Photo: Available from sharper65./ FLICKR: http://www.flickr.com/photos/41421819@N05/6227046130/in/photostream/

Ever wish you could have answers and direct access to websites before you complete a query, hit the search button, or go to a search results page? Welcome to Search Direct.

This new feature (currently in beta) taps into Yahoo!’s unique opportunity to combine content and structured data and to provide a rich search experience. Search Direct predicts search results as fast as a person types, character by character, and presents those results dynamically, generating a fast, simple search experience that goes beyond a list of blue links.  Search Direct rolls out in a public beta to Yahoo! users across the U.S. today, and will be available in other Yahoo! products and markets later this year.

With Search Direct, Yahoo! content is combined with information from the Web to provide rich answers, not just links, and to give people the option to immediately engage or continue to a traditional search results page. In this beta release, coverage includes top trending searches, movies, TV, sports teams and players, weather, local, travel, stocks, and shopping categories now available at search.yahoo.com.

• Trending Searches – The moment the cursor hits the search box, top search trends appear and are updated every 10 minutes to display the latest and greatest search trends.
• Search Previews – Search Direct predicts the search term as you type, providing the 10 most likely searches. You can then easily scan each option to see the related top results and find the best match for your needs.
• Direct Answers – For many common searches, Search Direct provides instant answers before you click the Search button. Find an address or phone number, a three-day weather forecast, financial stock performance, the top trending stories at Yahoo! News, or when and where a movie is playing – all without going to a results page.
• Direct Results – When you scan the search options and find the site you need, Search Direct provides exactly that – direct access to the site. No more overwhelming pages of links.
• Rich Content – For all top searches about sports, top news stories, and finance, Search Direct displays rich content that only the world’s largest digital media company can provide. For example, type “n” to get the Yahoo! News display, which always shows the top two trending stories.

We will continue to enhance and update Search Direct with new content, such as popular music and local listings.  For more information and a demo video of Search Direct from Yahoo!, visit search.yahoo.com

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

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

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

The results surprised even us, as we discovered official Pride celebrations in all 50 U.S. states and in 64 other countries. From the world’s largest LGBT Pride Parade – that would be in Sao Paulo, Brazil, with an estimated five million attendees in 2008 – to the more understated Rainbow Kite Flying day in cities throughout China, celebrations of our community’s diversity occur in many different flavors.

With Pride events scattered around the globe and throughout the year, we thought our local festivities would be the perfect opportunity to re-launch Yahoo!’s annual Pride site with some fun new additions at its first permanent destination: pride.yahoo.com.

Features of this new site include:

• The World Map of Pride – A resource for locating and browsing the breadth of LGBT Pride celebrations around the globe. Search the world map for festivals, parades, film fests, and other major events near you … and invite your friends to join in.
• The Past Century in LGBT History and Civil Rights – An interactive timeline exploring many of the key milestones for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community over the last 100 years.
• Visions of Pride on Flickr – Photos from Yahoo! users of the various Pride celebrations around the world.
• And easy access to the latest LGBT-related news, sports, entertainment, and community resources.

If you’re in the area, please also plan to join the 500,000+ people at San Francisco’s 38th annual LGBT Pride Celebration and Parade this Sunday, June 29. We’ll be demo’ing our shiny new Pride site and handing out some fabulous gifts at Yahoo!’s booth on Grove Street between Larkin and Polk. We’re also a sponsor of the 32nd annual San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival which runs from June 19-29. We’d be thrilled to see you there.

Happy Pride!

Drew Geishecker
Yahoo! Network Services
Co-chair, Yahoo! Pride

Then her dream came true — as it has for dozens of other young women, thanks to the emergence of a new Taiwanese job description: Ecommerce Model.

Jia-Jia entered and won the “EC Model Contest,” hosted by Yahoo! Taiwan Auctions. She is now not only a celebrity to the more than 300,000 people who participated in the voting process and is coveted by media for interviews and photo shoots, she regularly models women’s wear for online stores on our auctions platform.

This unique new profession was born essentially from the Yahoo! Taiwan Auctions platform, as sellers sought new ways to market their wares. We launched our first contest in 2005, and today there are 30 full-time professional online mannequins like Jia-Jia modeling for the e-stores on our platform. Many are college students fitting the shoots between classes. Some earn more than US$6,000 per month.

What’s fueling the demand? They dramatically impact sales. Items that are modeled by these young women are viewed 30 times more often and sales are 30% higher than merchandise that’s merely displayed via product images. As a result, more than 95% of our VIP sellers are now using these models. And that is, in turn, fueling the growth of online sales across Taiwan.

Within less than two years, women’s wear sales have increased from 550,000 items sold per month to 800,000 — a purchase every 5 seconds. That’s a lot of clothes, accessories, bags, shoes, and beauty products. And the market is expected to grow 36% this year, according to the Market Intelligence Center.

The growth of the industry, on the backdrop of an expanding virtual market economy, is a good indicator of the change in Taiwanese shopping behavior. Not only are people gradually embracing virtual shopping over traditional street-shopping, the competition among suppliers is now driving marketing innovation. The birth and growth of the online mannequin industry is clear evidence that consumers want a better shopping experience — demanding the same visual experience that they get while perusing shelves and racks.

This trend is setting off a positive growth spiral: As virtual shopping gets closer to replicating offline shopping, delivering goods as well as the experience, the number of regular online shoppers is bound to surge. And, after browsing the nicely put-together outfits displayed on the mannequins, how can you just buy the skirt… and not the top, the bag, the boots, and the necklace as well?

Charlene Hung
General Manager, Yahoo! Taiwan