According to this post, “the top searches over the last few weeks tended toward the thrifty and economical.” That seems a bit odd considering that the iPad is a $500 to $800+ device that, while possibly the future of computing, is hardly a must-have right now in tough economic times. eBay and Craigslist were at the top of shopping-related iPad searches followed by big discount retailers Walmart and Target, according to Yahoo’s data.

Other popular searches on Yahoo from the iPad include queries for the Netflix app, and one for Flickr (even though there is no native Yahoo-built Flickr iPad app yet). People are also searching for ABC, NBC, Hulu, Pandora, Farmville, and even Chatroutlette.

The data is also interesting because Yahoo isn’t the default search engine on the iPad — Google is. So these people are clearly going to Yahoo.com (or setting the search box to be Yahoo) specifically to search for something. Yahoo also reports a 327% increase in mobile searches for the term “iPad reviews” and 138% for “iPad cost.”

Back at the end of April, we noted that the iPad was already accounting for 1.18% of the traffic to TechCrunch for the past 30 days. In the past 30 days, that number has jumped to 2.42%.

Speaking here are:

• Shashi Seth, Senior Vice President of Search Products, Yahoo!
• Prabhakar Raghavan, Senior Vice President of Yahoo! Labs and Yahoo! Search Strategy
• Larry Cornett, Vice President, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search
• David Pann, Vice President of Search Advertising, Yahoo!

According to the pamphletes we’ve been handed, Yahoo will be focusing on a three main issues in search today:

• “Find Things Faster”
• “Explore What Matters”
• “Get Things Done”

Find our live notes below (paraphrased):

Shashi Seth – Senior Vice President of Search Products - (joined about 3 weeks ago): I came for a few reasons, first I wanted to be a part of the team that changes search. Also the quality of talent and leadership. Today we’re going to talk about the talent we’ve assembled with the Yahoo Labs team. We’re also going to talk about the products we’ve built in the past but maybe haven’t shared. And finally search advertising.

I wanted to clear out some misconceptions. One is that with the Microsoft Yahoo deal, Yahoo may not be in the game of search. We are.

———-AND THE POWER JUST WENT OUT IN THE WHOLE BUILDING. LOVELY.———

Still out, but we’re still going.

Yahoo has been in search, is in search, and will continue to be in the future. We’ll continue to drive innovation. It’s our stake in the ground. You’ll see some of this today.

Search has been largely the same for the past 10 years. It’s mostly the same for the user. With the Microsoft deal we can get the backend from them and innovate on top of it. It’s nice not having to focus on the backend. It frees us up. I think search is headed for innovation on the frontend side. And we started that journey about a year and a half to two years ago. But there still is a lot of work we need to do for this transition (assuming it’s approved).

In search volume, I admit we have seen some decline. But we’re still working on it. Yahoo has a strength in content and communication. We want search tightly integrated into both.

At the end of the day there are two paradigms that work for large amounts of content: You can browse or search. It’s in our DNA for search.

We’re also focused on Asia and mobile usages in that market. We have 80 million carrier and OEM partnerships. In some markets our mobile share is almost as large as our web share. That points to the future. Kids use cellphones more than laptops. The future is clearly on mobile devices. We’re investing a lot there.

Also focusing on our affiliate relationships. In Korea we’ve captured all of Google partnerships. In the other Asian countries too we’re very strong.

Prabhakar Raghavan, Senior Vice President of Yahoo! Labs: We’re moving from a web of documents to a web of things. What do I mean by this abstraction? It’s no longer about how big your index is. It’s not about 10 blue links. There needs to be a paradigm shift away from how many data centers can you have. It’s more about what people actually care about. Over 99% of our queries have a noun or a noun phrase in them. People are asking about things in the real world.

People don’t care about finding 5 million pages about Roger Federer, they want the one page with all the relevant information. If someone is looking for Black Eyed Peas, we want to show users a bubble with all the info they want – main site, most popular songs, etc. And we want to do this for all the bands, not just popular ones. And movies too, restaurants, etc. The web of things.

Microsoft is doing the crawling, we’re innovating how you display it.

So how is Yahoo going to lead this “web of things”? It’s like digitizing all your CDs – the hard part is building up a database of this information you’ve made. On the web the information about these recording is noisy. You just can’t manually edit metadata – you need killer machine learning and data mining.

