News about our Search Alliance with Microsoft

Today we issued a press release announcing that we’ve received clearance from both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission for our search agreement with Microsoft. Now that we’re full steam ahead, I’d like to share what we at Yahoo! see as an exciting opportunity to focus on creating new ways for people to search online.

Today’s Yahoo! Search:

First, let’s take a step back and explain what this alliance means for people who search with Yahoo! Most of the things you see on the typical Yahoo! Search results page below will not immediately change as a result of this alliance. What will change is that the basic search listings and ads will be provided by Microsoft instead of our own back-end platform – those are the text and links that you see in the left-hand image.

However, as you can see highlighted in the right-hand image, Yahoo! will continue to enhance the search result listings as we do for people today. A few examples of this are:

1) Providing you with rich results that display the most relevant information from Yahoo!’s rich content properties, as well as other great product, local, entertainment, reference, social and tech sites.

2) Showing specific results from vertical search products, like Yahoo! News.

3) Providing handy tools on the left-side of the page, such as our Search Pad and Search Scan apps, site filters that help you refine and explore the search results more easily, and related search term suggestions to help you refine your search further if the results aren’t quite what you were looking for.

Tomorrow’s Yahoo! Search:

And what you’re seeing today is just the tip of the iceberg. With Microsoft providing us the underlying list of search results, our Yahoo! team can now focus on making the overall experience of finding stuff online and getting things done easier for you – whether you’re searching at yahoo.com or just looking for specific information in the moment while using our many great products and properties on any device. We have lots of ideas for things we can do to help you with three main aspects of searching:

• Ways to find things faster when you’re just starting your search – by continuing to enhance our great Search Assist technology and also weaving search more deeply and conveniently into other Yahoo! products.

• New ways to help you explore the things that matter most – whether that’s with more rich results and options for organizing the search results page, or by showing you interesting Search topics that you might want to browse through in other relevant places that you spend your time on Yahoo!

• More apps and other tools to help you get things done as quickly as possible. We know that people don’t want to search per se – you want to complete tasks in your day, and we’ll be inventing new ways to help you do that.

I’m very excited about the opportunities ahead and hope all of you will come along with us for the ride. Go to Yahoo! Search today, try out a few searches, and give us feedback. If you have questions about the alliance, we’ve posted more information at the official search alliance Website, on our Yahoo! Search Marketing blog, and on the Yahoo! Developer’s Network blog.

Shashi Seth
Senior Vice President, Yahoo! Search Products

pictures-worth-thousand-translated

Imagine being in a foreign country staring at a restaurant menu you can't understand, a waiter impatiently tapping his foot at your tableside. You, a vegetarian, have no idea whether you're about to order spaghetti with meatballs or veggie pesto. What would you do? Well, eventually you might be able to take out your mobile phone, snap a photo with Google Goggles, and instantly view that menu translated into your language. Of course, that's not possible today — but yesterday at the Mobile World Congress we demonstrated a prototype of Google Goggles that has the power to do just that. It's still in an extremely early stage, but we thought we'd share this demo with you because it shows just how powerful a smartphone can be when it's connected to our translation technologies. For more information and to watch the demo, check out our brand-new Google Translate blog.

/google-desktop-58-for-windows-increased

We love getting your feedback, and one of the themes that has cropped up in the Google Desktop Help group is that you want a lighter, faster product. We heard the message loud and clear and decided that the Google Desktop 5.8 for Windows release would be based entirely on performance.

In true Google fashion, we took a data-driven approach: Measure, then analyze, fix the most important issues and lowest hanging fruit, then rinse, lather and repeat.

First, we built performance tests that simulate a typical user's behavior when using Google Desktop and measure the time spent on actions such as starting up, shutting down, searching, adding a gadget, adding a new document to the search index, and so forth. We then took a page from the Google Chrome playbook by running the performance tests automatically for every single change we made to the software, on dozens of machines each time so that an average of the time measurements from all of them would give us a reliable comparison against previous versions.

Next, we refined an option that helps us improve the product, with your agreement. To send us information about problems you might experience, you can opt in to our error reporting system. If you have opted in, the system will send us anonymous diagnostic information about such events as crashes. In the new version, we improved this system to also detect and report situations where our product could be making your computer slow to respond.

We've learned a lot from these two new sources of data. The performance measurement system enabled us to discover some seemingly small changes that had a major impact on performance. We've been able to immediately fix changes that decreased performance, and learn from changes that improved performance. For example:
We found a way to cut memory usage during startup by about 50%.
Shutdown now happens five times faster, and we were able to avoid a seemingly innocuous state that would have almost doubled startup time.
From automated error reports sent by our beta testers, we learned that while Google Desktop generally performs very well, certain types of usage and some interactions with 3rd party software can trigger problems. We've made dozens of improvements based on this data. Here are some examples of what we've been able to fix:


A few obscure cases where interaction with third party software could slow the computer down when certain types of files were being added to the search index.
A rare issue that could cause slower computers to become temporarily unresponsive during Google Desktop startup.


We still weren't satisfied, so we analyzed the design of our software to find ways to improve it. This led us to make a few more changes:
We realized that with the hundreds of Google Desktop Gadgets available from third parties, there is always the possibility that one of them performs badly. To help you deal with this, we added a system that detects when a gadget is causing your computer to perform poorly, and asks you whether to remove the gadget. While we were at it, we added proactive security measures that prevent malicious gadgets from stealing information from other gadgets, and we made changes that allow Flash programs such as interactive games to be embedded in gadgets; for certain types of gadgets this can be a lighter weight approach than previously possible.
To reduce memory usage, increase stability and reduce memory fragmentation, we reduced the number of different processes that Google Desktop runs, and we now recycle some of our processes frequently (just like Google Chrome).
Microsoft Outlook users will be glad to hear that we've reduced memory usage while at the same time improving the coverage and increasing the stability of our Outlook support.
We've had a fun and rewarding time improving performance, because at every step of the way we were sure that you would enjoy our product even more. Please give our new lighter, faster version a try. We hope you'll enjoy it.

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