL to collect the information. In this video, Glenn provides more details about Identify:

Glenn Jones is the creative director of Madgex, a company that delivers sites and web-based applications for the publishing and recruitment sectors. We had a chance to talk to Glenn about Identify, a Firefox extension that combines identities across various social network/media sites and provides you with a profile about an individual.

Identify makes extensive use of Google’s Social Graph API to find out about which sites an individual has profiles on, and then uses YQL to collect the information. In this video, Glenn provides more details about Identify:

YDN Lightning Talks: Tom Hughes-Croucher

In our latest YDN Lightning Talk, we have a seat with Tom Hughes-Croucher, an evangelist for Yahoo! developer tools. Tom has worked on front-end engineering for Yahoo! and a number of Accessibility standards for recognized standards bodies such as the World Wide Web consortium and the British Standards Institute. Tom shares about some developer tools he likes to use, including YQL.

In our newest Developer Spotlight, we went across the pond to pay a visit to Dr. Jim O’Donnell, a web developer with the Royal Observatory and National Maritime Museum - where we learned you can often find Dr. O'Donnell being the occasional astronomer.


Dr. O'Donnell talked to us about YQL and its uses at the museum. We even convinced him to attend the recent Open Hack Day in London where he decided at the last minute to hack. So, during breakfast on Sunday - and in about an hour - he had ported the JavaScript from his astronomy photo browser to YQL Execute, creating a new open data table which returns celestial coordinates for astrotagged flickr photos. Essentially, his hack extends the Flickr API to, hopefully, enable location-based searching in the sky. Easy. You see more here by clicking over to his site.


But first, here's our video:

London Open Hack Day 2009

On May 9th and 10th, 2009 over 270 hackers converged on the Congress Centre in London for Open Hack Day 2009.

It was a great event and you can read all about the winners in our blog post.

Here are some highlights from the event for you to watch:

The Yahoo! Query Language lets you query, filter, and join data across any web data source or service on the web. YQL treats the entire web as a source of table data, enabling developers to select * from Internet.


A few months ago, we launched Open Data Tables publicly for anyone to use to make data YQL-accessible, and there are seventy-some tables contributed to the community repository on github to date.


With this latest release, the YQL team has taken the Open Data Table capabilities to the next level by adding a new element - Execute. The Execute element can contain arbitrary developer code that the YQL data engine runs during the processing of a YQL statement.


Watch the screencast for an in-depth look at how you can use YQL Execute to create your next killer app or web product:

YSlow Screencast: New Rules for Faster Websites

All of us know how painful it is to wait – waiting in a line, waiting for a table, or waiting for a web page to load… If a business makes its customers wait too long, the customers will often leave and take their business elsewhere.


In our research at Yahoo!, we have found that Web Performance matters a great deal. Fast websites can make the online experience more effective, more enjoyable, and provide a competitive edge. If a web site is perceived as slow, users will often switch to a faster website.


In this screencast, we show you the benefits of the latest release of YSlow that introduces 9 new performance rules and Smush.it, a new tool that optimizes images by smushing them down to a reasonable size.

SlideShare is the world's largest community for sharing presentations and documents. With over 1,000,000 presentations online, Slideshare recently took the step to go mobile. In March, they launched their new mobile platform built on Yahoo! Blueprint. We spoke with Slideshare CEO Rashmi Sinha and CTO Jon Boutelle about the implementation:

Beyond Cookies: Persistent Storage for Web Apps

Web developers now have the ability to store large amounts of persistent data on the client-side, way beyond the 4K limit of cookies. Options include HTML 5 Storage, Gears, Dojo Storage, and more. Brad Neuberg talks about the latest ways to achieve browser-based client-side storage and how it can help you make better web apps:

Etsy is an online marketplace for buying & selling all things handmade. Their mission is to enable people to make a living making things, and to reconnect makers with buyers. Etsy also has a strong community of developers who can tap into their vibrant, global marketplace with the Etsy API. The Etsy API provides a range of API methods for developers to start building their own applications on top of the Etsy platform.

We sat with Justin Sheckler, Etsy Developer and with their CTO Chad Dickerson to talk about their newest API:

Screencast: Collating distributed information with YQL

In order to reach the most people on the web, it is a good idea to distribute your information. That way you can reach all kind of specialized audiences. On the flipside you also spread yourself thin and people will miss some of the goodies you put out on the web.

In this screencast tutorial you'll see how I built my home on the web, http://icant.co.uk the lazy way by using YQL to gather data from all kind of sources and YUI grids to display them in a single interface.

If you can spare 15 minutes of your time check out the screencast below to learn how to build a site like icant.co.uk from data stored on Slideshare, Delicious and on a Wordpress based blog with a few dozen lines of PHP.

The web of documents is dead - long live the web of distributed data. And with YQL, your participation is as easy as writing a database call.

Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network

Since it launched in 2008, txteagle has been "empowering the largest mobile workforce on Earth," one text-message at a time. txteagle is a service that enables people to earn money through simple tasks they complete via text message. For the over 2 billion literate, mobile phone subscribers in the developing world (many of whom live on less than $5 a day), txteagle is creating a revolutionary new way to make supplemental income.

txteagle founder, Nathan Eagle, spoke to a captive audience at ETech a few weeks ago, and we were lucky enough to be there. After his presentation he met with us to share how the developer community can help create additional income streams for the developing world by suggesting text-based tasks:

Sideline: Open Search for Twitter

Ever wonder what people are saying right now about your company, brand, service, product, etc? Inspired by a recent internal Yahoo! hack, Sideline, is a Twitter app that lets you monitor and search what people are saying about your product in real time. This desktop app allows for the creation, grouping, and auto-execution of advanced search queries against Twitter.

Built on Adobe Air, Sideline can run on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems, minimizing the amount of platform specific code that must be written. Oh, and it's open source.

Yahoo! front-end engineer and Sideline creator, Chad Auld, provides us with some of the rationale and logic that went into building the app:

What is a "Technomad?" According to Wikipedia it's a term "originally coined by Steven Roberts to describe a nomadic person who remains connected through communications media such as the internet during travel, exploration, and online nomadic living." So, when we actually met a pair of "technomads" - Chris Dunphy & Cherie Ve Ard - at ETech this year, our own Sophie Major decided to learn a little more about the technomadic life:

Developer Spotlight: Watercooler, Inc.

Watercooler provides an extensive network of online fan communities around sports and TV entertainment with over 30 million connected to its FanSection™ and TVLoop™ online communities. Watercooler CEO Kevin Chou provides an overview of the technology and strategy that makes the company a top player among social networking app developers:

Sadaf Shahsahebi is a front end developer at Yahoo! working on the Yahoo! Application Platform. Sadaf uses tools like YUI, YSlow, YML, and Caja to design secure, high-performance web products. In this lightning talk, Sadaf shares about her path to engineering and her technical work as a front end engineer:

High Performance Websites: Nicole Sullivan

Website performance is a growing challenge for web developers and designers. The net effect of features like rounded corners and rich Ajax integration is slower performance. At Web Directions North, performance guru and former Yahoo! engineer, Nicole Sullivan, shared some of the tools and techniques she developed and used to maximize performance for Yahoo! sites and applications.

Whether you are a designer, developer, product or project manager, this session will help you improve the performance of your sites and applications:

ABOUT: A highly experienced web engineer, Nicole has until recently been responsible for international evangelism in the performance research team, whose role is to quantify and improve the performance of all Yahoo! products worldwide. This was a multifunctional leadership role which was equal parts engineering, research, project management, and evangelism. requiring solid communication with people who have different levels of performance expertise.

As part of these efforts Nicole shares the lessons Yahoo! has learned in improving the performance of their many sites and applications.

FreeTech was the unconference track at ETech 2009-- two days of unstructured, informative sessions covering a wide range of emerging technologies. We chatted about the art of the unconference with Christine Herron, First Round Capital Principal, venture capitalist, and coordinator of this year's FreeTech.

Christine shares how a little wrangling and a lot of unplanned coordination helped make FreeTech a true "meta-unconference" experience:

Inside ETech: Andy Hunt, Author - The Pragmatic Programmer

Andy Hunt from Pragmatic Programmers tells us about his next experiments in becoming a better programmer. His latest work isn't about installing a better IDE or using a new programming language. Instead, Andy is tuning his brain. Andy has some great advice to improve your Wetware, and suggests that it's the most important thing of all to tweak:

We talked with Greg Elin from the Sunlight Foundation at ETech. The Sunlight Foundation is providing the tools and advice that government needs to embrace the new technologies of communication. Greg tells us about what individual developers can do to help their government be more e-engaged:

Inside ETech: Lensley Automatic

At ETech 2009, we met the creators of the Lensley Automatic, "the next generation of photobooth." The Lensley Automatic brings the classic photobooth experience into the 21st century with its sleek "cage-free design, superior optics, and the latest in digital technology."

We experienced the fun, speed, and amazing quality of the Lensley Automatic firsthand. At the press of a button, the Lensley produced a 4x6" sheet of 4 high quality photos for our team, in less than a minute. Check out this video to learn more about the Lensley Automatic, as described by its creators, Jaime Macías and Leonard Lin:

Barely three years old, Flixster is already one of the largest movie sites on the web with over 15 million unique visitors and almost 2 billion movie ratings. In this conversation with Flixster CEO and Co-Founder, Joe Greenstein, we had a chance to learn a little more about the background, growth and vision of this rising star in the app development scene:

Web Application Security with Christian Heilmann

Web Directions North 2009 (WDN) was a conference dedicated to bringing the best ideas and practices from the web development industry to educations, developers, and designers. Among the speakers, Christian Heilmann, Yahoo! technology evangelist and front-end web development expert, presented an introduction to web application security entitled: Things that go bump on the web. To learn more about the important connection between web security and usability, watch the video of his presentation at WDN09:

In this screencast Dan Theurer and Jonathan Trevor discuss why "YQL is the last web service you will ever need." With the help of the YQL console, an easy way to explore the power of YQL, we’ll cover the following topics: How to access public and private web services, filter and join results, extract data from web pages, and how the extend YQL to query additional data sources.

