As Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz posted earlier this morning, we have announced a global search deal with Microsoft. Carol took a few minutes to shoot this video to explain the agreement, why we’re excited about it, why we did it, and what its benefits will be to consumers, advertisers and publishers:

Also, Carol and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer hosted a conference call together this morning on our campus to discuss the agreement with media and analysts. You can check out an archive on our investor relations site. And here are a few photos of them both from just after the call.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

It’s inhumanly early in California, but it’s already a great day at Yahoo!. We’ve just signed a major search deal with Microsoft. Under the terms, Microsoft will become the search engine behind Yahoo! and we will become the worldwide exclusive relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.

While you’ll read a lot about why this is good for our business and for advertisers, I want to talk about what’s in it for you -– the Yahoo! fan.

Here’s the rundown:

• Better search: You’ll still find search boxes all across Yahoo!, but this deal will make the difference between a great Yahoo! search experience and an awesome one. Some of the biggest brains in the business work on Yahoo! Search, and they will continue to innovate to create a better search experience on Yahoo!. As a result of the deal, Microsoft, which has great technologists and deep pockets,will have the scale to bring users faster, more useful and more personally relevant search.
• Better everything else: With Microsoft powering Yahoo! Search, we’ll be able to focus on the things we do best -– being the center of people’s lives online with properties like our homepage, mail, finance, news, sports, entertainment, mobile, etc. Sure, we’re the world’s largest online media company and your loyalty has made that possible. But we’re not satisfied – we still want you to say “wow” a lot more often. And that’s what makes this deal especially exciting.
• Better competition: Competition equals innovation. But with one player dominating 70% of search, that field has been pretty lopsided. This transaction will create a healthy competitor that’ll keep everyone on their toes.

In short, everything’s just going to get a whole lot better for you.

And one final note — what this agreement does not cover is any of Yahoo!’s other properties or products. In those areas, Microsoft can expect a fierce competitor.

We’ve set up a special site, www.choicevalueinnovation.com, that answers your questions.

Carol Bartz
CEO

A lot went into the creation of the new Yahoo! Homepage. Not only did we test it until the cows came home (they’re home now), our developers pulled off significant feats of engineering to make it all work smoothly. While the page is simple, clean, and easy to use, there’s pretty sophisticated technology at work under the covers. Ask an engineer about it and you’ll hear references to things like machine-learned models, Hadoop, separating metadata from markup, giant JSON structures, YUI 3.0, intelligent squid-caching mechanisms, YDBM, MDBM, content optimization knowledge engine, adapter layers, and so on.

If you want to know what all that means, you’ll have to watch this video — now playing on the Yahoo! Homepage, starring just a handful of the many technical talents responsible for our spiffy new homepage.

Fortunately, it’s closed-captioned for the nerd-impaired.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

¡Ay, caramba! It’s National Tequila Day! Perfect excuse to ditch that rot-gut variety and broaden your horizons beyond sugary frozen margaritas and shooters from a waitress’ holster. Get to know the finer points of fermented agave and sip a snifter of top-shelf blanco, joven, reposado, añejo, or extra añejo. But don’t overdo it just because it’s Friday! (Pssstt. Figs are the new hangover cure.) Here’s what we slammed down this week:

