Quick – who said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”? That’s right, Mahatma Gandhi and today would have been his 140th birthday. Take a little time to honor his legacy by celebrating justice, tolerance and creating change through nonviolent resistance. Here’s the kind of change we enacted this week:

• Homepage is more apptastic: If you’ve been playing with our new homepage apps, you’ve discovered our gallery of recommended apps. This week, we added more than a dozen new ones, with more to come. You can balance your personal budget with Mint, learn how to pair the right wine with your meal with an app from MyRecipes and Snooth, discover weekly deals at Target, get movie info from Flixster, or manage posts and comments on your WordPress blog — all from the Yahoo! Homepage. And because we’ve opened it up to third-party developers, expect that list to grow. More on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog.
• New Yahoo! Search: Notice anything different about Yahoo! Search? After a month of testing, we’ve rolled out a brand new Yahoo! Search that ups the ante in personal relevance. You’ll see new tools that let you explore related concepts; display only results from popular Yahoo! and third-party sites like Wikipedia, YouTube and IMDB; and narrow results by types of content like people, videos, and discussion forums. We also give you quick access to our Search Scan/SafeSearch tool, to protect you from viruses, spyware and spam, and Search Pad, which lets you take notes during your queries. More on the Yahoo! Search blog.
• Yahoo! Messenger kills bugs dead: The bug hunters on the Messenger team have released new versions of both Yahoo! Messenger 10 Beta as well as Yahoo! Messenger for iPhone. In the former, they’ve fixed issues with webcam detection, added messaging to tell you when your friend needs to upgrade versions, offer better handling of unanswered calls, and explain when your Internet connection downgrades you to a voice call. Over on the iPhone, they’ve addressed the mysterious contact list disappearances. Download the upgrade in the iTunes App Store. More here and here on the Yahoo! Messenger blog.
• Zimbra milestone: Ok, what do Zimbra and South Africa have in common? People. Fifty million of them now have paid Zimbra mailboxes, just a bit more than the population of Africa’s most southerly nation That milestone comes amidst the launch of Zimbra Collaboration Suite 6.0, which now lets you more easily sync to your mobile, read and write emails with tabbed views, create presentations without external software, receive read email receipts, choose from among calendar views, and remotely wipe your phone if you lose it, among other features. More over on the Zimbra blog.

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

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

We’re sprucing up the joint today with major enhancements to three of our most popular products as part of our quest to make Yahoo! the center of your online world. We’ve rolled out improvements to Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Search to make them more personally relevant, help you get more done in less time, and keep you better connected with the people and things that matter to you most.

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

It’s inhumanly early in California, but it’s already a great day at Yahoo!. We’ve just signed a major search deal with Microsoft. Under the terms, Microsoft will become the search engine behind Yahoo! and we will become the worldwide exclusive relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.

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

¡Ay, caramba! It’s National Tequila Day! Perfect excuse to ditch that rot-gut variety and broaden your horizons beyond sugary frozen margaritas and shooters from a waitress’ holster. Get to know the finer points of fermented agave and sip a snifter of top-shelf blanco, joven, reposado, añejo, or extra añejo. But don’t overdo it just because it’s Friday! (Pssstt. Figs are the new hangover cure.) Here’s what we slammed down this week:

• Home sweet home: We’ve remodeled the house but we’re letting you pick out the furniture. The new Yahoo! Homepage is here! And it’s all about you. Load it up with your favorite websites by choosing from one of more than 65 apps or adding a link of your own. Also, your news is now hyper-local and you can also toggle the main news module for more of the big news that matters. And you can take it all with you — PC to mobile sync is coming very soon. If you live in the U.S., you can opt-in today by visiting http://yahoo.com/trynew. Our friends in France, India, and the UK will soon have access to localized versions and we’ll start rolling out to other markets in the next month. Take a tour and read more here.
• Roadtrip photos: If you’re one of the many people who researches travel destinations by checking out online photos, you’ll start packing your suitcase when you see the new travel image refiner on Yahoo! Image Search. You can now take a virtual tour of popular points of interest when you search for a destination. Which Hawaiian isle is right for you? Search for Hawaii and click on the thumbnails for islands like Maui, Oahu, Kauai, and popular spots like Haleakala National Park and Waimea Canyon. Try it with Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Rome, Sydney, New York City, San Francisco, and beyond. More here.
• More mobile Messenger: Attention, iPhone users – the latest Yahoo! Messenger app update is out and it is spiffy. Now you can get notified of a new message even when the app is closed. Make that, even when your iPhone is asleep! You can choose whether you get an alert on your home screen, an alert sound, or a badge featuring the number of messages — or all three, or none. Another new addition – you can now stay signed in for up to two weeks. Again, that’s even when your app is closed. And finally, you can now BUZZ! your friends – one of the most requested features for the iPhone app. Ask and ye shall receive! More here.
• Back to class: Yep, it’ll soon be time to trade flip-flops for Mary Janes – school is right around the corner. But we’re here to ease the pain. Our new Back to School site helps you choose the right backpack, find green school supplies, get safety tips, find ways to cut down your back-to-school budget, and even adjust to a new school. We give you a roster of shopping bargains, like dorm room essentials, MP3 players, and student duds. There’s also a study zone with fun learnings, games, and cool Avatar gear for when the time comes to drop a school bus in your background. And if you’re tired of the same ol’ same ol’, there are great healthy school lunch recipes. In the meantime, make the most of those flip-flops!

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

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

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.

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

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.

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