But again – how do we pull it off? Because we have the best scientists to look into these areas. At every single data mining conference we won all the awards in 2009. We’ll put our guys up against anyone. Last week was the first 2010 conference, and we won again.

Shashi Seth is back to go over his slides we couldn’t see when the power was out. Post Microsoft/Yahoo deal it will be all about the algorithmic side and the advertising side. But there will be a whole layer we’re putting on top of this. He takes away all the Yahoo additions and it’s just the 10 blue links.

Now it’s video time – a video showing off Yahoo’s different additions to search.

Larry Cornett, Vice President, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search: I’m going to share some innovative things we’ve been working on lately that will be coming soon. But first the past.

3 major UX things:

• “Find Things Faster”
• “Explore What Matters”
• “Get Things Done”

The average person is really just trying to get things done when they use search. “Explore What Matters” is important to us. How do we make search product.

You’ve seen competitors copy us – like Yahoo Finance. I’m looking forward to seeing how they copy us next (dammmmnnn). Doing a query for a stock ticker symbol, the drop down shows the price in realtime because it understands things (objects). Same is true with search for a movie and the like.

We also have a way to show the latest news about items. News, Photos, Videos, and Twitter. We’ve looked at the tweets and filtered out the spam. This is all in one module at the top of the page.

“Searching by clicking – I don’t have to touch the keyboard again.” U2 example. Pictures, albums, videos, etc. I’m searching, but I’m exploring too. Search is more about discovery and exploration. Less about keywords and links.

Launching today we have a new Winter Olympics optimization. We have a new shortcut. And it works on mobile too.

Now the future – here’s what coming in the next few months.

• Organizing the web for TV shows. Quick access to see clips from your favorite show.
• Organizing the web for News. A new time-based view to show the most recent news.
• Organizing the web for Celebrities. Tom Cruise example. Pictures, tweets, etc.

• More search powered things across all of Yahoo. Like Yahoo Mail.
• We look at your email and give you a way to explore more about what’s being talked about.
• Enhancing Vertical Search in  Yahoo News.
• Yahoo Buzz just celebrated its two year anniversary (a jab at the just-launched Google Buzz).
• Pushing the boundries of mobile search. A lot are simply taking the PC experience and pushing it into a mobile device. We are thinking about how to build this from the ground up. Like an Etch-a-Sketch…

Sketch-a-Search

Shown on the iPhone. You can pull up a city, and drag your finger to sketch around where you are looking for places (this is cool). The example here is restaurants.

Imagine that paradigm being applied to any search.

Future Yahoo Search

This is a little farther out. Imagine searching for New York City and not seeing anything that looks like traditional search. Imagine NYC as a “thing” and you get all kinds of information.

David Pann, Vice President of Search Advertising, Yahoo!: These innovations are all going to help get advertising in front of consumers. Let’s step back to 2009 with the economy. We saw unprecedented changes. Consumers changed searching patterns. It became about getting out of trouble.

Advertisers moved to optimizing ROI at the keyword level (rather than a bunch of keywords together). We’re focused on three key areas for them. Better value, transparency and control, and innovation. We’re making pricing enhancements. We now have network distribution, you can pay for different sources of traffic across the network (different pay rates for affiliates versus Yahoo Search, for example).

We also want to save our advertisers time. We know most advertisers spend time making campaigns for Google. So we made an import campaign tool.

We also have a new Yahoo Search Marketing desktop tool. It’s testing now, will be available in March. This is designed to scale for huge advertisers. The feedback we’ve gotten is that it saves time – and these guys increase their spend with us.

We’re also now doing search re-targeting based on what a user has searched on previously. If I search for laptops, go somewhere else, I still may see a laptop ad.

Many times we may not have an ad to show you – so we’ll show you “you ads” to show you things you’re probably interested in.

In the beginning of 2009 we started put rich ads in search. It’s multimedia in search, like video or sub-links. Click through rates go north of 25% with this from what we’ve seen. We also now have sponsored ads in search assist.