• Home sweet home: We’ve remodeled the house but we’re letting you pick out the furniture. The new Yahoo! Homepage is here! And it’s all about you. Load it up with your favorite websites by choosing from one of more than 65 apps or adding a link of your own. Also, your news is now hyper-local and you can also toggle the main news module for more of the big news that matters. And you can take it all with you — PC to mobile sync is coming very soon. If you live in the U.S., you can opt-in today by visiting http://yahoo.com/trynew. Our friends in France, India, and the UK will soon have access to localized versions and we’ll start rolling out to other markets in the next month. Take a tour and read more here.
• Roadtrip photos: If you’re one of the many people who researches travel destinations by checking out online photos, you’ll start packing your suitcase when you see the new travel image refiner on Yahoo! Image Search. You can now take a virtual tour of popular points of interest when you search for a destination. Which Hawaiian isle is right for you? Search for Hawaii and click on the thumbnails for islands like Maui, Oahu, Kauai, and popular spots like Haleakala National Park and Waimea Canyon. Try it with Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Rome, Sydney, New York City, San Francisco, and beyond. More here.
• More mobile Messenger: Attention, iPhone users – the latest Yahoo! Messenger app update is out and it is spiffy. Now you can get notified of a new message even when the app is closed. Make that, even when your iPhone is asleep! You can choose whether you get an alert on your home screen, an alert sound, or a badge featuring the number of messages — or all three, or none. Another new addition – you can now stay signed in for up to two weeks. Again, that’s even when your app is closed. And finally, you can now BUZZ! your friends – one of the most requested features for the iPhone app. Ask and ye shall receive! More here.
• Back to class: Yep, it’ll soon be time to trade flip-flops for Mary Janes – school is right around the corner. But we’re here to ease the pain. Our new Back to School site helps you choose the right backpack, find green school supplies, get safety tips, find ways to cut down your back-to-school budget, and even adjust to a new school. We give you a roster of shopping bargains, like dorm room essentials, MP3 players, and student duds. There’s also a study zone with fun learnings, games, and cool Avatar gear for when the time comes to drop a school bus in your background. And if you’re tired of the same ol’ same ol’, there are great healthy school lunch recipes. In the meantime, make the most of those flip-flops!

Subscribe to the RSS feed (or add it to My Yahoo!) to get this Product Pulse every week.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

If your email inbox is anything like mine, it’s turned into a “digital shoebox” over the years. It’s full of hundreds or maybe thousands of special photos that have been shared by close friends and family members, but they’re not organized in any particular way. I open them, occasionally print or forward them, and then move on to my mail, letting precious pictures become buried in the unlimited storage of my inbox.

Enter Xoopit, which Yahoo! signed an agreement to acquire today. Their name may sound familiar – they won our Open Hack Day last fall and we teamed with them in December to launch the “My Photos” app in Yahoo! Mail, which many of you are already using today. In fact, it’s the most popular third party app in Yahoo! Mail.

With the integration of Xoopit’s platform technology and capabilities, the task of sending photos via email will be as easy as it should be and sharing photo albums with friends and family members will also be a cinch. You’ll be able to share your pictures among a group of friends or family like never before – combining pictures from numerous sources into a single album for a private group to view. And soon your inbox will become an organized photo index as well. Just imagine having a tool that collects all the photos you’ve sent and received over the years into that scrapbook you’ve never had time to assemble.

In short, Xoopit will bring phenomenal photo organization, improved photo sharing, and the serendipity of discovering forgotten photos to Yahoo! Mail.

Why is this such a big deal? Yahoo! Mail is actually home to one of the largest online photo repositories in the world. And every day, millions of you use Yahoo! Mail as your primary way to share the photos of important moments in your lives. While social networks and community sites are great for sharing photos with everyone you know, we realize it’s not for everyone or every occasion. For many, email is still best for sharing photos among a more select group of friends or family. And now we’re making it all that much easier for you.

For a flavor of what’s to come, take a look at this quick demo of how Xoopit currently works in Yahoo! Mail’s “My Photos” app.

BTW: I know what you’re thinking. In comes the guy who oversaw Photoshop for 13 years and all he can think about is photos? Well, rest assured a smart team was thinking about solving this problem well before I showed up on Yahoo!’s doorstep. And it’s just one of the many things on our plate to ensure we’re improving our products!

Please join me in welcoming the talented Xoopit team to the Yahoo! family. We can’t wait to help you tap your inbox for all those great photos waiting to be rediscovered.

Bryan Lamkin
SVP Yahoo! Applications

PS: For you Gmail+Xoopit users out there who’ve been waiting for an excuse to switch to Yahoo!, here’s your chance. But, in the meantime, we will still be providing support for your Xoopit Firefox Add-on.

It’s a huge day – for us and for you. After months of testing, listening, adjusting, and testing again, we’re ready to start rolling out a new Yahoo! homepage – one that is tailored to you and your interests like never before.

You’ll soon see for yourself. Starting today, anyone living in the U.S. can opt-in to the new page by visiting http://yahoo.com/trynew, and our friends in France, India, and the UK will have access to localized versions in the coming week. We’ll start rolling out to other markets in the next month.

