Economic traumas. Military entanglements. Crazy weather. And yet, even as we tried to find ways to survive day to day, we were also acutely aware that we were living through momentous times.

The Yahoo! Year in Review returns. Since 2001, we’ve been crunching lists based on search data. Naturally, we’ve expanded quite a bit since those early Internet days, and because a list of 10 is barely a drop in the sea of billions of searches, we’ve expanded beyond that to walk through the moments and events behind the trends.

This year, we have eight primary themes, and not surprisingly, two are finance-focused. “Financial Hangovers” and “Market Darlings” reflect the yin-yang of a rough year. Many of you hunkered down, staycationed, built up credit—and in more heart-wrenching scenarios reflected in searches, checked in with state unemployment sites, foreclosure details, and student loan alternatives. Not all businesses were bailing (or bailed out): Market Darlings touches on the big leap in fiscal viability of social networking sites (or rather, tiny little leaps in 140 characters or less) and e-readers. Whoever said people don’t read anymore needs to get thee to a wireless device.

You didn’t give up the political diet that you were on for the past two years. Aside from a few puzzling gubernatorial detours here and there, many of you focused on a political agenda that ranged from stimulus plans to wayward governors. The one big political category is “Obama in the House.” Barack Obama was the first politician to crack the Yahoo! Top 10 by taking the No. 3 spot in 2008, but he slipped off this year when he became the 44th President. Then again, people knew exactly where he was: on Pennsylvania Avenue, churning out executive orders and setting priorities. No matter if you voted for or protested against, the commander-in-chief commanded the headlines and searches.

We also covered overnight sensations (Susan Boyle) and infamous breakouts (Nadya “Octomom” Suleman) in “Sudden Fame,” newly coined terms in health (H1N1) and science (conficker worm) in “Mad Science,” shocking passings and sad good-byes in “Farewells,” and of course the Top 10 Searches.

Several notable shifts happened in the Top 10. The breaking news that Michael Jackson died became the top search of the year. As many of you know, the Web traffic on June 25, the day the news emerged of his demise, was massive, surpassing even Inauguration Day just months earlier. Online investigations into his death also turned into tributes to the King of Pop’s legacy, as people sought his music, videos, and even costumes to honor him on Halloween night.

While some are familiar faces (WWE, Britney Spears, NASCAR, Runescape), some terms are new: Vampire hysteria vaulted “The Twilight Saga” to the No. 2 slot, savvy rising star Megan Fox got herself in the top 5, and Kim Kardashian isn’t just the new Paris Hilton, but a symbol of reality TV prowess. As for Britney Spears, the princess of pop was hard at work this year on her “Circus” tour, and cut back on the antics that had commanded searches for the last four years of her No. 1 reign.

This year on the Year In Review site,  we also created a “Rewind” video. Check it out here:

YOUR YEAR IN REVIEW:

And as part of the 2009 Year in Review, Yahoo!s have an opportunity to tweet their own top moments of 2009. Tweet your top moments of 2009 here:

http://yearinreview.yahoo.com/2009/moments

By the way, some consider 2009 more than a historical turning point, but also the marker for the decade’s end. This year was more than a handful, but you can take a look at our past top searches by checking these links:

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

Vera Chan, Senior Buzz Editor for Yahoo!

The core of our message will focus on YOU. It will celebrate all of your individual wants, needs, interests, and passions. That’s because Yahoo! really is all about you — we’re constantly evolving to give you more of what you want and less of what you don’t. We want you to make the Web your own and are designing products to put you in the driver’s seat of your Internet experience. Our new brand positioning reflects that.

Our campaign will kick off in the U.S. on Monday, September 28, expand to the U.K. and India on October 5, and reach other markets in 2010, including Brazil, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, and Taiwan. We’re quite serious about our vision to be the center of people’s online lives. You’ll find us what might seem like everywhere online, on network and cable TV, on the radio, in print, and outdoor.

Why now? We are relentlessly focused on making the Web more personally relevant for you. We’ve backed that up with major product enhancements during the past few months. We recently updated Mail and Messenger with new tools and features. In the week ahead, our new homepage — the epitome of openness and personalization — will be broadly available in a number of global markets. And, today, we’re debuting the new Yahoo! Search experience. Of course, there’s plenty more to come, and although we’re still one of the most recognizable brands in the world, now’s the time to start retelling our great story and revitalizing our bond with people.

I should also note that people like you helped shape the message of this new campaign. We conducted a massive research effort that involved focus groups with thousands of people in seven countries. It helped us confirm that a brand refresh was in order, that people crave an answer to “What is Yahoo! all about?”, and that, although we’ve drifted apart a bit, people around the world still want to love Yahoo!.

This is much more than an advertising campaign. It’s our promise to you that your life online will become more personal and more meaningful with Yahoo!. We believe we offer the only Web experience that converges your personal world and the world at large to create integrated, personally relevant experiences. And it sets the direction for how we will deliver awesome new experiences and continue to push the frontiers of science and technology to invent Web products and services that will dazzle you for years to come.

You’ll hear lots more about the campaign in the coming weeks. Be sure to check back on Monday when we pull back the curtain. We look forward to hearing what you think. We want you to get more out of the Web, so you can get more out of life.

Elisa Steele
EVP & Chief Marketing Officer

But today, at a press conference in New York, after verifying the results with their top technical brass, Netflix officially declared Yehuda and his team the grand prize champions. To achieve this honor, they bested 41,305 teams from 186 countries.

To reiterate, this was no easy feat. Every person in the world has a different taste in movies. Yehuda, for example, loves the Godfather, but is not much of a James Bond fan (whether it’s Connery, Moore, Daulton, Brosnan, Craig, or the other guy). And it’s not just Yehuda — everyone has personal tastes that don’t perfectly correspond to box office results, DVD sales, or Academy Awards. As a result, figuring out what movies should be recommended to you is an intense scientific problem.

