Did you know that every year Internet scams and traps cost Americans over 7 billion dollars? Searching on the Web can present a minefield of spyware, malware and other malicious sites that can cause serious harm to your PC and cost you valuable time and money.

We are taking steps to make you feel safe when searching the Web — warning you about dangerous sites before you click on them. Today we’ve launched SearchScan (in beta), a new safety feature tucked into Yahoo! Search, courtesy of our friends, the dedicated security experts over at McAfee.

It provides alerts that appear within your search results, flagging “risky” sites with dangerous downloads that can include spyware and viruses. SearchScan will even warn you about sites that have dubious email practices to help you keep your email box free of spam.

No other search engine today offers you this level of warning before visiting sites. Period.

Yahoo! Search with the SearchScan feature is like your Internet security guard, warning you of danger so you can search with confidence… another reason to make Yahoo.com your starting point

Vish Makhijani
SVP & GM, Yahoo! Search

In case you haven’t already seen the news, Microsoft today withdrew its proposal to acquire Yahoo!. Here’s our press release, with comments from Yahoo! board chairman Roy Bostock and CEO Jerry Yang.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

You’re a developer. Your dream is to impact an insane number of people with your work. And you’re impatient — you don’t want to start small, dazzling just a few people with your coding wares.

Enter the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS). Imagine a world where you can write code that will meaningfully reach millions of users in a single bound. That’s the promise of an open Yahoo!.

Ari Balogh, our new CTO, just offered a preview at Web 2.0 Expo of a very new kind of Yahoo!. One that invites developers to take advantage of our huge scale to write applications that build on our existing properties (think Mail, Sports, Search, our front page, mobile, My Yahoo!, etc.), tap into millions of loyal users, and make Internet experience more relevant and useful. You’ve heard us hint at this for a while and now it’s right around the corner.

Think about it: Yahoo! serves more than 500 million unique users every month. We serve 120 billion page views per month. Yahoo! users spend 235 billion minutes a month on our sites. More importantly, some 10 billion relationships exist on user buddy lists and in Yahoo! address books. All that represents a mind-boggling audience for developers.

There’s a massive, latent social network within Yahoo!, and we’re going to bring it to the surface. We’re making Yahoo! more social, but we’re not building yet another social network. We already have an incredible social network… we just need to unlock it.

We are rewiring Yahoo!, building platforms that fundamentally change how Yahoo! works. We’re also opening up to developers to take advantage of the social aspects of our many favored destinations, creating what we call “vitality” — a lifeline into what’s happening with your social connections We plan to become open the best platform on the web, where tens of thousands of developers will create applications and features (many we’ve never even thought of) for our network and our consumers.

Of course, lots of Internet companies are on the “open” bandwagon. In fact, the bandwagon is getting pretty crowded (I’ve never actually seen a bandwagon, but go with me on this). Yahoo! has been in the “open” camp for years, starting simple with RSS feeds in 2003. And now Flickr is the second-most popular API on the Web. We’ve also been a leader in industry’s efforts to embrace open development.

A first taste of our strategy is SearchMonkey, which will let developers mash up helpful data with our search engine results. A Japanese restaurant would no longer be a simple link. Instead, it could include a photo, address, ratings, reviews, and links to online reservations. Search Monkey will be available in a few weeks. Make sure you come to our launch party on May 15th.

And it doesn’t stop there. Y!OS will let developers make Yahoo! portable so that everywhere you go, a more relevant, social and useful online experience is available to you. Shopping on a third-party site? Why not have instant access to your Yahoo! Address Book? I know I want it! ;-)

We’ve previewed Yahoo! OS with leading development shops and they’re very excited to do their thing on Yahoo!. In fact, they plan to dedicate a lot of resources to this platform. It all comes back to the size of the opportunity, right?

Today’s just the beginning. There’s plenty more to come in the months ahead!

UPDATE: Here’s a video of Ari’s Web 2.0 Expo keynote from this morning.