This new launch represents the most significant change to our homepage since the company’s inception. Our new homepage has been built around the people who use it and we’ve made sure every pixel counts. Gone is the sea of links to Yahoo! products – that was really more about us than you. And you only used a handful anyway, so why not let you decide how to use that real estate?

You can now customize your Yahoo! homepage (with a click or two) and make it your own, bringing in your favorites websites, whether they’re from Yahoo! or somewhere else on the Web. That means there could eventually be more than 110 million individual versions of our homepage out there in the U.S. alone – with people adding content that could range from Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Finance, and omg! to Gmail, epicurious, NPR, The New York Times, Facebook, and much more. The sky’s the limit.

You’ll see and hear a lot more from us in the coming weeks about this new design, but here are highlights of what’s new:

• My Favorites – You can easily choose from a dashboard of more than 65 apps to add directly to your homepage, including different email providers (AOL, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail), best of breed content sites (Barron’s, NPR, omg!, USA Today), popular social networking sites (Facebook and MySpace), and dozens of others. These apps let you preview, interact with, or navigate to your favorite sites from one easy check-in point.
• App Maker – You can create your own app on the fly by adding virtually any URL of your choice.
• Trend Setter – A new trends snapshot lets you keep tabs on the most popular Yahoo! searches, insights from Yahoo! Buzz, and fun facts from around the Web.
• PC to Mobile Sync (coming soon) – Whatever new apps you add on your computer stay with you when you’re mobile.
• News, Your Way – Your news is now hyper-local and you can also toggle the main news module for more of the big news that matters.
• Social Updates – You can now share your current “status” with friends directly from the homepage, see what your friends are doing across the Web, and integrate with leading social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

Over the years, we’ve evolved our homepage to help you simplify the Web and your life, which both only seem to get more complicated. (Did you know the average person in the U.S. visits 85 sites a month? Exhausting.) You’ve got your world to stay on top of and the rest of the world. Now you can do it all in one place and get more done, faster.

One other thing you’ll notice is that we’re now sporting a new purple logo, officially ushering in Yahoo!’s long-standing corporate color. The legacy red logo, chosen in 1995 because purple often resolved closer to blue or brown on old monitors and red popped better against our historically gray background, has been retired in favor of the color that is truly synonymous with Yahoo!.

Oh, and tremendous thanks to the millions of you who tested the site, told us what you loved and hated, tested it again, and guided us to this final design. Since we run one of the most trafficked sites on the Web, we don’t take changes lightly. Your experience drives everything we do and your feedback was invaluable. Thanks for letting us listen.

Learn more here and then go check out the new Yahoo! Homepage at http://yahoo.com/trynew. And here are some screenshots and photos of the site’s 15-year evolution.

Tapan Bhat
SVP, Integrated Consumer Experiences

There are 60 million people with disabilities in the U.S. There are more than 10 times that number around the globe. Yahoo!’s Accessibility team wants to make sure that every one of these individuals is able to use Yahoo! as their web site of choice. That will only be possible, of course, if every corner of our network is fully accessible.

While we still have work to do toward that end, we did reach a significant milestone last month when Yahoo! India launched an Accessibility Lab in Bangalore. It is modeled after our Sunnyvale lab, which has demonstrated a variety of assistive technologies to hundreds of Yahoos since it launched in 2008.

Our Accessibility Labs are important tools for engineers who can’t imagine life with a disability. The reality is that not everyone can use a mouse, type on a keyboard, or see the computer screen. We simulate that experience so our developers can learn how to think about users with disabilities during their product development process. We have screen readers to help them understand the experience of a blind user, single switches and onscreen keyboards for physically disabled users, communication devices for kids with speech impairments, etc. More and more Yahoo! products are being designed and developed in our Bangalore office, so it became clear that we needed to enhance our ability to train engineers and designers there.

Here’s a slideshow of photos from our grand opening event in India:

Also, a a global company, we are keenly aware that commercial screen readers are generally out of reach for most blind people living in developing countries. So we’ve sponsored the non-profit NV Access Foundation, which is working on a free, open-source screen reader. Our support will help them improve web features for NVDA for Windows, making it easier for visually-impaired users around the world to browse the Web – especially when they encounter Web 2.0 technologies. And by making NVDA’s screen reader a better product, we’re also helping all the web developers who use it as their testing tool.

Everybody wins.