In fact, it is such an impressive piece of research that Yehuda’s paper detailing one of his main contributions to the prize-winning team won the best paper award at KDD-09 (otherwise know as 15th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining).

It’s too complicated a paper to summarize here with any justice, but let me give you the gist: Yehuda figured out that the way people rate movies on Netflix changes over time and, in some cases, from day to day. In other words, not only do my tastes “mature” and shift, but so do my moods. For example, on a Monday, perhaps out of frustration with having to be back in the office, maybe I’m a little harsh on the movie I watched Sunday night, which I give a 1-star rating in spite of it not being that terrible. On the other hand, that film I saw with my kids when we were on vacation – the one that had them laughing all night — gets a warm-hearted 5 stars when it wasn’t exactly an aesthetic masterpiece. Yehuda laid down the research to mathematically model this phenomenon and it’s a major reason why his team cracked the code to get over 10-percent.

Ultimately, this exactly why we founded Yahoo! Labs — to encourage Yahoos to think outside of our own sandbox and contribute to industry-wide technical and scientific challenges that will some day make your online life easier. Sometimes that means just making sure there’s less spam in your email inbox and — in this case — making sure that your Netflix queue is filled with movies you’re really going to like.

• New York Times – Netflix Awards $1 Million Prize and Starts a New Contest
• Forbes – The Netflix R&D Game
• Fortune – Box office boffo for brainiacs: The Netflix Prize

Prabhakar Raghavan
Head of Yahoo! Labs

Today we’re taking a huge step in bringing more of Yahoo!’s most popular properties and services to mobile devices around the world. You can now have Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Fantasy Football and Flickr, with much of the same interactivity as on the PC, on your iPhone or iPod touch (via the App Store) and select BlackBerry models (Bold, Tour, and 8900 series). It’s all part of our effort to help you stay connected.

The new Yahoo! Finance app, available on the iPhone or iPod touch and compatible BlackBerry models, helps you stay on top of the market, your portfolio, and the latest news, research, and analysis with powerful interactivity. The app lets you:

• Follow the broad market indices or a specific company
• Access the top financial news stories
• Follow your personalized portfolio from Yahoo! Finance
• Drill down into specific company information (news, chart, financial metrics)
• Get currency conversions on the go
• Watch streaming video from Tech Ticker

The new app is available in English for the U.S. and Canada and we expect to support more languages and countries in the near future, so stay tuned!

The new Fantasy Football app, available on the iPhone or iPod touch and compatible BlackBerry models, ensures that when you’re away from your computer or TV, you’ll still be in the know when your team puts points on the board. You’ll have up-to-the-minute access to rosters, players, live scores via Stat Tracker, and the latest expert analysis and news. The new app lets you:

• Edit your bench (add and drop) directly from your phone
• View matchups, standings, player and team stats, etc.
• Get live scoring just like on the PC
• Get news and expert advice just like you’re used to on the PC

This app is available in English for the U.S. and Canada – those football-loving nations.

Flickr fans will be amazed by the functionality in their new Flickr iPhone/iPod touch app – starting with the Ken Burns-effect on famed Flickr images when you first launch it. In addition to being able to share and discover photos and videos, you can also take advantage of location-based information when uploading new stuff. The new app lets you:

• Easily upload and tag photos and video while on the go
• Automatically geo-tag before you upload (opt-in required)
• Add and view photos and videos by tags & sets
• Share photos with friends via email
• Search photos and videos from the Flickr community all over the world by subject, people, or places
• See your contacts’ recent photos and activity
• Make comments and mark photos as favorites

The new Flickr app is available in English, French and traditional Chinese for the U.S., Canada, UK, France, Hong Kong, and Singapore – with more to come.

And don’t despair if you don’t have an iPhone/iPod touch or one of the compatible BlackBerry devices. You can always access these three popular services from the mobile web – just head to Flickr (http://m.flickr.com), Yahoo! Finance (http://m.yahoo.com/finance), and Fantasy Sports (http://m.yahoo.com/fantasy). And be sure to visit the new Yahoo! Mobile Homepage (http://m.yahoo.com) and personalize it with your favorite content and services from across the Internet.

Keep an eye out for additional mobile offerings across a lot more devices as we continue to bring the best of Yahoo! to mobile users around the world.

David Ko
SVP, Yahoo! Mobile

This deal is part of Yahoo!’s broader strategy to grow our international business, particularly in emerging markets. In many countries, vast populations — and advertisers — are just starting to come online. The potential is tremendous. Yahoo! has a large and growing audience in these markets today, and our acquisition of Maktoob represents the kind of investment we’re making to cater to the needs of these promising regions.

We plan to join forces with the Maktoob team, the strongest in the region, to create locally relevant content, services, and programming. That’s no easy task when you consider the differences between countries like UAE, Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But we’re committed to literally translating our winning formula for this growing market in many ways, including through locally-based editorial teams.

Initially, we’ll plan to introduce Arabic versions of Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Search, and our homepage and then eventually local versions of properties like News, Sports, and Finance. We’ll also focus on creating content and services tailored to the region. No other global company has made this kind of investment in local relevance for the Arab world.

Arabs are vastly underserved by today’s Internet offerings. The World Bank estimates that there are 320 million Arabic speakers around the globe, yet less than one per cent of online content is written in their language (despite a vibrant Arabic blogosphere). We have a big opportunity to meet this growing demand, and we think Yahoo!, building on Maktoob’s local expertise, brings the scale and heft to draw many more people online in the region –- and we plan to give them compelling reasons to log on.

