New to Yahoo! Search: YQ Contextual Search API

Monte: That was going to be kind of my next topic; with everything that is going on with Google, Yahoo! being the most trafficked web site in the world, what are some of the things that you guys are strategically doing to stay ahead of the game. There’s a lot of things going on with Google and with some of the other search players in the market. What’s on the table, what’s going to happen in the near future, what are some of the exciting things that will be coming out?

Tim: Well, I think that, as an example of 360, what it does it allows…a lot of people don’t know about everything we have at Yahoo! and what this allows us to do is tie together a lot of services so someone can go in and say I can go to this one place and I can…these are all the different Yahoo! services that will be available to me. And you can customize it and just use the ones that you really want to use; and traditionally, people know about mail, a lot of people use Finance, a lot of people use Search, but there are a lot of other things out there. Every time I tell a friend, I say “Oh, do you know we have this?” and they say, “I never knew that; that’s really cool.”

Monte: Right, so going to this place, going to 360 is going to allow people to see, uh, will it be displayed in a menu format so you can see all the different things that Yahoo! offers?

Tim: They are actually different boxes. So, you’ll have one area where it will have all your friends…like these are all the friends you are connected to, you’ll have another area where you’ll have “My Photos” that you’re sharing, you’ll have a bunch of photos that you can see and then you’ll have a blog where you can post your blog. Yea, I mean, that’s one of the things we’d like to do, is just increase the discoverability of all the Yahoo! services. We’ve done that through search. If you do a search and you see the Yahoo! shortcuts, you can do lots of different activities; and we’ll just give you the answers if you want Stock Quotes or, if you type in something and we have the answer from a Yahoo! service, if you type in a band, then you will listen to that on launch, we can provide a link that will go right into the launch network.

Monte: Oh, that’s very nice.

Tim: Some of the things we released last Wednesday that not many people know about, and this really applies to the FireFox users out there, is we both…we added an ad to my Yahoo! link on FireFox,…on the FireFox toolbar. So, if you go to the Search Results page and you want to add that to My Yahoo!, you can just add that particular search; and then that will show up as an RSS feed on My Yahoo!. And we also added an RSS autodiscovery link to the Search Results page; so, when you go to the Search Result page, you’ll have this little red button that will light up on the bottom right, and that is called Light Bookmark and that will allow you to actually view the search results in RSS format, which we think is a pretty cool feature.

Monte: Yea, that is a cool feature. There is a question in the chat, contextual search API, would that be available yet, the contextual search API?

Tim: So you’re talking about, are you talking about YQ?

Monte: Yes.

Tim: Yea, I mean that’s already…I mean, YQ you can go to our next…if you go to next.Yahoo!.com, all you need for YQ is available at that site, and it’s a pretty interesting tool. It allows you to put a link under an article. So, if you’re in News Type for example, that’s what the example that’s shown on next.Yahoo!.com is that you can….any publisher can add a link and, then, if someone clicks on it, will use the context of that specific news article to provide you search results. And these might be news…it might show you news results. So, you’re getting really contextual answers to your questions. So, if you put in the article is about some merger in Texas, you could click on that and you would get related articles both in the news search and then you get served background articles potentially in the web search results below this.