Neal Sample
Chief Architect, Platforms

When it comes to the hall of fame of the Web 2.0 world, the CNET Webware 100 Awards is as close as it gets. And here comes the shameless self-promotion… Yahoo! just brought home a fistful of trophies for having the best Web applications represented in 8 out of the 10 categories.

Making it onto this list isn’t easy. After receiving more than 5,000 nominations, the editors selected 300 finalists. Then they took it to the people for the popular vote, selecting the 100 top products in 10 different categories. After nearly two million votes were cast, our friends from Yahoo! Front Page/Search, Flickr, Yahoo! Mail, My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Calendar, and Yahoo! Briefcase were all recognized by the community for offering a favorite app. And rest assured, they heart you back.

Check out the whole list of winners here .

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Baseball. It’s a time-honored tradition. A game that’s so ingrained in our culture that it was labeled “America’s pastime.” With spring comes another season of Major League Baseball, and any fan will tell you that there’s no greater feeling than watching your favorite team take the field.

I had the pleasure of watching every game from the best seat in the house, playing right field for the San Diego Padres for 20 years. Not everyone can be as lucky, and as much as they try, even the biggest fans struggle to catch every game.

We can’t help anyone make the team, but we’re definitely doing our part to make sure fans don’t miss out on any of the action this season. Yahoo! Sports just signed a deal with Major League Baseball to carry each and every game of the 2008 season – live and streaming – on Yahoo! Sports. As you know, we’re already the Internet’s leading sports destination, and this partnership will bring millions of the world’s most devoted fans to Yahoo!.

No more earpieces at the office. No more crowding into the sports bar during lunch. No more erasing your kid’s shows to make room on the DVR. I even had a friend who skipped his youngest brother’s wedding reception – including his speech as best man – so that he could catch the end of a game. Had we announced this partnership a couple of years ago, his sister-in-law may be talking to him today.

All you need to be a loyal fan now is a computer and Yahoo! Sports. Here I was, beginning to worry about how I was going to catch all of my son’s games (sorry, Tony, I’m a busy man!). Now we can all relax and know that America’s Pastime is conveniently waiting for us online, wherever we are at the time. Sorry, you’ll have to supply your own hotdog…

Tony Gwynn
Yahoo! Sports Baseball Expert

What is the Holy Grail for online marketers? Well, it starts with knowing in real time whether your campaign is working or not. And it ends with turning that insight into tweaks that improve performance.

After all, nothing is worse for advertisers — and consumers — than marketing that bombs.

Enter IndexTools, a leading provider of Web analytics software for online marketing, which we announced we’re acquiring today. Their technology will give our customers tools for monitoring and analyzing websites and marketing campaigns, providing valuable insights into key metrics, traffic patterns and performance. And that means consumers are more likely to see marketing content that’s engaging and relevant.

We’ll initially make these tools available to our vast community of 150,000 small- to medium-sized business customers, but we’ll eventually extend them to third party developers who can use them to track how their applications are performing with visitors.

When it comes to marketers, we have just one goal: To be their partner of choice. IndexTools is another great arrow in our quiver.

Bassel Ojjeh
SVP and Head of Yahoo! Strategic Data Solutions

We’re very excited to announce that Flickr now supports video!

Yes, those videos you’ve been accumulating on your hard drive or cell phone finally have a great place to hang out, meet other videos, and be loved.

Adding the ability to share videos on Flickr is a natural extension of our mission to be the “eyes of the world” — letting our members share what they see with the people who matter most to them, be they family and friends, or the world. As we set about adding video to one of the world’s most loved photo sharing experiences (Flickr has over 25 million members worldwide who have collectively uploaded over 2 billion photos), we did a lot of homework. We spoke to our members, took surveys, played with very many video experiences on the web, and, of course, took lots of video. Through the process, we learned a few surprising things:

• Most videos being captured today are essentially “long photos” — short clips that are captured on digital still cameras or mobile phones rather than long format video taken by traditional video cameras
• People aren’t sharing these clips much. If they are, it’s either via playback on their camera, DVD, or sending a large email file.
• While certainly there is video being shared on the web, most of it is re-broadcast content, such as clips from TV shows. If it’s user recorded content, much of it is material that is trying to be like broadcast content.