——————-Q&A Time——————

• Shashi Seth, Senior Vice President of Search Products, Yahoo!
• Prabhakar Raghavan, Senior Vice President of Yahoo! Labs and Yahoo! Search Strategy
• Larry Cornett, Vice President, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search
• David Pann, Vice President of Search Advertising, Yahoo!

Q: Most people have an ingrained search habit – how do you get consumers to change that habit?

SS: Search is still the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the consumer experience. Users can and do switch from one search engine to another. We’re betting the farm on building a more stick experience.

LC: You have to reach the consumers where they live. Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Finance, etc. These are destinations on the web. You have to rethink what is search – is it just keywords? Or is it finding what you need? That’s what we think. See search in a new light and they will change their minds.

PR: If it’s about 10 blue links, then yes, that’s hard. But it’s about more than that with us. It’s not about getting people to do more searches, it should be about getting them to do less because it’s more useful info the first time. It’s about Search Satisfaction.

Q: This seems like a me-too kind of event. Microsoft or Google would launch a major product. What are you going to do to fix the perception problem?

SS: The reason for this event was a few things. To talk about the Microsoft/Yahoo deal – let people know that we are in the game. We are going to compete against Google and Bing still. We have 600 million users who love our content and properties. In terms of what other companies do – sure they do major products, but for us this is a dialogue with you.

We are going to be innovative – more than Google and Bing. We haven’t been sitting around doing nothing. We just haven’t been talking about it. Going forward, we’re going to talk more.

Q: How do these innovations translate into revenue?

DP: Advertisers want better ways to get in front of consumers. We want to grow search volume (of course, this goes against what Yahoo just said).

Q: But didn’t you just say the search volume is going down?

DP: Well search is evolving with these rich ads – advertisers pay a premium for this experience. It may not even look like an ad unit. It may look like content.

PR: Revenue is a product of 2 things: How happy users are and they come back. And how much money you are making off of all of them. But how do you measure the ways that consumers are engaging with our products? We think this is evolving.

Q: Yahoo at one time had the leading local property – and Maps was huge – seems like you’ve neglected them. Now with the rise of mobile, what are you going to do?

SS: Yes, certain verticals make a lot of sense – our focus is back on those spaces. And as we go towards mobile, there are even more verticals that make sense.

Q: But have the local properties languished?

SS: I would say that we recognize that we need to invest in the future.

Q: Back to Microsoft. Do you think that this ongoing issue has damaged the perception of you as a company?

SS: One of the reasons for this event was the clear up that. I think we’ve neglected talking about it – some our own fault, some regulatory reasons.

Q: And with share declining – how worrying is that?

SS: I’m not worried about it. There is much innovation left to me done in this space. We have core competence around content and communication. It will set us apart.

DP: We’ve just scratched the surface for how to change things. We have all these leading properties (finance, mail, etc). We’re thinking about this every single day. It’s a top priority of Carol’s and the company’s.

SS: And our leading products themselves are morphing. There are new opportunities. The user base is changing.

Q: Can you comment on how quickly this market moves? You’ve been talking web of things for a year – but your competitors are adding things as well. So how do you gain share?

SS: We want to change the game entirely. We can take these risks easier than Google can.

PR: We’re sitting at the head now - we need to push it out into the tail, beyond popular search topics. That’s what we’re working on, and it’s hard work. The top 10,000 queries satisfy 2/3rds of queries, but everyone has niche interests and we’re all out in the tail. In order to satisfy most people, you have to do well in the tail. And it’s a tail of things. We’re doing well with that. We’re about 15-20% there now. But no one is close to it.

LC: Don’t be deceived by the surface layer. Look at assistance – did they really replicate us? I did a query with a competitor (I won’t name), about kayaks – how to roll one. On the competitor I got “how to roll a joint.” Look deeper – “it sucks. We rock.” It’s not about surface layer candy.

DP: Search doesn’t sell itself.

Q: So Bing is taking a lot of your share – how does that not worry you?

SS: We’ve backed away from a lot of the distribution relationships that we’re very profitable. Our competition is still there, but we’re willing to walk away. These are toolbar and PC deals – we walked away from. Hence, the drop is share. I think we’ve seen a small drop in regular searches. Also there’s some magic about what constitutes search – we’re not sure if we’re going to play these games yet. We think we can grow our market share.