We also recognize the Middle East is deeply complex, a complexity mirrored in the online world, and that it will present certain challenges. As an Internet pioneer in the emerging markets, we’ve learned important lessons and we’re committed to responsible global engagement. This means being sensitive to local laws, customs, and norms while also protecting and promoting the rights of our users. We believe our engagement in the Middle East can be a positive force for people by increasing access to information, supporting a thriving marketplace for the exchange of ideas, and bridging local, regional, and international communities.

It’s easy to forget the fastest growing Internet audiences are in the emerging markets. That’s not lost on us. We’re passionate about growing our presence in places like Southeast Asia, India, Latin America, and Africa. And we can’t wait to yodel in the Middle East.

In an effort to keep things brief here on Yodel, we have provided a link to the press release and we have also created an informational site that should answer many of your questions.

Keith Nilsson
Senior Vice President, Emerging Markets

Let’s start with Yahoo! Mail.
After much testing, today we’ve reached a significant Yahoo! Mail milestone by bringing the best of the web – including photosharing, third-party apps and social features – to people’s inboxes… all 300 million inboxes around the world.

For photo hounds, we’ve introduced new multi-select and drag-and-drop functionality that makes it easier to attach photos, view thumbnail previews, and rotate images before you send them. And we’ve upped the photo and filesize limits from 10MB to 25MB.

We’ve also streamlined the inbox experience to further expand the social and open capabilities. A new Application Box brings third-party open apps like PayPal, Picnik, Xoopit, and ZumoDrive together with Flickr, Calendar and Notepad to make managing your email folders easier. Plus, we’re excited to add a new app to the gallery in a few weeks from Evite. With the Evite app you’ll be able to create invitations, check on events, and add items to your Calendar all from one place. And we are only scratching the surface on the apps available. Stay tuned as we roll out additional apps worldwide and specific apps for regional markets over the coming year.

Your inbox will soon be a bit more social, filtering out the noise by surfacing the most recent emails from your contacts and giving you birthday reminders. In addition, we’ve improved Yahoo! Contacts so you can automatically get updates when a contact changes their name, e-mail address or phone number.

We’ve also redesigned Yahoo! Mail for the mobile web (http://m.yahoo.com), giving you one-click access to check, compose and search email; allowing attachment downloads like Microsoft Office, PDFs and photos; and letting you access personal folders on the go. It’s available today on the iPhone and will be released on 400 other devices with HTML browsers on September 1st.

Here’s a video tour of some of the new features in Yahoo! Mail:

Introducing Yahoo! Messenger 10
With this new release of Yahoo! Messenger, the biggest news is the debut of truly high quality video calling. Using your Web cam, you can now have full-screen, face-to-face video conversations with crystal clear audio for free from right within your Yahoo! Messenger window. Messenger is also more getting social as we roll out new features to help you stay in closer contact with friends and family. A new “Updates” tab gives you a quick glimpse of what your contacts are up to – including status updates, Flickr uploads, Yahoo! Buzz stories, Tweets and more. Since our popularity only grows around the globe, we’re also letting you customize your client with one of 16 languages without having to download a different version. And finally, an improved iPhone Messenger app ensures the same great experience with your contacts’ messages even when you’re on the go.

Download the Messenger 10 Beta here: http://messenger.yahoo.com/winbeta. And be sure to check out a demo of what’s new in Yahoo! Messenger 10:

Testing the new Yahoo! Search.
To prove just how committed we are to continued innovation in your search experience, we’re testing a new search results page that ups the ante on personal relevance. We’re providing new tools for refining results that let you explore related concepts, display only results from popular Yahoo! and third-party sites, and narrow results by types of content like people, videos, and discussion forums.

We’re also using advanced science to detect what you’re searching for based on your search history. For example, if you search for “cat” and then later for “jaguar” we can figure out that you’re looking for content about the animal and not the car.

We’re running random bucket tests (no opt-in at this time) of this new version of search with a small subset of our users. In case you’re not one of the lucky millions, here’s a sneak preview of what we’re testing:

Finally, following the lead of the new Yahoo! Homepage, which now proudly wears our corporate color, we are introducing a new “universal header” across every Yahoo! product and service in the U.S. It not only sports a purple logo, it also features a Yahoo! Search box that integrates Search Assist on every page. We never want you to have to go far to find what you’re looking for.

Check out screenshots of our various enhancements as well as more details of today’s news at our Press Room and over at the Yahoo! Messenger Blog and the Yahoo! Mail Blog.

Bryan Lamkin
SVP Yahoo! Applications

One thing this recession has created is a society of unapologetic penny pinchers. We’re frugal and proud. That’s why we’ve just spruced up Yahoo! Deals, first launched in November, which now features more great bargains, including grocery coupons, local deals, and even the ability to share your dollar-saving discoveries.

Take Yahoo! Search trends, for example. Searches for “printable coupons” on Yahoo! are up 50 percent in 2009, compared to the same time in 2008, and up 135 percent compared to 2007. The most popular coupon-related searches? Coupons for pizza, major retailers and groceries. And while there are signs of economic recovery, our wallets remain cautious. In a recent Yahoo! survey, 43 percent of participants said they’re using coupons more since last year.

In addition to daily deals, weekly electronic circulars, and online coupons from major retailers, here’s what you’ll find on our refreshed site:

• Grocery coupons for all kinds of kitchen staples, provided by Coupons.com
• Coupons for local chain and neighborhood restaurants, retailers and service providers provided by Valpak
• Exclusive deals from new partners including Visa and Next Jump; Ecobunga! and Greenzer (for eco-friendly products); TechBargains.com and LogicBUY (for computers and electronics); plus coupons and deals on a variety of products from CouponAlbum, CouponMountain, BradsDeals.com and Dealnews
• The gas finder module that helps you find the cheapest gas by zip code
• Improved search so you can quickly find deals from across the site
• Video stories on consumer shopping trends and savings tips provided by Inside Edition
• New social features that let you share deals with friends via email and popular social networks, and to save deals for later use
• The ability to post or read comments on each deal

So whether you’re a bona fide cheapskate or just an average Joe riding out the recession, check out deals.yahoo.com to start saving money today!