The video equivalent for the personal, authentic moments that are the hallmark of photos found on Flickr is actually pretty tough to find.

Until now. Check out some of the great videos shared by members of our Beta program:

So here’s how it works. If you’re a pro member, you can go to Flickr and start uploading your videos now. Video on Flickr works the same way as photos. Features you know and love like easy uploading, tagging, sets, sharing, privacy settings, adding to groups, geo-tagging, interestingness, and stats all work for video just as they do for photos. We support videos that are up to 90 seconds long each and up to 150MB large. Your unlimited storage limits still apply — so go ahead, push that to the limit.

Why 90 seconds?
Most video that people capture is, in actuality, fairly short-format content captured on digital still cameras. Our research suggests that most of it is actually under 60 seconds, and 90 seconds should be a pretty comfortable limit. As with (most) other features on the site, we’d love to hear feedback.

Why pro only?
Pro members are the most active, dedicated members of the Flickr community and are the foundation to all we do at Flickr. Starting with them seemed like the right way to introduce such a significant new feature to the site.

So what are you waiting for? Free your videos — share them on Flickr.

Kakul Srivastava
General Manager, Flickr

We went from 8-tracks to iPods, snail mail to email, the VCR to the DVR. These are just a few examples of industries that have been completely changed by innovation. History clearly shows that inefficient marketplaces are ripe for transformation. And that’s what we’re focused on here at Yahoo!. We plan to forever change the way advertisers, publishers, agencies, and ad networks interact with one another in order to serve ads that are relevant and effective.

We’re popping the hood today on a new advertising management platform, AMP! from Yahoo! (you might have seen it referred to as Project Apex). It’s been under development for some time now by an army of engineers, product strategists and managers, and user-interface design experts — all intimately familiar with the online advertising industry. They understand the pain the industry currently feels in how things are done.

Here’s the core premise that’s fueled this new platform: Online advertising is growing increasingly sophisticated, yet it’s unnecessarily Byzantine to buy and sell. The online media landscape is incredibly fragmented. And, today, the process of finding your target audience, booking inventory, negotiating pricing, seeking approval, creating tearsheets, testing ads — it’s living in an 8-track world. Let’s just say people are doing a lot more faxing and phone calling than should be necessary in 2008. It’s terribly inefficient.

AMP! will not only automate all of these processes and take the cycle time down from weeks to minutes, it will enable a new, more open paradigm, taking participants from private walled gardens to a new world where they will be able to buy and sell across the entire Web – all in one interface, with a few clicks of a mouse. It’s like a stock market for ads — the more efficient the marketplace, the more value in it. The impact is hard to overstate. This is simply not possible today and we think that’s really hobbling the industry’s ability to focus on what matters most — developing great creative and getting it front of the right person.

We recently previewed AMP! for our partners in the Newspaper Consortium and there were “ah ha!” moments visible across the room, with execs throwing out comments like “blown away,” “revolutionary,” and they even put “sexy” and “ad serving” in the same sentence.

AMP! from Yahoo! is real. We will start rolling the platform out in phases beginning next quarter, and will open it up for additional publishers as well as advertisers, agencies, and ad networks throughout the rest of 2008 and into next year. And you can see what the newspaper execs were so excited about by checking out this short video:

Sue Decker
President

“Using technology to make the world a better place.” That was the theme of remarks I made yesterday at Georgetown University, where I had the chance to honor the research of Irene Wu, the inaugural Yahoo! International Values, Communications, Technology, and Global Internet Fellow. Irene’s work is part of a partnership we created with Georgetown a year ago to study the link between international values and Internet and communications technologies.

Our goal is to inspire scholars to explore new ways to use technology for good, particularly in navigating the complexities that go hand-in-hand with the shrinking globe that the Internet has created. These are complexities we at Yahoo! are well familiar with. While we’ve been at the forefront of opening up new communications and information frontiers for citizens of the world, we’ve also seen the challenges that come when these technologies are used by governments for other purposes – those that run counter to our values.