PR: From the advertising end, it’s not in Microsoft’s interest to steal our marketshare. So they’re not worried about us, it’s taking share from the other platforms.

Q: It sounds like great products in a great store – but is the store in the right neighborhood? Like on my Chrome browser, I have to jump through hoops to search on Yahoo. What do you need to do on the new platforms like tablets?

SS: People find our products really attractive, like Yahoo News and Flickr. We’re focusing on the core. I’m pretty sure we can drive traffic to search through those properties. Our competition isn’t doing that – they have to do deals with OEMs, make their own browsers, etc. We get the traffic organically because we have great products.

DP: Taking a page our of Carol’s playbook – we’re going to get aggressive. “We’re out there buying traffic.” Homepage refreshes, all of this – we need to be aggressive. It’s not about being obnoxious, but it has to make sense. We will tap our asset.

Q: How do you do that in the mobile world if you don’t have an OS?

SS: Interesting point. We have a lot of carrier and OEM relationships worldwide. Again, key in innovating and focusing on the right geographies – like the Asian markets.

Q: What about the advertising that looks like content? That was ballsy to say.

DP: Sure – this is all about advertisers being a part of the relationship, rather than being a bolt-on to it. It’s like during the Super Bowl when we ran the ad over the frontpage. We want to help our advertiser do this more.

Q: But it will be labeled as an ad right?

DP: Ha. Yes.

Q: What about the ads in the drop downs?

DP: It’s about getting you to the info you’re looking for. This is just a test right now. We’re trying it. If it works, we’ll go with it.

Q: Has anyone seen The Invention of Lying? It’s all about that people lie. There’s a lot of skepticism about Yahoo – there’s a question, can they really pull it off? Can you speak to why you think you will? Speak to that skepticism.

SS: The only reason I came here is because I truly do believe that we can do this in a big way. More than maintaining market share. Loss of personnel hasn’t been an issue since I’ve been here. Sharp minds are here. I think we can do it. I honestly do. Even when I came, I approached it with skepticism.

LC: I was at Apple during the dark years. But there was still amazing talent – we could just do no right for whatever reason. The winds were against us. It takes a few wins. When Steve came back and we started to have some wins, it started. But it doesn’t happen over night. We will have some wins – they’re coming. Now Apple can do no wrong. People are going to love what we’re doing – and we’re looking forward to it.

Now they’re introducing Executives from Yahoo! Search for Mobile, and Yahoo! Labs around the world including:

• Yoelle Maarek, Senior Director at Yahoo! Research in Haifa, Israel
• Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Vice President of Yahoo! Research Europe and Latin America
• Preston McAfee, Vice President and Research Fellow at Yahoo! Research in Burbank, CA

That’s a wrap.

Here’s a timeline for Yahoo Search:

But there’s an important distinction between Yahoo’s plans for its own search product going forward, and Microsoft’s plans for it. The easiest way to think about it is that Yahoo will be in charge of the frontend side of things for Yahoo Search, while Microsoft will be in charge of the backend — though not all of it. And Yahoo didn’t shy away from questions today as to whether that means that essentially, Yahoo is still competing with Microsoft in search? From a frontend perspective, which is all most users will ever see, it is, says Yahoo.

Yeah, it’s confusing.

Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo’s Senior VP of Labs and Search Strategy, tried to answer the questions as best he could. But the vibe seemed to be that he felt confined in giving the answers that Yahoo is making all of its execs give. And even though at least half of the questions during the Q&A session were about Yahoo’s deal with Microsoft, it was clear that plenty of the journalists and bloggers in the audience still weren’t entirely clear what the plan is. Or that Yahoo really knows what the plan is.

“We are not a version of Bing. We are the Yahoo search experience,” Raghavan said at one point. And he continued on that it was a complex deal, and not as easy to explain or execute as a straight-up acquisition would be. I’ll say.

While Yahoo is full of PR-ready answers that seem to confuse even them, here’s how I interpreted what Yahoo was basically saying today: “We are Yahoo Search, powered by Bing, but we don’t want you to know we’re powered by Bing.”