Greg Hintz
Head of Yahoo! Shopping

Photo from sgrace

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

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.

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

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

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

In the last year, we’ve seen civil marriage rights for gays and lesbians both granted and subsequently taken away from Californians, while also witnessing marriage legalized in 10% of U.S. states and even more countries in Europe. We’ve also seen a further explosion in LGBT pride celebrations across the globe. This year marks the first pride celebrations in China, several countries throughout Central America, and even Tahiti. There were multiple organized events for LGBT rights in cities across India, Russia, Cuba, and nearly 100 new pride celebrations throughout Brazil. Check out the map of over 1,000 LGBT pride events across the globe at pride.yahoo.com for more info.

On the home front, we had a great time again sponsoring San Francisco’s International LGBT Film Festival this past week. In commemoration of Stonewall’s 40th birthday, we hid free Yahoo! Mail Plus and Flickr Pro packages under the seats of 40 lucky audience members at two sold-out screenings at the historic Castro Theatre. It was an amazing experience to see a packed-house of 1,400 people simultaneously shout out the classic Yahoo! yodel when the prize packages were announced. Congrats to all the winners!

However, that was just the run-up to our big giveaway this pride season. We’re excited to announce that Yahoo! is going to send two winners on a week-long trip to the 2010 Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras in beautiful Sydney, Australia, next summer (that’s February, a nice treat for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere). Mardi Gras is a spectacular citywide pride event in Sydney, and the prize-winners will arrive in time for the big parade and extravaganza. You can enter to win either online at http://pride.yahoo.com through July 1, 2009, or in person at the Yahoo! booth at the San Francisco LGBT Pride Festival this Sunday, June 28. Please come visit us near the corner of Grove and Larkin Streets on City Hall Plaza, say hi to Yahoo!, and enter for a chance to win.

Again, Yahoo! wishes you and your loved ones happy LGBT Pride 2009!

Drew Geishecker
Co-chair, Yahoo! Pride

The passing of the King of Pop set multiple records across Yahoo!. On our front page, the story “Michael Jackson rushed to hospital” was the highest clicking story in our history. It generated a whopping 800,000 clicks within 10 minutes and news of his death saw 560,000 clicks in 10 minutes. Also, the news area on our front page experienced five times the amount of traffic it normally receives.

Yahoo! News set an all-time record in unique visitors with 16.4 million people, surpassing our previous record of 15.1 million visitors on election day. Four million people visited the site between 3-4pm Pacific time, setting an hourly record. We also recorded 175 million page views yesterday, our fourth highest after Inauguration Day, the day after the Inauguration, and Hurricane Ike.

In Yahoo! Music, a staggering 21,000 people left comments on a blog post about the music legend. And over on Flickr, more than 4,000 Michael Jackson-related images have been posted in the last day, including art images labeled as “in tribute” and photos of spontaneous memorials all over the world, such as this Thriller “flashdance” in San Francisco.

Also, here’s a behind-the-scenes look at our search logs, revealing what our users were most curious about as they tried to reconcile the news:

• Michael Jackson – including variations of his name and nicknames
• Photos – especially for photos of his face and how it changed throughout the years; also, searches for “plastic surgery“
• Videos – both videos of Michael Jackson and his music videos
• Music – Jackson Five music and his solo work; also searches for his albums and songs
• Songs - including lyrics, especially for hits like Thriller, Man in the Mirror, Billy Jean, and PYT
• Questions – “did Michael Jackson die?”, “who is Michael Jackson?” (!!), “when did Michael Jackson die?”, “why did Michael Jackson die?”
• Cardiac arrest – and other medical terms mentioned in the news
• People – lots of searches for Jackson family members; notable friends like Quincy Jones, Elizabeth Taylor, his lawyer; ex-wives Debbie Rowe and Lisa Marie Presley; and his children
• Elvis Presley – not just because of the Lisa Marie connection, but people want to know how old Elvis was when he died
• Places - Holmby Hills, UCLA Medical Center, Encino, and his house location
• Hoax rumors – given that TMZ.com was the first to confirm his death, people wondered if it was all true. Then came rumors of Harrison Ford and Jeff Goldblum’s deaths.
• RIP Michael Jackson – was very prominent in Twitter
• Drugs – for the pain killer Demerol and other variations/spellings
• Celebrity death in threes – because apparently people are superstitious
• How to moonwalk – because nobody did it better

And that’s just from yesterday…

Michael Jackson’s death was clearly a seminal event. And unlike in the 1970s, we all have a remarkable tool that brings the world together — informed and connected — over those “I remember when…” moments.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Image from thechorompys

Beginning today, with the launch of Yahoo! My Display Ads, businesses of all sizes can easily launch display advertising campaigns on Yahoo! to reach the targeted audiences that matter to them most. The new solution is an easy and affordable way to create and run display ads on Yahoo! – even without a major ad budget. In fact, a campaign can cost you as little as $30 per day.

So, how does it work?

Let’s say you own a local boutique shop and you want to reach local-area women. With Yahoo! My Display Ads, you can build a customized ad campaign in a matter of minutes. First, choose from our more than 800 ad templates (organized by business category) and customize the text, images, colors and add your company logo —no design expertise necessary. Then, set your budget and decide who you want to target — by Yahoo! channel content, age, demographics, and location. For example, you could target females between the age of 18-24 in your city. (Keep in mind, though, that the more you target, the less potential traffic you may receive. We recommend starting broad and working your way smaller.) You can even decide whether you want to pay by how many times your ad was viewed or by how often it was clicked on. Finally, we give you daily reports on how ads are performing and let you easily adjust your campaign on the fly.