Although our challenges have been widely reported, the full scope of efforts we’ve been making to address freedom of expression and other human rights issues may not be as well known. So I thought I’d take an opportunity to set out some examples:

• Industry Code of Conduct: We’ve been working with industry counterparts, academics, human rights organizations, and socially responsible investors to develop a code of conduct that would guide leading global technology and communications companies operating in challenging markets. We hope to announce the results of our collective efforts in the near future.
• Academic Fellowships: In addition to the Georgetown Fellowship program, we also initiated the Yahoo! International Journalism Fellowship at Stanford in conjunction with the John S. Knight Fellowships program. It focuses on journalists from press-restrictive countries, allowing them to withdraw from their environments for a year of study. The first fellow came from Pakistan and this year’s fellow is from Zimbabwe.
• Human Rights Fund: Recognizing the plight of unfairly imprisoned political dissidents, we established a Human Rights Fund last month to provide humanitarian and legal support for these individuals and their families. We’ve partnered with noted human rights activist Harry Wu, who spent 19 years in a Chinese labor camp, to administer the fund. It will also support educational efforts on human rights. We’re so grateful to have Harry’s partnership in this.
• Policy Dialogue: While we’re committed to advancing human rights globally, there are practical limits to corporate diplomacy. That’s why we’ve been urging government officials in the United States and abroad to advocate for policy change. We believe governments have the most leverage to influence the decision-making of other governments.
• Advocating for Freedom: Having followed these issues intently and having now met personally with the families of dissidents, I understand our responsibility in advocating for their release. In fact, just yesterday, I went to Capitol Hill with Harry Wu to meet with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Dianne Feinstein to discuss these issues. And I recently sent a letter to Condoleezza Rice before her visit to Beijing, urging support in seeking freedom for Shi Tao and Wang Xiaoning. With the Summer Games approaching, there seems to be a perfect window of opportunity for exerting diplomatic leverage. Senior Yahoo! leaders have also met with high-level Chinese and U.S. officials to directly appeal for release. We’ll continue to pursue this doggedly.

We’ve learned important lessons from our experience in China. We hope our experiences and plans can help guide other companies and ultimately influence the emergence of more open societies around the globe — when technology can truly be used to make the world a better place.

Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo

As evidence of our strategy to become the “must buy” for the most advertisers by ensuring the most effective and easiest marketing solutions, I am pleased to announce a significant strategic partnership with Nestlé USA in support of their rebranding effort for the iconic American candy bar, the Butterfinger. Effective immediately, the company will officially changed the name of the bar to “The Finger.”

To quote Nestlé’s press release announcing the initiative, “The renaming program reflects the results of a two-year comprehensive study conducted by the company into consumer perceptions of the Butterfinger name. According to the study, an overwhelming majority of consumers identified the phrase with undesirable traits, such as being clumsy, awkward, and lacking in physical coordination, skill, or grace.”

Nestlé has partnered with Yahoo! to provide consumers with a robust, turnkey solution for providing fans of the crispety, crunchety, peanut-buttery taste with more insights into the brand transformation. The robust new packaging instructs users to go to Yahoo! and search for “The Finger” to find more information, creating unique synergies and cross pollination opportunities between the two leading brands.

This cutting-edge campaign leverages Yahoo!’s pioneering approach toward creating premier opportunities for its marketing customers. We believe this sort of high-performance solution will continue to empower marketers to broaden their horizons as they build next-generation online brand identities.

UPDATE: Ok, people, you’ve probably figured this out by now — this is all just a load of April Fool’s horse puckey. But we are partnering with Nestlé to launch the new Butterfinger Comedy Network on Yahoo! Video, featuring hundreds of the funniest comedies, spoofs, pranks, and standups from across the Web. And Nestlé actually is distributing these clever babies — 200,000 free Finger bars are now available at 2,000 7-Eleven stores across the country. Or you can bid on one on Ebay’s Giving Works site. Tasty.

Curtiss Barr
Director, Global Partner Solutions