Elisa Steele, Chief Marketing Officer of Yahoo, wanted to make it clear that the Yahoo branding would remain intact on all Yahoo Search pages. Okay, and that’s fine, as I said, most users will have no idea what is actually powering their search results. But it’s a little odd that Yahoo Search now sounds more like a search layer of sorts over Bing (though, again, they would never put it that way).

And it’s too bad. After the last event which focused on their search innovation (before the Microsoft deal), I was harsh in my criticism of Yahoo, saying that they weren’t doing enough on the frontend to ever take users away from Google. At today’s event, a new frontend is exactly what they showed off, and some of it looks very good. The people-search aspect in particular strikes me as something I would use, as soon as it gets a way to filter things like tweets by most recent updates — which it’s getting, I’m told.

The left-side filters work well as an obvious visual way to scour various popular services that Yahoo has included. We currently use Yahoo BOSS to power TechCrunch search, it was impressive that when I did a search for my name, one of the options was to see all the TechCrunch articles by me.

Certainly it’s in Yahoo’s interest to get people using Yahoo more, but it is too bad that the main benefactor of all the work Yahoo has been doing to make the frontend of its search more compelling may be Microsoft. I wonder if in a year’s time we won’t just consider Yahoo Search to be the prettier version of Bing.

According to the new data, Bing took 12.9% of the US market like comScore had earlier measured. With the strong jump, Bing comes out ahead of Yahoo Search (10.15%), while Mountain View remains the undisputed king of the mountain with a US market share of 75%.

StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen comments on the leapfrogging of Yahoo Search by Bing, saying: “The jump in Bing’s share may reflect a positive review of the search engine compared to Google which appeared online in the New York Times on the 8th and in the print version on the 9th July.” I’m not really sure if that is in fact the reason and if this isn’t just the service’s regular growth path. After all, Microsoft has shown a remarkable drive to keep the momentum for its decision engine going, recently adding Twitter messages to search results and bringing the search platform to its Hotmail service. Surely one newspaper article can’t be the only reason for its steady rise in share?

In any event, while Google shouldn’t be particularly worried about losing its dominance on the search market yet, the other players in the field better be watching Bing’s progress very closely. Microsoft is doing it right, and users are noticing, too.

Update: as a commenter points out, judging by the graph Yahoo Search is holding quite steady while Google seems to mirror Bing’s market share evolution. Check it out:

That’s not necessarily to say that Yahoo isn’t working on anything interesting in search — it is. BOSS, its open search strategy and Search Monkey, its open search application platform, are interesting, but they’re also old. In fact, part of today was used to highlight Search Monkey’s one year anniversary. One year may not seem like a long time, but in a constantly innovating web, especially in the search space, it is. And there’s a much larger problem with those two offerings: They’re not particularly interesting to end users on a large scale.

I bring that up because Yahoo is still losing search share. As it slips closer to 20 percent in the U.S., Google keeps gaining share, up to 64.2% in April, according to comScore. I don’t want to say that there is no way for Yahoo to reverse that trend, but with the things it’s currently doing, I see no way it can. Even if (and probably “when”) it does merge its search business with Microsoft’s search business, the two combined will only have about 28% of the search market in the U.S. — well below half of Google’s share.

So what the hell is Yahoo doing? Well I can tell you what they’re not doing. They’re not focusing on launching sexy-looking new ways to interpret search data on the front end, like Google is. At today’s event, Yahoo did show off some new ways of displaying search results that are being bucket-tested. But when question after question kept asking when those would launch, Yahoo kept basically saying “when they’re ready.” And, to be honest, they were really nothing to write home about anyway.

Yahoo is using its BOSS and Search Monkey products to gather up new data for better results, but none of it is likely as interesting as Google say, trying to index the world’s books.

Here’s what else Yahoo is not doing: Focusing on real-time search. I asked a question about their thoughts on that sexy trend right now, and the various execs at the event all downplayed its importance — calling it a “buzzword.” On some levels they’re right, many real-time search queries like certain results on Twitter search are basically meaningless. But there is an underlying power to real-time search that is undeniable, and that users want. That’s why we’re seeing so many companies working on it right now.

Google recognizes the trend, and is starting to talk about it very seriously. And Twitter is going the other way to add link crawling to its results, to make its real-time search offering much more robust. Prabhakar Raghavan, the head of Yahoo! Labs and Yahoo! Search Strategy did say that Yahoo would like to “blend the best of both” meaning mix fresh content with relevant content, but offered no firm plans as to what the company was working on to do that, beyond what it’s already doing — which isn’t enough.

