It’s been a rough week, especially for those of us who grew up in the 1970s. First, we lost Ed McMahon, who we always hoped would show up at our doorstep with a big check. Then, came news of Farrah Fawcett, who always got the bad guy and launched a hair revolution among us. But it was the shocking news (confirmed, then unconfirmed, then finally confirmed) of Michael Jackson’s death that rattled the online world the most.

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

Tonight marks the end of an era. After 17 years, Jay Leno will give his last “Tonight Show” monologue, joining Steve Allen, Jack Paar, and Johnny Carson in the ranks of former hosts. From taking Hugh Grant to the woodshed for using a prostitute to hosting the first sitting American president on a late-night show, Leno gave you plenty of reasons to delay your bedtime. Here’s what we pulled on stage this week:

• Photos without the jail time: If you’ve ever hesitated before throwing that copyrighted photo into a presentation or web page, you’ll celebrate this news. Yahoo! Search has added a Creative Commons license filter to Yahoo! Image Search to help you quickly identify photos that are OK to reuse or modify. No other search engine saves your bacon that way. Not only do we keep you out of trouble, you’ll never even the see the photos you don’t have permission to use — it’s like Eve didn’t even know the apple existed. More here.
• Search that sport: That little search box just made you a better sports fan. Yahoo! Search has added a sports team shortcut that helps you keep track of your favorite teams, leagues, and events simply by typing in a keyword or two. When’s the next Lakers game? Who’s winning the French Open? Just go to Yahoo! Search. The sports team shortcut covers the NFL, MLB, NHL, and NBA, and college sports leagues including the NCAAF and NCAAB. More here.
• 360 comes full circle: Yes, it’s official — Yahoo! 360 is coming to an end. We know, we know — it took us a while to pull the plug. But rather than rush the process and risk losing your precious photos and prose, we wanted to make sure we had a solution in place — Yahoo! Profiles. You can move your content over to your profile, where your connections can keep tabs on you, or take it to go. You can export your entries to blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger, and MoveableType. More here.
• Comments with a click: And in the hilarious third-party app category… Feeling too lazy, bored, tired, or uninspired to write a comment for that Flickr photo? Good thing some clever souls from Virginia have developed the Flickr comment generatr. You can choose between simple (”this is super :-p”) or verbose (”i eat up the framing and foto ;-) good job my friend”). Now you can be meaningless without even trying.

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If you’re a foodie and/or you use Yahoo! Search, you might want to grab your TV (or DVR) remote tonight. The Food Network’s “Dinner: Impossible” episode featuring Yahoo! Search premieres this evening at 10:00pm ET/PT.

In “The Yahoo! Search Scramble,” you’ll watch Chef Robert Irvine descend upon our headquarters to receive his mission: make the top 15 dishes most searched for on Yahoo!. After all, he was helping us celebrate the fifth anniversary of Yahoo! Search. But there was a little catch — each dish was randomly paired with a top-searched ingredient!

Was Chef Robert able to pull off an edible meal out of some pretty strange pairings and successfully feed 450 Yahoos in just eight hours (with a little help from some Yahoo! friends) — or will this be Dinner: Impossible?

(Here’s our post and photos after the shoot in January)

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Twenty-three years ago today, IBM released its first personal portable information manipulator — otherwise known as a laptop. With its clamshell design, the IBM PC Convertible weighed about 13 pounds (akin to a midsized watermelon), utilized two 720K floppy disk drives (no internal hard disk), and measured smaller than a suitcase (progress!). Here’s what we evolved this week:

• Mobile home: As announced in February, we’ve collected all of our mobile offerings into one handy application called, succinctly, Yahoo! Mobile. And this week, it said “sayonara, beta!” You can now access Yahoo! Mobile for the Web on 300+ devices with HTML-enabled mobile browsers (http://new.m.yahoo.com/) or download the free Yahoo! Mobile app from the Apple iPhone App Store. It’s clean, it’s simple, and it’s open, so you not only get quick access to your favorite Yahoo! services (Mail, Messenger, News, Finance, etc.), you can check your Gmail, see Twitter and Facebook updates, read up on RSS feeds, and more. And, as an added bonus, iPhone users can also download Yahoo! Messenger. More here.
• Get a new image: Searching for an image? You might have noticed our spiffy new Yahoo! Image Search preview page, which is both prettier and more helpful. Click on that thumbnail of Vin Diesel and you get rewarded with a much larger image, along with thumbnails for other top image results and suggestions for related searches (ie, Dwayne Johnson, Brad Pitt, Paul Walker, etc.). More here.
• See attached: Yahoo! Groups is bringing back an old concept — the email attachment! Removed in 2003, we’re reviving this capability so Group members can share images and files and be able to retrieve them at a later date. That’s especially great news if you’re receiving digests. This new tool is currently in beta and will be rolling out to all groups over the next few weeks. Let the kitten photosharing begin! More here, including how-tos for moderators.
• On the Twitter sideline: Are you a Twitterholic looking for an easier way to monitor what’s being said about you or your brand? One of our engineers, playing around with Adobe AIR and the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI), has created a nifty little desktop application called Sideline that lets you set up and save multiple tabbed search topics for Twitter conversations. Not bad for a side project. Take it for a spin here.

And, of course, don’t miss our new Ideological Search! ;-)

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Tired of being inundated with the contradictory and offensive beliefs of others? Today, the scientists at Yahoo! are releasing a groundbreaking new search filter that keeps controversy out of your search experience. I’m extremely pleased to announce the immediate availability of Ideological Search, which allows you to control the ideology of your search results.

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

If you’ve never really liked your name, today’s your day to give it a rest. It’s National Joe Day, when everyone’s can introduce themselves as, well, “Joe.” So throw it out there legitimately when you order that venti triple-caff non-fat soy mocha latte. Here’s what we built for you Joe Schmo’s this week:

• The Interwebs invade your TV: You probably won’t ditch your computer any time soon, but now your TV can do more than just coddle couch potatoes. The new Yahoo! TV Widgets are here, debuting in Samsung’s new LED TV 7000, letting you multitask with a vengeance as you watch the boob tube. Without interrupting your program, you can check out content from Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Weather, and Flickr as well as (coming soon) great third-party brands like Twitter, the New York Times, Netflix, eBay, CBS Sports, Showtime and MySpace. You’ll find these widgets on TVs and devices from Sony, LG Electronics, Intel, and VIZIO starting this summer. Watch a demo here.
• Inquisitor goes global: A few weeks ago, we rolled out the Inquisitor app for the iPhone for people in the U.S. Now the mobile search app is available in ten more countries, autocompleting keywords and making suggestions so you can spend less time fat-fingering your query. And according to the Twitterverse, it appears to be scoring a spot on quite a number of iPhone first pages. (Note that you’ll need to change the country default in the options menu if you don’t want U.S. search results.) More here.

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Whether you’re celebrating Nowruz, Ostara, Shunbun no hi, or the vernal equinox, today is the first day of spring, people! Rebirth, revival, renewal, the end of a long cold winter, and a time to see if you can actually balance an egg on its point. Here’s what we fêted this week:

• omg! celebrity mamas!: The ever-popular gossip site, omg!, is giving you one more way to obsess about the lives of the rich, famous, and far-too-photographed. This week, realizing that you can’t seem to get enough of Katie/Suri, Gwen/Kingston, Angelina/(pick one) on omg!’s Goddess blog, the team has launched “Spotlight to Nightlight,” a biweekly video program that peers into the lives of celebrity mothers. Each three- to five-minute episode features host Ali Landry (former Miss USA and famed “Doritos Girl”) chatting up a different celebrity mom, discussing parenting tips or the latest mama making headlines. Ever wonder how much a starlet’s nanny makes? Get addicted here.
• IE8 4 Y!: Microsoft’s brand new Internet Explorer 8 browser launched this week. Minutes later, we made a Yahoo!-optimized version available. What’s in it for you? Easy access to Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Mail, our toolbar, and our homepage. You’ll get instant visual results for weather, stock quotes, and movie reviews/showtimes when you use the browser’s search box (i.e., a three-day weather forecast shows up right inside a search pulldown menu). And, no matter what site you’re on, you can always access a preview window to check your Yahoo! Mail. More on the Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Mail blogs. Download IE 8 optimized for Yahoo! here. (Not available for Macs. Duh.)
• Find photos with fast filters: Ever searched for just the right photo but gotten lost in a sea of stuff you don’t want? Yahoo! Image Search has just added a few new filters to hasten your mission. You can now narrow your scope by selecting black & white vs. color, restricting results to images that are either from Flickr or not, or even specifying the dimensions of the shot you’re after. And they promise more cool stuff to come. More here.
• Sometimes it’s the little things: The Flickr team rolled out two small tweaks that mean so much. If you’ve often found yourself irked by the “loading…” message you got when trying to narrow down your list of contacts, behold the people picker! It’s now lightning-fast when trying to find someone in your Contact List, share an image, or send Flickr mail. But wait, there’s more. For Flickr Pro members, the Stats page now shows real-time data for the day (no more waiting til midnight) and lets you drill down for daily details on up to 28 of the last days. More here and here.

