Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

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?

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.