Thankfully, things have changed. Cancer has hit close to home for me many times in the last ten years — my dad, my mom, extended family, friends. But when I was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer in 2005 shortly after starting at Yahoo!, I didn’t have to whisper about it. Not only was it okay to talk about cancer, there was an international movement to cure it. The pink ribbon had even given the disease its own trademark color.

I stood on the shoulders of those who went before me – the nearly $1 billion in research funding raised by Susan G. Komen for the Cure, Lance Armstrong and the Global Cancer Initiative of his growing Livestrong Army, and the grassroots efforts of my friend Jill and others like her. I learned from their courage, strength and willingness to ask tough questions, demand more research, and take pride in being a survivor.

It may sound trite, but I owe my own life (and my daughter’s –- born less than two years after I completed treatment) to these organizations. Each of them made it possible for me to face cancer head on, ask tough questions, learn quickly, and make well-informed decisions about myriad treatment and care options. They gave me my voice.

During breast cancer awareness month, Yahoo!’s going pink in the name of helping our users find their own voice. You’ll see special features in October on the Yahoo! logo on our homepage; Yahoo! Telemundo, Yahoo! Shine, and Yahoo! Health are featuring breast cancer resources; and searches for breast cancer terms will turn the search results page pink (starting tonight) and link to content on Yahoo! Health.

Also, Yahoo! for Good and Yahoo! Search have teamed up to launch “Search for a Cause,” a new SearchMonkey enhancement displayed under search results for nearly 60 (and growing) popular shopping sites like Amazon, REI and Expedia. If users click “Shop Now” and complete a purchase, a commission will benefit Susan G. Komen for the Cure – 7.5% of your purchase price, on average. Need more encouragement? Yahoo! will donate a dollar for every user who adds the application in the month of October, up to $25,000. More here.

So get out there and search, find, learn, and find your voice. No more whispering.

Marta Nichols
Vice President, Investor Relations

Here’s how to personalize it: After logging in and conducting a search in any Yahoo! Search box, you’ll notice a “Customize” link to the right of the yellow “Search” box. Select “Browse Gallery” in the pull-down menu and you’ll be taken to a list that, at last count, includes nearly 40 different options for enhancing Yahoo! Search. For example, if you select “Yelp,” your search results will include things like a preview of photos, reviews, rating, address, and phone number. If you select “Epicurious,” your search for pumpkin pie will include links to specific recipes from the popular foodie site. By selecting “Facebook,” any time you search for a name, you’ll get a thumbnail of that person’s public Facebook profile right within your search results. Other great enhancement options include LinkedIn, Howstuffworks.com, MTV.com, WebMD, Amazon, and a host of Yahoo! properties like Finance, Real Estate, Health, Autos, Local and Shopping.

We’ve set a few initial defaults for you with Yahoo! Video, Flickr and Yahoo! Travel and we’ll add to that list once we see which applications are most useful and popular. For the time being, if you want to see SearchMonkey results when you search, you need to add Enhanced Results and Infobars from the Search Gallery.

And, of course, this is just the beginning. It’s only been two weeks since we unleashed developer creativity on all of the possibilities SearchMonkey has to offer. There are plenty more innovations to come and a bunch of applications in the works.

Check out our Search Blog for more skinny and go here if you’re a developer ready for some monkey business.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

• Traffic is a good thing: That’s right, there are more traffic pileups than ever on Yahoo! Maps to help make you the wiliest driver on the road. They’ve added a panoply of new markets from Bakersfield, Calif., to Rochester, Maine, and improved markets like New York, which previously only gave you incident data. And why should freeways have all the fun, when you can find out about traffic jams on major thoroughfares. No more getting stuck on Manhattan’s Canal Street or San Francisco’s Van Ness Avenue. Add in our drag-and-drop routing and your clutch will be buying you pizza. More here.
• Exploring bookmarks: Swiftly on the heels of the popular del.icio.us Firefox 3 beta extension comes an early beta release of an Internet Explorer version. Now IE users can revel in plugin features like nearly instantaneous searching with huge accounts (yeah, you, with more than 10,000 bookmarks), full sidebar and toolbar integration with bookmark synch and typedown search, and a handy indicator of new network activity and links. Download it here or discuss it here.
• Mybloglog gets friendlier: Kevin Bacon, eat your heart out. Mybloglog has just launched Friender, a quick way to grow your network of friends, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends… The next time you go to manage your friends and contacts, you’ll notice a “Friender” tab. It’s essentially a rank-ordered list of friends (and others they know) that you’re connected to elsewhere. Chances are, if someone knows five of your friends, you probably know them, too. You quickly fly through the list and grow your network. And the best part is it all happens in real-time. Shazam! More here.
• Monkey on the loose: It’s official. The doors to Yahoo! Search no longer have locks. SearchMonkey is open for business, inviting developers (from pros to tinkerers) to start building customized Yahoo! Search results that are even more useful and relevant. If structured data makes you quiver (think CitySearch, StumbleUpon, eBay, Epicurious, Yelp, Netflix), you’ll waste no time mashing it up to add links, reviews, contact information, reservations, etc. to your site’s search listing. And if that’s not enough motivation for you, how does winning up to 10,000 clams sound? We’re looking for search heroes in the categories of Best Enhanced Result, Best Infobar, Most Innovative Use of Structured Data, Best Data Service, and Grand Prize (best over all categories). More on the SearchMonkey Challenge here.

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

• Would you like to touch our SearchMonkey?: If you’re a developer or site owner clamoring for a chance to monkey with enhanced Yahoo! search results, sign up for a developer preview of SearchMonkey or mark your calendar for our May 15th developer launch party. It’s our first step toward a totally new open Yahoo! strategy. Buh bye, links and abstracts. Hello, rich results with data like images, deep links, ratings, reviews, etc.!
• Circle of refinement: Yahoo! Local just made narrowing search results vastly easier with that rockstar of geometry: the circle. Looking for a greasy spoon for breakfast, but want one close to the ocean? Click “expand map” on your search query results and move that circle around to whatever ‘hood you’re looking for and make the radius bigger or smaller. As you move the circle, the business results automatically update. Brings new meaning to search radius. More here.
• Share your Flickr love: See something on Flickr and just can’t contain yourself? In this world of instant gratification, it’s now easier than ever to share photos, videos, sets, and groups with Flickr’s simple new “share this” button. Everpresent on the upper right side, it beckons you to email, link to, blog about, or get the HTML code to embed pictures and videos. What’s more, it will auto-complete screen names of your contacts as you type. All the more easy to spread the love. More here.
• Ain’t nothin’ better than free: You’re about to toss your old bottle cap collection when you realize there just might be a 10-year-old aching for a Nehi Red to complete his. That’s when you go check out our “Free is Good” microsite, launched in honor of Earth Day. It’s based on the old “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” adage and it’s there to help you find reuse groups in your neck of the woods. In addition to the warm feeling you’ll get inside from getting cool stuff and keeping other stuff out of landfills, you’ll have a shot at scoring eco-friendly prizes like a Smart car, a trek to a national park, a trip to an eco-resort, a home energy audit, local organic food or public transit for a year, or even free toilet paper (hey, who doesn’t need that?). Get thee green!
• Gimme your digits: You’ll never have to ask that again with the new MyBlogLog feature that lets you instantly add your MyBlogLog contacts and other members to your address book. They’ve rolled out one-click access to vCards (for Outlook, Thunderbird, Address Book on Macs, etc.) and hCards (for you more sophisticated microformats fan). Your info will reflect whatever you specified in your privacy settings. There’s nothing quite like portable data. More here.

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