We partnered with Seattle-based AdReady to develop this service, marking the first time that businesses with ad budgets of all sizes can reach localized portions of Yahoo!’s 165 million users in the U.S. with targeted display ads. To learn more, check out mydisplayads.yahoo.com and get started!

Amanda Reierson
Director, B2B Marketing

In my remarks today (which you can find here – PDF), I conveyed Yahoo!’s long leadership on privacy matters and shared our comprehensive approach to this issue. We believe the best approach to user privacy is one that provides people with plenty of transparency, gives them a chance to opt-out of things they don’t want, and educates them about their choices, while also putting limits on how much information we hold and how long we it.

Last December we announced an industry-leading data retention policy, which the New York Times described as “…an encouraging development for the cause of Internet privacy.” We now hold your data in identifiable form for just 90 days (with some limited exceptions) — the shortest duration in the industry. And we apply it to the widest array of data, far outpacing our competitors.

Most people recognize and accept that online advertising fuels the largely free Internet economy. Their only caveat often is that if they do have advertising, they want to see ads that are relevant to their needs and interests — and I often hear from them when it’s not. We want every page on Yahoo! to be relevant and compelling both in terms of content and advertising. This marriage provides the best possible user experience and it is what Yahoo! is all about.

But we understand that not all users share the same views, so Yahoo! makes an opt out available. For most online advertising, we believe a good opt out paired with responsible data retention policies is the right default setting. It offers meaningful privacy protections while providing the best possible user experience. A good opt out needs to be prominent, readily accessible, clearly conveyed, and have options for persistency. Yahoo! has been working to ensure that our opt out is exactly that. Head to our Privacy Center for more on how to manage your preferences.

Privacy is at the core of our trusted relationship with more than 500 million users around the globe. In my more than 11 years of overseeing our policy decisions, I’ve learned that advances in consumer protection are most often driven by the industry and we hope that Congress will consider an approach that allows us to continue keeping pace with not only technology advances, but also your demands and expectations.

Anne Toth
VP Policy, Head of Privacy

Photo from kimberlyfaye

The new Yahoo! Toolbar now offers greater customization and more immediate access to the information you care about most from across the entire web – not just Yahoo! sites. Currently available if you’re using Internet Explorer 6+ and now for Firefox (as a beta), too, our new toolbar also helps you do some really handy things, including:

• Preview and Go: Most of us have sites we check every day –- sometimes more than once. Now you can preview information from your favorite sites directly within your toolbar. Small previews drop down from your toolbar, giving you real-time information without ever having to leave the page you’re on. Customize your toolbar with dozens of apps from Yahoo! and across the rest of the web, so you can check on your multiple email inboxes (Yahoo! and AOL), your eBay listings, the latest news from People.com or USA Today, stock portfolios, and even your local weather or movie showtimes.
• Search Faster: One of the most popular features on toolbars is search. So, we’ve created a better, more efficient way for you to conduct web searches (with the help of some cool technology from Inquisitor). The search box in your Yahoo! Toolbar now offers query suggestions, recall of sites based on your recent search history, and the ability to directly search other web sites, like Flickr and Wikipedia — right from the search box. It’s a real time saver!

By bringing the best of the web together in one place, we want to make the web work better for you – right from within your toolbar. Get started by downloading the new Yahoo! Toolbar at http://toolbar.yahoo.com/.

Burke Culligan
Senior Director, Yahoo! Front Doors

This week, you’ll find a number of new third-party “apps” and “widgets” on Yahoo! Mail, My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Connected TV and Zimbra email to give you quicker access to the things you do online every day – whether planning your dinner menu, sharing photos with friends, or looking for YouTube videos. Below are screenshots and more info on some that we think are especially handy.

Make the Most of Your Inbox
Back in December, we started testing Yahoo! Mail apps that let you do all kinds of new things from your inbox. Today we’re introducing more great options, including:

• PayPal: request or send money securely
• Picnik: edit photos and share photo collages
• Zumo Drive: email files as large as 100MB for free

These apps are only available to a limited number of people during our beta period. Read more about the new Yahoo! Mail apps introduced today, and if you’d like to try it out, click here and enter your Yahoo! ID.

Personalized Productivity on My Yahoo!
We opened up My Yahoo! in December to tap into innovation from third party developers across the Web and give you even more choice for your personalized start page. Some of the new My Yahoo! apps available today include:

• Mint.com: manage your finances, set budgets and get money-saving tips
• Food & Wine Pairing: find recipes, menus, wine reviews and recommended pairings
• Green Lifestyle: grow your green knowledge and help benefit the environment
• WordPress: post to your blog and moderate your recent comments

To add these and other apps to your page, click on any of the links above or go to “Add Content” and look for the “Open Apps” category in the My Yahoo! gallery. These apps are built on the Yahoo! Application Platform, and you can read more about them and many others on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog.

Do More on Your TV
Back in March, we helped raise your TV’s IQ with widgets that can deliver the best of the Internet to your living room. In addition to your favorite Web sites like Flickr, Twitter, USA Today Sports, Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! Weather, Internet-enabled TVs from Samsung and LG Electronics (coming soon from Sony and VIZIO) now feature more best-of-the-web Yahoo! TV widgets, including:

• YouTube: search and view YouTube’s massive library of video content on your TV screen
• Showtime: find information, schedules, interviews and short clips from popular Showtime offerings
• eBay (coming soon): get real-time updates, place bids, and monitor your favorite items on eBay

Zimlets Anyone?
Even Yahoo!’s Zimbra (our advanced open-source email & collaboration software) is getting into the mix, introducing a handful of new Zimlets (which integrate new features in email, similar to the Yahoo! Mail applications). Automatically save emails as documents, drop sticky notes on messages, and handle expense reports with one click. More information can be found on the Zimbra blog.