Here’s what Yahoo is doing with its search product based on what they were saying at today’s event: They’re moving from returning links to returning objects based on user intent. But come on, even after we parse the buzzwords (interesting, when you consider that Yahoo called real-time search a buzzword), there’s still not much there. This is the same thing that basically all the search engines have been saying for years now. The web is about more than just links — shocking.

While a new search engine like Wolfram Alpha is actually taking a different approach to search, Yahoo is just trying to display things in a different way to users. They’re saying they’re going to display “objects” rather than links, but that just means they’ll show pictures, movie show times and other slightly more useful cousins of web links in results. Google does that too. So does Microsoft. So does Ask. So does AOL.

You can call it whatever you want: Objects, rich results, pretty picture things — this alone is not a way Yahoo is going to reverse its search share trend. At some point Google will stop taking search share from its competitors (at the very least when it reaches 100%), but Google is synonymous with web search right now, and that is not going to change anytime soon. Especially when Google’s innovations in the space trump Yahoo’s.

Yahoo search may have a window with its mobile offerings — and it played that up today by saying that while about 1 billion people in the world use PCs, 4 billion people use cellphones. But that’s almost more contingent on worldwide mobile carrier deals that any kind of real innovation. Can Yahoo wheel and deal and own that space? We’ll see, but again Google is doing some kick-ass things in mobile search with its voice search technology.

Yahoo can downplay something like real-time search, but at least that’s something different than being the “other Google.” Sadly, with its search product, that’s what Yahoo has become.

There’s a clear theme already in this presentation: Search is shifting away from links to intent, according to Yahoo. And it’s moving from just pages to objects. They don’t just want to serve up a series of static results based on a word, but rather want to leverage the data they’re collecting from products like Search Monkey and mobile search to figure out what people are actually looking for.

None of this is hardly a new idea, but Yahoo feels it can do the best job of it as it’s been working on many of these technologies for a while now. And with products like BOSS gaining big usage (over 30 million queries a day now), there’s a lot of data coming in.

Below find my live notes:

Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo! Labs and Yahoo! Search Strategy

• It’s time to kill the 10 blue links.
• Take the insight from mobile search and take it back to the web.
• Figure out the underlying intent of the user.
• We need to move from a web of pages to a web of objects.
• It goes from how many pages we index to how complete of a picture do we make.
• We need to build a web of objects from a web of pages.
• We need to use the wisdom of the crowds — it’s not just about machine algorithms, but the people who gives us information through Search Monkey.
• BOSS is another important part — open up the search engine structure for other players to use it.
• Query volume of BOSS been growing fast, past 30 million now.
• Microsoft’s offering is doing 40 million queries a day, BOSS is hovering around 30 million already

Larry Cornett, Vice President of Consumer Products

• Understanding user intent, creating open search ecosystem and mobile
• Let’s talk about intent: Users have goals that go way beyond a search page: 1) Intent around keywords 2) Intent around objects 3) Intent within time
• In July 2007 we kicked off some of our new initiatives (search suggestions), launched way before competitors followed suit
• The drop-down menu when you do a query, this does query-completion and explore related concepts.
• Rolled this concept out to image searching as well. But image searches are done visually, so we include pictures in there.
• All of this is available through the BOSS API
• Currently in testing: Search for “Paris” and get images of Eiffel Tower. Bring in objects from the real world.
• Also in testing: Recognize an object in the real-world and figure out what they’re looking for — again, all about intent.
• The final dimension: Time. Search Pad is the product we’ve been using to do research. People don’t recognize that they’re doing the same query every night for 6 months. Search Pad is being bucket tested.
• There is intent being expressed over time. “iPod” is different from “iPod fix”
• Get music to play right on page, and music videos to play right on search page — old stuff, Yahoo just patting itself on the back.
• 1st anniversary of Search Monkey.
• In 23 markets around the world. 70 million enhanced results viewed everyday
• 15% increase in click-through rates for some partners
• 15,000 developers using it
• 400 applications in the gallery
• Increase in structured data 413% since we launched
• It’s completely open-standards compliant

Alex Moskalyuk, software engineer for Facebook — Yahoo Search Monkey partner

• Building a Search Monkey app was a valid project for us
• People want to see a user’s picture and their bio information — we can also display the geo information
• Facebook had to create a special URL schema for profiles to work with Search Monkey
• They also had to format pages in hCard microformat

Matthew Hertz from pipl.com — BOSS partner

• Pipl started in 2004, public beta since early 2007 — People search engine – we covered them here.
• We’re good at deep web, but we needed surface web data — that’s where BOSS came in
• Also use BOSS for spam detection and algorithm screening

Marc Davis, chief scientist Yahoo Mobile

• 4 billion people have a mobile device around the world – we’re looking at a world that people use mobile to meet fundamental needs
• Another Star Trek example, it needs to be real easy to figure out what you’re looking for especially on mobile.
• We’re talking to a web of objects that can be connected to by people
• Answers, not just links — with a minimal amount of clicks as possible
• Understanding user context — these 4 billion phones know a lot about you already, now we just need to connect that with results
• Showing off oneSearch — oneSearch shortcut, etc. Search assist is a “lifesaver” on mobile.
• 1 billion PC users versus 4 billion mobile users worldwide — not all Internet users yet, but will be soon
• In Indonesia, mobile search volume is about 4 times greater than PC search. Emerging market growth is juge
• 70 partnerships in 40 countries.
• This is not about one phone (*cough* iPhone *cough*)

Summary and What’s Next?

• Ending the 10 blue link legacy to move to user intent
• Creating experiences from objects and their relationship with the world (rather than just pages)
• Leading the industry with an open foundation for innovation

Q&A Session

• Interfaces in testing — when will we see them? We learn from these bucket tests — if they test well they can launch in the coming months.
• How does a web of objects change the way you serve ads? It doesn’t really change it, but web of objects can help with intent which helps with advertisers.
• Why is this different form what competitors are doing? Eventually users don’t want to read documents, so we want to surface the web objects. A non-answer
• When would it be appropriate to show a page or a link in this object world? Every users won’t want the same thing, so we need to better tailor to cert
• Real time question — the sexy thing? — A bit of a buzz word. Need to separate that word from just Twitter. There’s much more to real-time. Product plans: there is definitely an information need fulfilled by real-time, but they’re saying just something right now. Don’t sacrifice relevance. We’re investing in being able to discover fresh content as fast as possible. Find the freshest content we can and show it. Blend the best of both
• Yahoo Answers, how to use that in search? We should use both and figure out what people are looking for.
• Microsoft new search product with these qualities? For us, if something isn’t testing well, we’re not going to launch it, not based on what others are doing.
• Privacy? It’s opt-in, we don’t have to save the results.
• BOSS model has changed right? Open monetization was launched earlier this year.
• How accurate is intent? Search assist helps with that.
• Tech behind bucket testing things? Our technology plus information we gather from Search Monkey, etc.
• What constitutes an object? Anything in the real-world.
• How do you group objects together? We don’t insist on things being tagged, but there is a lot of data out there to tie things together. And there is value in curation.
• Is it fair to call this semantic search? Yes, that’s fair — at least somewhat. But this goes far beyond static pages and documents. Connect the web of documents to the web of the world.
• Moving from BlackBerry to iPhone? We’re on a thousand different devices globally — we love the mobile web. On a BlackBerry I use Yahoo oneSearch the client. We’re focusing on where we see consumers going — so in going where consumers go.

A custom search engine can be created that searches just a few defined sites, and/or the entire Yahoo search index and Yahoo News. The search engine can be further tailored to include a specific search term along with whatever the user types in, exclude certain keywords, etc. Once completed, the search engine can be integrated directly into a website via a code snippet.

This is directly competitive with Rollyo (see our posts here) and Eurekster’s Swicki product (see our posts here), which we use for search on TechCrunch – see right sidebar.

Like Eurekster, Yahoo is giving search engine creators the ability to personalize the results page, view search statistics and include a tag cloud of commonly searched terms (this tag cloud greatly increased use of the search engine). Yahoo is saying nothing about sharing advertising revenue with creators – Eurekster is doing this now.