Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

A quick tip before the kids start pounding on my door for candy and lightsticks...

Amit provides a lot of hidden search gems in a post, but two are very interesting indeed:

wrapping a search term in [ ] will make sure that words appear in that order, (for instance [JR Conlin] produces links about just me and not from Bill Conlin Jr.)

The other fun (and hidden) one is linkdomain: which allow you to limit outlink searches to a given domain. Kinda useful if you want to find out who's linking to what.

Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 Beta recently launched with all sorts of upgraded bells and whistles. One of the more drastic visual departures is your contacts are presented by default with larger avatars and fancy rollover options. While this is pretty and emphasizes the fact that the focus is on your friends in this release (or it's friend-happy, whatever that means), it does make it a bit harder to quickly scan for contacts because you have so many fewer visible at one time. But why scan for contacts when you can just search? The whole issue is sidestepped by the handy new EDIT: old but new-to-me Contact Search Bar (which you can show/hide from the Show/Hide menu option), which does exactly what you might expect in a straightforward autocomplete fashion. For my tastes, I still revert back to the compact view, but either way, the search bar means I don't have to worry about losing my contacts again.

Whilst wandering various blogs over the weekend, i came across a post from Marco talking about how the term extractor is fairly useful.

Well, yeah, actually, it is.

What that does is analyze a block of content looking for words that might be important. It does that by doing all sorts of context related things in order to find the items that most likely match the terms that are interesting to you (thereby preventing you from getting words about jungle cats and English sports cars when talking about the latest OSX version from Apple). It was originally used to do content analysis for what sorts of ads to display, but obviously it can be used for far more than that.

For instance, you could use it to automatically generate tags for articles, or indexable terms for documents, or boil down things like the Magna Carta into easy, bite-sized buzzwords. (for the curious, they are:

• king of england
• ireland
• all england
• bishops
• illustrious men
• cardinal
• archbishop of canterbury
• william marshall
• god king
• grace of god
• archbishop of dublin
• knights of the temple
• duke of normandy
• bailiffs
• abbots
• foresters
• anjou
• earls
• holy roman church

which I encourage you to add to your next Major Historical Document Recitation Drinking Game.)

What? Hey, I just came off of serving jury duty. Having a Major Historical Document Recitation Drinking Game would have been a more than welcome diversion.)

I'm always pretty excited about the fact that I work at Yahoo! Sports. Not gonna lie, it's a really fun job. So it's great to see that my enthusiasm produces relevant search results: searching for "Sports!" -- note the exclamation point -- from Yahoo! Search will take me directly to the Yahoo! Sports home page. Other excited search queries, like "Finance!" or "Farechase!" produce equally punctuated redirects. And you thought the exclamation point at the end of our name was just a gimmick.

There are a bunch more cool search tricks available here, but this was definitely one of the quirkiest (and one of the few that I hadn't actually known about).

EDIT: See comments for explanation of awkward title, originally just: "Search" -> infinite loop

At the last internal hack day, the fine folks at Pipes did a hack to bring Pipes to iPhones.

About a month later, they're rolling it out for everyone to play with. (I'll add that you don't need to have an iPhone to play with this, just any mobile device that can display web pages with CSS. My Helio Ocean and Archos 605 show the pages just fine.

From hack to product in less than a month. Well done Pipes team!

Yahoo! India Maps launched driving directions today. Now you can travel from Chennai and Bangalore or from Bandra, Mumbai to Juhu, Mumbai or back. It will help to know that auto fare (that famous 3-wheeler on Indian roads) from Bandra to Juhu will cost Rs. 39/- (or about a Dollar). Download the short version of the directions to your mobile phone or print it out and carry it with you. What's more, you can also travel from Sunnyvale CA to Mission College Santa Clara CA.

While the directions for Sunnyvale to Mission College are what you're likely to see mostly, the directions for Bandra to Juhu will contain interesting instructions like:

3rd Left (past Lovely Home Bank Shop on the left) onto Kalina Kurla Rd

Slight 2nd Right (past Prabhudas Building on the right) onto Sarojini Path

2nd Left (past Union Bank Of India on the left) onto 13th Cross Rd

These are typically how users in India are used to receiving or giving directions while on the road, using landmarks as points of reference and directions relative to the current location on the route.  Try it out sometime.

-Sridhar

Oh that's right, yesterday was my day. D'OH!

Anyway, here's a silly hack that's kinda clever. Let's say you've got a really long url that's going to wrap horribly, say, like a url to some multi-point driving directions. You could use a service like TinyUrl, but one potential problem is that some folks aren't big fans of not knowing where they're going. (They've been subject to one too many unexpected anatomy lessons)

Well, one option is that you can save that link to del.icio.us with a unique tag and suddenly

http://maps.yahoo.com/#mvt=m&gid2=31215286&q2=2821+Mission+
College+Blvd%2C+SANTA+CLARA%2C+CA&q1=701+First+Ave%2C+
SUNNYVALE%2C+CA%2C+94089&trf=0&lon=-122.001886
&lat=37.403574&mag=5

becomes

http://del.icio.us/jrconlin/snv2mc1

with a nice landing comment so that visitors can see where they're going to.

We've been saying all along that the new Yahoo! Search features will help you get stuff done faster. But you don't have to just take our word for it. Take our crossword for it. This rather clever mashup of a Will-Shortz-edited puzzle with an iframe chock full of Yahoo! Search lets you use the autocomplete and search assistance to complete clues without even needing to actually pull up a new search results page. A few of the clues also highlight our search shortcut results, like for shopping and music. Okay, yes, it's a really easy crossword, but I'm sure it will seem even easier thanks to Yahoo! Search.

Plus, you can submit your completed crossword puzzle for a chance to win a trip to Hawaii!

...I'm sure that relates somehow.

Thanks to Ian Kennedy for the reminder about this -- don't worry, we'd seen it earlier! Just hadn't written about it yet.

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Who wants to read that much anyway? It's all well and good for me to include this screenshot of the Guitar Hero song list, but that doesn't at all help me draw attention to the indisputable proof that I've spent too much time playing it. For that, dear readers, we use Flickr notes.

You've hopefully used this feature before, because it's quite handy. When you click the "Add Note" button at the top of a photo page, you're presented with a resizable rectangle that you can move around to frame any sort of interesting feature of the photo. You can then add a little descriptive note that'll show up for anyone who moves their mouse into that area. The outlines of all of the notes will pop up whenever you mouse over the image in general, so people will never miss out. You can also add notes to other people's photos if they've set up their preferences to let you, in case you see anything neat or want to provide a comment that has a little bit more context.

It's my secret hope that we'll eventually add the feature to allow you to use notes to tag your contacts in your photos, similar to how Facebook does things. Noting that fact may have been my main impetus for writing this entry.

If you haven't checked out your MyBlogLog profile in a while, you probably haven't noticed the knee-weakening list of Web 2.0 services you can proudly display upon your MyBlogLog profile page. Yes, make it easier for your fans and stalkers to follow your every move online with this handy "Hey, here's all the crap I play with" list that shows up under your "Profile" section (at the bottom of the page). Yep, you can list your contact info here, or I suppose if you're just interested in following someone else's life, you can use their info instead.

Still, darn easy way to list all the various sites you haunt. I wonder.... If you fill out every service listed there, do you win a prize or just get an interdiction?