By making Yahoo! more open, we’re able to bring all that is good and useful on the Web even closer to your fingertips. We’re constantly adding new apps, so stay tuned for more.

Tapan Bhat
SVP, Integrated Consumer Experiences, Yahoo!

What’s new, you ask?
We recently made the new Yahoo! Mobile (http://m.yahoo.com) available on the mobile Web across more than 300 devices and as an Apple iPhone app – both are available in eight countries, with more launching soon. We’ve moved out of beta and are in the process of rolling it out as our default mobile homepage.

Like the PC homepage we’re testing, the new Yahoo! Mobile has a more feature-rich design, letting you bring together your favorite content and services from across the Web, making it more personally relevant. For example, my experience is customized with my Yahoo! Mail, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo! Messenger accounts, as well as my various stocks, favorite blog feeds, and weather from my favorite cities. The beauty of it is that you can customize the experience to exactly what you want and add anything to the page.

As for the Web, we recently started testing some new designs based on your feedback. We recognize that many of you like your homepage just the way it is, thank-you-very-much, so the overall look and feel of the page will be familiar. But take a closer look, and you’ll see that we’ve made some fundamental improvements and packed in features that are easy to use and easy to make your own – things you have told us you want.

The “My Favorites” area on the left side of the page includes an applications “dashboard” with the ability to preview, interact with or navigate to your favorite sites – whether they’re on Yahoo! or elsewhere on the Web. It’s all fully customizable.

Here’s some of what’s new and cool:

• Lots more apps: We’re testing a growing library of apps that let you get more done without leaving the page. Some of these apps include eBay and MySpace, and content sites like USA Today and NPR. We also have newly developed apps for popular Yahoo! services like Messenger, Movies and Flickr.
• Social pulse: A new Yahoo! Updates app lets you keep up with your friends’ online activities directly on the homepage – such as a recently Buzzed article or a video uploaded to YouTube.
• Easier email: We’ve separated your individual email accounts as distinct apps, rather than a combined inbox, so that it’s faster and easier to get to the exact mail you want. This was a request we heard repeatedly during testing.

What about local personalization?
As a global company, it’s critical that we create localized homepages, and we’re testing them now in France, India and the UK. While we’ll provide a consistent experience across all our global homepages in terms of design, they will be customized with information and apps that are locally relevant. For example, the new homepage in India will include a Cricket app and a whole host of others that are India-centric, while the UK site will include apps such as underground alerts, news from the BBC, and more.

This screenshot shows London Underground alerts from Transport for London:

We’re excited about the new direction of our homepages, especially because you’ve helped us build them. The designs being tested are changing frequently based on your input. Stay tuned for updates in the months ahead as we roll them out more broadly.

Tapan Bhat
SVP, Integrated Consumer Experiences, Yahoo!

Today, Yahoo! Buzz in India is starting off with more than two dozen featured Indian publishers and we look forward to welcoming many more in the coming weeks and months. Since Yahoo! Buzz launched in the U.S. just over a year ago, more than 20,000 publishers from around the world have had stories “buzzed up.”

But that’s not all. We are introducing a new look for Yahoo! Buzz overall that more prominently features contributions from the site’s community. With our new “Buzz Updates” tab, we’re making it easier to follow the submitting, voting, and commenting activity of your friends and the larger Yahoo! Buzz community. And, you’ll also find it’s faster and simpler than ever to share the stories and videos you find most interesting, since we now automatically fill in the story headline and description when you submit a URL.

Take a look at the new Yahoo! Buzz:

And here’s the new Yahoo! Buzz in India:

Stay tuned for more about what’s next for Yahoo! Buzz, and in the meantime, keep buzzing and helping people find the most remarkable stories from across the Web.

Julie Demsey
Senior Director, Product Management, Yahoo! Buzz

Starting this week, we’ll be asking you to update your recovery data. Since the information we collected in the past – such as zip codes or birthdays – has increasingly become part of our public persona online, users will be given the option to provide additional information such as an alternate email address and new secret questions of their choice. U.S. users will also have the option to provide a mobile phone number. This updated information will let us help you faster in the event of a future recovery attempt – whether you’ve forgotten your password or your account has been compromised. It also lets us better protect you by creating a recovery process that includes information and questions that only you should be able to complete, with information only you should know.

Our goal is to have all Yahoo! users update this information. We’ll start prompting some users to update their data this week (note: you’ll only see this after you’ve logged in) and will continue reaching out to more and more users over the next several months. If you want to update your information proactively, visit https://edit.yahoo.com/commchannel/manage.

We hope everyone takes advantage of these new features and that, in the event you do forget your Yahoo! details, you find the recovery process as quick and painless as possible.

UPDATE: We’ve gotten some questions about how exactly you’ll be notified to update your account recovery information. You will NOT receive an email from us, but rather be prompted with a screen after you log in to your account. That said, you will receive an email from us to your Yahoo! and your alternate email address every time you update your data (ie, a new secret question). Please be mindful of any phishing attempts — emails that appear to be from Yahoo! but are not. You can read more about phishing and account security at our Yahoo! Security Center.

Sabari Devadoss
Platforms Product Manager, Yahoo! Membership

Photo from fragglerawker_03

We’ve been evolving our approach to music for the last year or so. We found that our subscription music offering required a huge amount of resources for a relatively small user base, leading to our partnership with Rhapsody. And new royalty rates made us to rethink our streaming radio service, which is now run by CBS. Through all of these tough decisions as the industry evolved, the biggest constant has been our core music offering, which connects music fans to their favorite musicians. We said, “Why compete with everyone, fighting on all fronts, if we can just move up a layer and be a resource to our users?”