Victor Tsaran
Sr. Accessibility Program Manager

From modern chicken coops to buildings of years past — built to naturally breathe outside air — familiar designs are bringing new inspiration to how we’re creating the data centers that serve up your favorite websites. As our co-founder David Filo noted two weeks ago, we’re focused on building some of the greenest data centers in the world. Our team of data center engineers is working on never-been-done-before designs and technologies that can radically increase our energy efficiency – both in existing facilities and those we build from the ground up. We’ll give you a behind-the-scene look at their work in the coming months.

In the meantime, you might want to check out public radio. Chris Page, our director of climate and energy strategy, who works with the data center team to squeeze more work out of every kilowatt-hour our data centers consume, spoke to the folks at Public Radio International’s “Living on Earth” program for a segment that aired this week. She gives you both a virtual tour of our local Sunnyvale data center and explains how far the industry has come since energy efficiency became a priority. Think facilities that operate more like a Tesla than your mom’s old wood-paneled station wagon (but without the pricetag).

Head over to “Living on Earth” to check out the transcript or listen to the program.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

If you’ve seen “The Godfather,” chances are you might like other Marlon Brando movies. Or films about gangsters. Or those directed by Francis Ford Coppola. But will you like “Napoleon Dynamite”?

This is the central problem posed by the Netflix Prize. Netflix is offering $1 million in prize money to anyone who can substantially improve (by more than 10 percent) the accuracy of its movie recommendation engine. While Netflix suggests movies based on your ratings history, the company isn’t satisfied with how well it can predict what you’ll like.

At Yahoo! Labs, this is just the kind of crazy difficult problem we love to take on. For scientists, it’s a pure challenge, requiring deep study and experimentation across a variety of fields, such as machine learning and data mining.

And for Yahoo! as a whole, these types of scientific problems also happen to be a critical element of what we most want to succeed at: connecting you with the content and information you most want in your life – even if you don’t know it yet.

That’s why we couldn’t be happier to pass along the news that Yehuda Koren, one of our scientists at Yahoo!’s Israel Lab, is part of the first qualifying team for the Netflix Prize.

Yehuda’s team, BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos, reached first place on the Netflix Prize leaderboard on June 26, with an improvement of 10.05 percent. Achieving a more than ten percent improvement in the quality of movie recommendations is no drop in the bucket. It took Yehuda and his teammates three years to achieve and no other team has matched it yet.

Congratulations to Yehuda and his team. In the past few weeks alone, in addition to the Netflix Prize, Yehuda and his colleagues also received best paper prizes at two of the most important scientific conferences (ACM SIGMOD and ACM SIGKDD) for computer science and the Internet. Yahoo! researchers Christopher Olston, Shubham Chopra, Utkarsh Srivastava, Ashwin Machanavajjhala and Bee-Chung Chen, were also recognized for contributions to the science of how to better query and mine data, which will ultimately make it easier for you to get things done on the Web and beyond.

We may not yet have solved every problem the Internet has thrown our way, but at the very least, you should start feeling a lot more confident about those movies in your Netflix queue.

Prabhakar Raghavan
Head of Yahoo! Labs

What do you do if the world’s tallest building stands in your city? Try to run up its stairs as fast as you can!

A group of Yahoos from Taiwan recently banded together to run up the Taipei 101, which weighs in as the world’s tallest skyscraper at 101 stories with 2,046 steps. That’s 508 meters or one third of a mile… straight up. It was part of a masochistic race called the “Taipei 101 Run Up,” which pits teams against each other to see who can reach the top first. The 20 participating teams included major brands like Coca-Cola, Nike, and Bayer.

Sporting purple Yahoo! T-shirts, our team included a few senior Yahoo! executives, including Ari Balogh, our executive vice president of Products and chief technology officer (visiting from California); Rose Tsou, senior vice president of our Asia region; and Charlene Hung, general manager of Yahoo! Taiwan.

So, how’d they do in this ultimate Stairmaster challenge? They placed fifth, just a few spots behind last year’s second place finish (when they lost out to the fire department — the only team you really want passing you). And the fastest Yahoo? That would be Ari, whose addiction to energy bars clearly paid off. He scaled the building’s 101 stories in just 18:26.

Here are some photos from the race and sweet victory:

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor