Fourteen years ago, two guys named Marc and Jim founded the first company to capitalize on the World Wide Web: Mosaic Communications Corporation. Their flagship, of course, was Netscape Navigator, which reigned supreme over the web browser market in its heyday. May it rest its soul. Once you stop feeling verklempt, check out the history we made this week:

• Bright Shine-y objects: Sometimes we women want a room of our own. That’s why we’ve created Yahoo! Shine, a new site for women that covers topics like parenting, fashion and beauty, love and sex, work and money, entertainment, and healthy living — and does so with a healthy dose of smarts and attitude. Best of all, start blogging on Shine and your musings might just run toe-to-toe with headlines from partners like Glamour, Self, Bon Appetit, Redbook, Cosmo, InStyle, and Women’s Health. More here.
• I can hear you now: All thumbs while steering with your knees? Now you can talk your way through mobile searches with voice-enabled Yahoo! oneSearch. Currently enabled on Blackberry 8800 series, Curve, and Pearl devices, with additional phones supported in the coming months, oneSearch with voice lets you search for anything — flight status, sports scores, maps — by simply speaking. Now it’ll be faster to shut up and drive.
• Search your iPhone: Love that Yahoo! Search feature, where search recommendations magically appear under your search box as you type, offering up query suggestions and related topics or phrases? Search Assist is now living in your iPhone. Not only does that speed up your searching process, it means the spelling-challenged among you no longer have to guess at how to spell septuagenarian, ukulele, and anecdotal. Bookmark it at m.yahoo.com. More here.
• It’s more fun with friends: With 42 million people uploading photos to Flickr, it’s not hard to imagine bumping into someone you know. But why wait for serendipity? Flickr just introduced “Find Your Friends,” which scans your Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, or Hotmail accounts to find people in your address book already using Flickr. You’d be surprised how many familiar faces you’re missing out on. More here.

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Our job in Search is to be the starting point for our users to find what they need – and sometimes even the things they didn’t know they needed. To help celebrate all of the cool, useful and quirky things we’re discovering across the pond, Yahoo! Europe hosts an annual “Yahoo! Finds of the Year” awards. It’s where the Europe search team scours the Internet for the most innovative, humorous and useful websites, and with a panel of judges and the greater public, vote on our favourites.

The awards originated in the UK and this year we decided to go European: Yahoo! Germany, Italy and Spain have all launched their own version of “Finds of the Year” – Yahoo! Entdeckungen 2007, Le Rivelazioni del Web and Web Revelación – representing the region’s rich and entertaining Web endeavours.

The UK winners include a social networking site with a twist – a site for dogs and their pooch personalities. Users raved about an eco-shopping site created by a chap named Nigel, full of innovative and wonderful environmentally friendly products. My particular favourite is the staple-free stapler. And the people’s choice winner was Move Me, a site that captures a to-do list for when you move house and adds it all into a neat calendar for a step-by-step guide to a stress-free move!

Germany’s first ‘Finds’ awards, “Yahoo! Entdeckungen,” had great examples of Web 2.0 in action, including a cool new approach to exploring the German capital and sites that capture the essence of ‘friends of the web.’ The online-community hausgemacht.tv was a double-winner: it was a favourite for both the jury in the category “Zeitgeist” and the public vote. hausgemacht.tv delivers convenient DIY videos, ranging from tips on housekeeping to cars and health.

In Italy, if you want math as your friend and not your enemy or are keen to discover and share your passion of shoes with other like-minded souls then Yahoo! Italia’s “Le Rivelazioni del Web” is the place to go.

And with “Web Revelación,” Yahoo! Espana chimes in with revelations ranging from a website reminding you of those little things that your friends and family borrow and never give back, to a karaoke platform to an operating system developed by two young Spanish engineers.

The awards across UK, Germany, Italy and Spain really capture the ingenuity, creativity and fun that are out there on the Web for all to discover. So sidle up to our Search bar and go find something cool today!

Jeff Revoy
VP, EU Search, Local and Social Media
London, UK