So now we can be all things to all music people with a little help from our industry friends. The new Yahoo! Music Artist Pages now bring together downloads from iTunes, albums from Amazon; streams from Pandora, Last.fm and Rhapsody; music videos from YouTube; and tickets from Ticketmaster – for more than 500,000 artists. We also include photos from Flickr as well as our own Yahoo! music videos. You can customize your Artist Pages to include your favorite content modules. Previously a closed service with proprietary licensed content, this is the first major effort by any online music site to truly open itself up to third-party services.

And we’ll soon open up our site to developers so that any music service can build an application to host in our gallery. And eventually artists will be able to directly publish content to our site – so fans can keep tabs on their latest blog posts, photos, music videos, live recordings, etc.

The ultimate goal is help you discover, experience, and consume your favorite music online as easily as possible. So go out there and enjoy the music.

Michael Spiegelman
Head of Yahoo! Music

Our research found that web searchers are regularly affronted by articles, blogs, facts, and pages that contain perspectives directly contradicting their own personal beliefs and values –- whether political, religious, economic, scientific, philosophical, etc. If consumers have the freedom in whether they navigate to the HuffingtonPost.com or FOXNews.com, why not extend that same choice to search? Until today, no other search engine could provide this level of personalization –- ensuring that consumers can search with the utmost confidence, knowing that they won’t be antagonized by their results.

Ideological Search, built on Yahoo! BOSS, is the result of extensive research conducted by virtually every scientist at Yahoo!. The team applied the latest research from the fields of sentiment analysis, intent detection, eye tracking, clustering and empathic reasoning to create this revolutionary service. We also found that adaptations were required within existing technologies to ensure ideologically-biased results. For example, Pig, the large-scale data processing environment, was not compatible with all beliefs, particularly among vegetarians. As a result we developed a sister codebase called Tofu, which proved to be more flexible and gelatinous, albeit less optimized.

To give Ideological Search a test drive, type in “global warming” or “stimulus package” and see for yourself. For more background on how we developed Ideological Search, visit the Yahoo! Labs site.

We hope this is the start of a more peaceful, conflict-free Yahoo! Search experience for you.

Try Ideological Search today!

Prabhakar Raghavan
Head of Yahoo! Labs

So what if you could make those kinds of little events happen more often? Wouldn’t it be great if — when you were sitting at home or in your office — you could see your friends in the neighborhood? Maybe you could even see if one of them was interested in finding a snack for lunch!

Yahoo! has a way for you to do just that. We’ve made an application called Friends on Fire that brings together Facebook and our Fire Eagle project to help you quickly and easily share your location with your trusted friends. And you can post little messages on the map, too, to recommend bars or restaurants, or to suggest meeting up for a beer!

We like to describe Fire Eagle as a place to store information about your location. You can get your location into Fire Eagle by using all kinds of different Fire Eagle updaters — from iPhones to websites. And then — if you want — you can choose to share your location with all kinds of applications all over the Internet. There are over 70 different applications in our gallery at the moment, and more appearing every day. We also give you control over how much you choose to share with these different applications. You can choose to share your cross-street or your country, you can hide yourself from everyone, and, of course, you can change your preferences at any time.

In addition to Friends on Fire, we’re also launching a new way to update Fire Eagle — a Firefox extension that adds a button to your toolbar. With one click, your location is instantly shared with your trusted friends on your favorite services.

And finally, for the developers among us, we have three new announcements that you can read about over on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog.

In the meantime, we hope to see you guys trying out the Facebook app! And don’t hesitate to let us know what you think about it — we love to get your feedback.

Tom Coates
Head of Fire Eagle

First and foremost, we want to say congratulations to our members — this is truly a testament to their great work. Our community of more than 35 million members from all over the globe continue to amaze us with the authentic and individualistic images that they see in their daily lives and share on Flickr.

For the past few months, editors at Getty Images have been busy exploring the Flickrverse to find the right photos to be part of the collection – a task that is somewhat daunting when there are more than three billion images to choose from on Flickr. The goal was to choose photos that created a commercially viable collection, while preserving the inspirational and unexpected nature of the kinds of images that are so prevalent on Flickr. Like Flickr itself, this is a “living collection” and Getty Images will continue to add thousands of new images every month from here on out.

We see this as an exciting moment that’s breaking new ground for our members around the world, as well as the larger imagery industry. So what are you waiting for — start exploring the first set of photos on gettyimages.com/flickr.

Kakul Srivastava
Flickr General Manager

Photos courtesy of Flickr Collection/Getty Images

Today we have some exciting enhancements related to video on Flickr to announce:

• Video for All Members: We want to see what the rest of the community has to share, so we are extending the ability to upload video to all of our members. Free members can upload two videos per month, in addition to the 100MB monthly photo upload limit that’s already in place. Video, like photos, is quickly moving beyond a means to simply preserve memories and into a social activity that allows people to communicate and connect. As more devices have the ability to capture both, we’re seeing Flickr members capture videos along with photos to share their view of the world.
• Flickr in HD: Another trend that we’ve noticed is the growing appetite for higher-quality video. With the recent introduction of Nikon’s D90, Canon’s EOS 5D Mark II, Flip Mino HD, and others, it’s even easier to shoot videos in HD. Because our focus has always been on allowing our members to showcase their vision in the best way possible, we’re also enabling HD video uploading and viewing today. Only Pro members can upload videos in HD, but our entire community will benefit by being able to view high quality videos.
• Flickr Clock: All of us at Flickr love creative ways of exploring and visualizing imagery, and Flickr Clock is a new way that we want to celebrate and showcase the amazing video across the Flickrverse. Through Flickr Clock, members will be able to share their vision of what’s happening at any given minute around the world. We’ll be able to display these videos according to the approximate time that they were taken, so you can see what’s happening at different moments in time. Please help us build it into something truly unique and upload your best videos here.

