Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

It's official, I love the Yahoo! Finance team. Less than a week ago, I applauded them for improving their quote lookup process, but I had really been hoping they'd put out a better solution soon. Shazam!

And just like that, my Yahoo! Finance experience is autocomplete. Try it out for yourself!

1 Carnegie Mellon Undergrad +
1 University Hack Day +
several flickr APIs +
1 internet meme = an automated lolcatz generator.

Yes, they're 100% automated from the image tags, yet disturbingly accurate and weirdly addictive.

Set a timer, stop after an hour.

When I had first written about the movie Y! Search shortcut a little while back, it had disappointed me that just using a movie name as the query without appending any sort of locational information wouldn't give any sort of showtimes information at all. You could retype the query with your zip code appended to get it to show up or use the provided input box to jump to a separate showtimes page, but it felt clunky and not at all integrated into the experience. After chugging through all the videos on this mildly interesting promotional site for Y! Search, though, I noticed that movie searches now will use your default location for showtimes unless otherwise specified, and also that editing the module to provide a new location actually brings the results directly back into the page instead of making you load up our movies site. This experience has been rated a solid A both by Yahoo! Users and by the Critics.

Sure, Search may have gotten most of the attention, but it's not the only assist going on. Turns out that the fine folks at My also have been busy adding improvements to movies and the other personal assist modules.

Go, read, (potentially add it to your page), and bask in the warm glow of page plugin goodness.

Yahoo! Finance is great, but I've always been hugely annoyed by the fact that you had to provide the exact symbol for a company if you wanted to get its quotes. Say that you didn't know the symbol for the Walt Disney Corporation -- just typing "Disney" into the Get Quotes input box should work fine, right? Nope. Instead, you'd get an error page saying that the symbol wasn't found, with a link over to the Symbol Lookup result for that query. One click later, you would be staring at the perfectly acceptable list of matching symbols, wondering why in the world you had to waste the last 5 seconds of your life on a completely useless intermediary page.

Times have changed -- don't go spending all of those 5 seconds in one place! Mercifully, the error page is gone; any queries that aren't exact matches for stock symbols will take you directly to the symbol lookup page. There's still another click to the actual quote page, but I suppose it does make sense to display all the options if there are multiple matching companies and regardless, the experience feels SO much more friendly now. There's still room for improvement (and I hear updates are in the pipeline), but this is a nice step in the right direction.

By now, you may have noticed that we've added a few things to the search page. (Granted, we've been about as subtle about it as an elephant covered in bells let loose in a punk rock concert, but that's beside the point.)

Still, while a lot of folks have sat up and took notice, there are a bunch of little things that folks have missed. Fortunately, Good Mr. Grove (one of the fine folks behind the changes) provides a handy list of some of those lesser known tweaks.

I keep wanting to do a full-on review of how cool the new Yahoo! Search features are, but it's a big task to handle and I get the sneaking suspicion that the Y! Search Blog Squad has already got it totally covered. So, rest assured, Search Assist and search page redesign and suggestions on the SERPs as well as the top page of Yahoo! and increased Flickr and Answers integration, all of those are very cool things and each would probably warrant their own entry if I didn't think that I'd feel guilty about stretching out a single update for so long.

One Yahoo! Search feature that I've never really seen publicized, however, is the option to change the number of search results that show up on a search result page. Maybe this has been around for ages, but I just noticed it thanks to the handy "Options" dropdown menu that shows up next to the search box now. Any more than 20 results per page makes it a bit tricky to consume, in my opinion, but it's nice to have the freedom to mess with my finely tuned search experience! I'm still trying to come up with a particular application where having 100 results per page is useful. So far I've just determined that it's fun to scroll.

Also, we've mentioned this before, but I feel like it's a point worth driving home: type http://ysearch.com for all of your searching needs! It's easy to remember and prevents the onset of carpal tunnel!

Life is about choice. Some folks like using my.yahoo.com for their daily start, others prefer Google's version. We're not here to criticize your choices or point out the folks who are crying their hearts out after working their fingers to the bone over a hot keyboard for you, but rather make your life easier.

So, if you're someone who likes spartan, but wants to have your Y!Mail served up for you, good Mr. Kennedy is there to provide. He's got a Y!Mail gadget you can use that is built off of bbAuth and the Mail APIs.

Now you can load up that page with movable elements for mail, weather, rss feeds, calendar, stock portfolios, photos and have it look just like my My, er... mine My...

My English professor would be screaming right now.

In this blog, we generally write about cool things that Yahoo! does. This is the opposite -- a thing that we're not doing, which ends up being cool. Yup, being lazy has never been so handy!

No, seriously, a lot of work went into this, really. *grin* Yahoo! Mail has been integrating Domain Keys -- a method of verifying that email is coming from where it says it's coming from, essentially -- into our mail product for quite some time, which makes sense given that we helped to develop some of the first specifications for the system. It's hard to actually stop phishing by just displaying whether an email is Domain Keys signed, though, because who would remember to always check (especially considering that a majority of email senders still aren't using the protocol)? But we have taken a very concrete step forward by working with eBay and PayPal to block unsigned emails that are supposedly originating from their domains (more coverage here). Instead of putting the burden on our mail users to sort out whether the emails are legitimate or not, we can simply keep them from even seeing the emails that we know are fraudulent in the first place. Given how many eBay and PayPal phishing scams are out there and how much is materially at stake when your account is compromised, this can only be a good thing.

Somehow, I never get the same response when I want to not do things on my site.

While there's a good bit of attention being paid to a certain improvement made on general search, I'll note that it's not the only thing that has been gettin' the love. Turns out the fine folks at OneSearch have been busy too, adding flight status to the results.

Now, when you're on your way to pick up Mom & Dad at the airport, you can do a quick check to see if you can take your time finding a spot, or if you need to enter your own holding pattern around the arrivals building.