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It’s National Frozen Foods Day! A time to honor the cryogenic wizardry that prolongs the life and freshness of pizzas, peas, breakfast sausage, Hungry Man dinners, ice cream, and, of course, snowballs. Honorable mention goes to the microwave today. Here’s what we nuked up this week:

• Video free for all: Flickr made several video headlines on Monday. First, they granted free video uploads to all users (hooray!). Then they introduced HD video uploads for Pro users (yahooo!), bringing the magical and glorious world of crisp, aperture-rich high-definition video to the viewing masses on Flickr. And, finally, they introduced Flickr Clock, a unique new toy that lets you explore videos taken across the Flickrverse by time of day. Oh! And unrelated to video, free Flickr users are no longer relegated to organizing photos into just three sets — let’s hear it for unlimited sets for your 200 most recent photos.
• In the loop on Mail: If you noticed something different when you logged into Yahoo! Mail, that’s because the team has been sprucing up the page with more new social features. As we said in December, we’re working on bringing you a “smarter inbox.” Initially, you could see your friends’ Yahoo!-related updates (i.e., stories they’ve buzzed on Yahoo! Buzz, hotels rated on Yahoo! Travel, etc.). But now you can see their updates from across the web — sites like YouTube, Blogger, Yelp, Picasa, and more. And there are many more Yahoo! sites now live, including Yahoo! Sports and Flickr. More here.
• Inquisitive iPhone: If you own an iPhone in the U.S., I suggest you run — don’t walk — to the App Store and download yourself a copy of the new Inquisitor app. This new mobile version of Inquisitor makes searching on your iPhone a breeze by autocompleting keywords and making search suggestions, so you can spend less time typing and more time finding. Here’s the buzz on Twitter. Obama’s not your president? Sit tight — it’s coming to your world soon.
• That’s my Mac calling: If you’re a Mac head and like calling your friends via Yahoo! Messenger, listen up. One of our engineers has written a plugin that lets you automatically dial a friend from within your Mac Address Book. Just install the script, open a friend’s contact card, right-click on the phone number, select “Call with Yahoo! Messenger,” and start gabbing away. Make sure you have Yahoo! Messenger for Mac 3.0 Beta 4. More here.

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On this day 76 years ago, the U.S. Congress made a proposal that had brewers, vintners, bartenders, wine snobs, and fraternity brothers clinking glasses across the country — the 21st amendment. It would ultimately end Prohibition, shutter the speakeasy, kill profits for organized crime, and make hangovers perfectly legal in all 48 states. Here’s what we toasted to this week:

• Mobile makeover: The gang at Yahoo! Mobile rolled out a beta program this week for a comprehensive new mobile service known as, simply enough, Yahoo! Mobile. It will come to a cell phone near you next month on the mobile Web, as an iPhone app, and as an app developed for smartphones from Nokia, RIM, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and Motorola, as well as those running Windows Mobile. It will replace Yahoo! Go and packages a variety of great mobile offerings into one location — search, email, messenger, address book, calendar, news, social networks, and even managing all your favorite non-Yahoo! content. To sign up for the beta, just enter http://mobile.yahoo.com in your phone’s browser (and be patient — it make take up to a few weeks to be admitted to the program). Here’s the press release.
• Ogling at the Oscars: Let’s face it — next to finding out the Academy Award winners, we care most about how everyone looks on the red carpet. That’s why the Yahoo! Search team has built a new Oscar-related carousel for Yahoo! Image Search. After Sunday’s show and parties, enter keywords related to Oscar-nominated films or actors and you’ll find a rolling gallery of the newest photos above the regular search results. Toggle your way through Slumdog Millionaire, Mickey Rourke, and Kate Winslet eye candy. More here.
• Watch with me: Raise your hand if you’ve ever IMed a video link to share a laugh with a friend, only to be disappointed when it takes them a few hours to finally get around to watching it. Wouldn’t it be cooler to watch that video together, at the same time? The scientists and engineers at Yahoo! Research think so and have just released a piping hot new version of Zync, a synchronized video player for Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 for Windows. You can now simultaneously view videos on Yahoo! Video, Flickr and, of course, YouTube — with Yahoo! Music and Yahoo! News to come next week. Just paste the video link into your conversation and click the “Watch With Me” button — share, watch, chat. No download necessary. Now go watch the woman who missed her flight in Hong Kong with someone.

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You’re doing research online – writing a paper on global warming, buying a new washing machine, planning a trip to Thailand, or trying to understand a health condition. You visit a few related websites when suddenly your search engine asks you if you’d like to start taking notes.

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