It’s been truly amazing to see how creative our members can get using this medium – check out some of my favorite groups: My Day Yesterday, Timelapse Videos and Video! Video! Video!

And as with the rest of Flickr, we are continuing to evolve the video experience to make it more compelling, accessible and easy to use. So grab your cameras, and capture and share “long photos” of your own!

Here’s an HD demo from a fellow Flickrite’s commute to work:

Kakul Srivastava
Flickr General Manager

Let’s check out the numbers. The 2008 Emmy Awards averaged 12.2 million viewers, down 6% and the lowest ratings ever for an Emmy telecast. Yet the day after the awards, 4.6 million people flocked to Yahoo! TV and generated 103 million page views (nearly doubled year over year). This year’s SAG Awards drew the smallest audience since TBS and TNT began airing them together in 2006 –- with 5.3 million viewers, down 12% from 2007. The next day, 4.1 million people flooded Yahoo! Movies for its best and worst dressed gallery and checked out 83 million pages. And although the 3-hour Golden Globes won a coveted Sunday night time slot, this year’s star-studded telecast drew the lowest ratings in 13 years –- 14.6 million viewers, down from 20 million the year before. The next day, 7.2 million people descended on omg!, taking in an average of about 40 page views per person, driven mainly by an insatiable appetite for photos.

So all is not lost — we’re still just as obsessed with celebrities and their red carpet fashion foibles. Possibly more so than ever. But we’re just turning to a different screen to view it — during and after the show. So don’t cancel your Oscars party on Sunday. Just make sure you have a laptop next to the popcorn.

Sibyl Goldman
GM, Yahoo! Entertainment

Starting today, Southwest will be testing inflight wi-fi. They’ve equipped one aircraft with Internet connectivity (via Row 44) and plan to add three more before the end of March.

Yahoo! has teamed up with Southwest to build the free inflight homepage (here’s a larger screenshot), where passengers can find a host of things to either help them wile away the hours or bone up on their destination city.

Plug in your city name and you’ll find guides for the best shopping, restaurant and attractions. You’ll also get the latest in localized news, weather, and events like concerts and art exhibits. Gaming fans can choose from among more than a dozen Yahoo! Games. And a local buzz tag cloud lets you track the topics that are most popular where you’re headed – whether it’s fusion restaurants or IMAX theaters.

What you won’t find on any other airline is a cool new flight tracker that not only tells you where you are, it lets you explore places on the ground via geo-tagged photos posted to Flickr. And it’s all free. You just need a wifi-enabled laptop.

So if you’re fortunate enough to board one of Southwest’s wifi-equipped planes, you’ll be surfing the Web as soon as it’s safe to release your tray table. Read more on the Southwest blog.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Introducing Search Pad, a new feature we’re testing on Yahoo! Search that helps you keep track of websites and take notes whenever you do research online. It intelligently understands when you’re in research mode and, if you choose, collects information about the sites you visit. You can create research documents with saved websites, edit and reorder your personal notes, and share them with friends. No more handwritten scrawls, Post-Its or scattered documents. And you can access them from wherever you are.

It’ll be a few months before we officially launch Search Pad. In the meantime, have a look at this screencast to get a sense of how it works. And head over to Yahoo! Search Blog for more details.

We’re excited to bring you search innovations like these, designed to help you get stuff done – faster and easier.

Larry Cornett
Vice President, Yahoo! Search

In fact, people with Obama fever broke records across Yahoo! News on Tuesday, seeking as much news and information as possible. Let’s take a look at why:

• Historic milestone – That’s the no-brainer. It seemed that whether or not Americans voted for President Obama, they appreciated the significance of inaugurating our first African-American president. Global interest in this American tradition was never higher.
• Net news rules – As the Pew Research Center reported in December, the Internet has surpassed newspapers and all other mediums except television for national and international news. And even that is destined to change, considering 6 in 10 people under age 30 prefer the Web to TV for news. As more people turned to the Web on Tuesday, we saw our highest traffic day ever on Yahoo! News, with 12.3 million unique visitors (the equivalent of the populations of New York City and Los Angeles combined) logging 329 million page views. These eye-popping figures beat our previous records around Hurricanes Katrina and Ike.
• Web video has arrived – Online video is no longer seen as a spotty, unreliable medium fraught with outages and buffering, as it might have been in 2000 and 2004. While hiccups can still happen, it seems people now confidently log on to live news coverage online knowing they won’t miss a thing. That was paramount on Tuesday because the inauguration and ensuing festivities fell during the workday for Americans. Yahoo! News upped our video server capacity as we logged record video streams, surpassing even Election Day coverage.
• Photos attract – People like news stories, but they can’t seem to get enough of photos – both news agency and user generated. On average, people viewed more than 70 images per person among our 56 inauguration-related slideshows (vs. our normal 40 photos per person). Not surprisingly, the most viewed set was of First Daughters Malia and Sasha. Over at Flickr, people tagged more than 150,000 photos and videos with terms related to the inauguration, along with those newly submitted to the Commons by partners like the Smithsonian that show historic images of past inaugurations.

As demand for online news continues to grow, our team will look for new ways to help you sort through the volume of news information and formats available. Who knows what the next record-breaking event will be?

But one thing’s for sure. It’s nice to see Internet news come of age.

Neeraj Khemlani
VP & GM, Yahoo! News