Inside Web Directions North 2009

Web Directions North 2009 (WDN) brought together web developers and designers in Denver, Colorado for a full week of insightful talks and education about the future direction of the web. YDN's own technical evangelist and front-end development expert, Christian Heilmann had a chance to talk with some of the attendees about their thoughts on how web development technologies can help during these tough economic times. Tune in to hear the thoughtful and candid answers from the crowd at WDN:

The Yahoo! Design Pattern Library shares useful patterns and code with the web design and development community. Patterns have been built for Reputation, Ranking, Calendar Pickers, and more.

Christian Crumlish, Yahoo!'s head "pattern detective", provides an overview of the design pattern library, sharing from his own experiences in design. To learn how design patterns can help solve common design problems, listen to Christian's talk:

Developer Spotlight: Playfish

Playfish is one of the largest developers and publishers of video games on social networks with "over 50 million registered players and over 20 million monthly players" across their games. Playfish is one of the first developers to launch a social game on My Yahoo!, with Bowling Buddies, a 3D flash-based game that allows users to bowl with their friends.

We spoke to Playfish co-founder and COO, Sebastien de Halleux to learn more about the company's development approach and viewpoint on the future for social apps. Sebastien offers valuable pointers for developers and entrepreneurs working in this space. Tune in to learn more:

Hadoop helps Yahoo! Mail reduce spam for over 300 million people. In the second part of their talk, Mark Risher and Jay Pujara, Yahoo! Mail technologists and spam cops, describe how they are using Hadoop to fight botnets.

Mark and Jay explain how Hadoop makes it possible for Yahoo! Mail to quickly analyze huge sets of data to identify where spam comes from. Want to learn how Hadoop can help solve your largest data challenges? Tune in:

YDN Lightning Talks: Hadoop - Part I

Hadoop helps Yahoo! Mail reduce spam for over 300 million people. Mark Risher and Jay Pujara, Yahoo! Mail technologists and spam cops, describe how they are using Hadoop to fight the rising tide of spam.

Mark and Jay explain how Hadoop makes it possible for Yahoo! Mail to slice through billions of email messages to isolate patterns of spam -- within minutes. They dive into the most common Hadoop implementations, including Streaming and Pig. Want to learn how to harness the power of Hadoop to solve your most impossible, ginormous data problems? Tune in:

"All the code that's fit to printf( )" - so goes the tagline on the NYTimes.com Open blog. The NYTimes.com developer site is about "open-source technology at The New York Times, written by and primarily for developers." Recently, the "Times" launched the TimesPeople API, which allows you to retrieve TimesPeople data for a particular user, including the user's profile, activities, news feed and network. We sat down with Derek Gottfrid, Senior Software Architect to talk about their first Times Open event today and also learn a little about what the NYTimes is doing in the developer community:

Developer Spotlight: OneRiot

Recently, on our stop-over in Denver for Web Directions North, we drove to Boulder, to talk to the minds behind OneRiot, a social search engine company that finds the "pulse of the web" - the news, videos and products that people are talking about right now. We sat down with technologist Yannis Pavlidis, who implemented BOSS to compliment OneRiot's social search with traditional search features from Yahoo!:

The second in our series of quick, candid conversations with some of Yahoo!'s most interesting developers, designers, and evangelists -- a chat with Vik Singh from the Yahoo! Search BOSS team.

Vik talks extensively about the birth and launch of BOSS, Yahoo!'s game-changing open search service, and how it's enabling innovation and extending the marketplace for search. Want to get a feel for what developers are doing with BOSS or increase awareness of the BOSS work you're doing? Vik recommends bookmarking your project or mashup in delicious with the tag bossmashup. Have a look:

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YDN Lightning Talks: Ted Drake

Quick, candid conversations with some of Yahoo!'s most interesting developers, designers, and evangelists about their passions, experiences, and, of course, about their work at Yahoo!.


For our first lightning talk, we sit down with Ted Drake, a Yahoo! developer who resides in Paris, France. Ted has worked on some of Yahoo!'s top properties such as Yahoo! Finance. Ted is also a "foodie" and has started a side project, Insider Food, which is powered by Yahoo!'s BOSS.

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RockYou is a leading creator and distributor of widgets and applications on the Social Web. Yahoo! Developer Network's Erik Eldridge sat down with Raymond Chan, Architect in RockYou's Advanced Technologies Group:

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Gigya

Gigya gives people the power to socialize and share content across the web, providing publishers and marketers with powerful tools for increasing audience reach and engagement online. We sat down with Patrick Salyer, Director of Business Development to learn more. Gigya's social widgets combine the universal portability with the viral power of Facebook applications:

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