Top Online Political Searches

From the announcement of several jobs bills that President Obama  is expected to address tomorrow to campaign shakeups, most recently the departure of Michele Bachmann’s top campaign chief, this week has been full of political surprises.
On the eve of his jobs speech, searches on Yahoo! for “Obama approval rating” are up 102% in the past 30 days.  Additionally, it looks like Americans are trying to better understand what tomorrow’s speech might entail.  Searches this week on Yahoo! for “Obama speech” are up 66%. Also spiking on Yahoo! this week are searches for “Obama birth certificate,“ “Obama bus tour,” and “Obama speech.”
According to Yahoo!, job searches this month include:

• Searches for “unemployment compensation” in the past 30 days on Yahoo are up 467%.
• Yahoo! searches for “secret shopper jobs” is spiking 865%, searches for “housekeeping jobs” is up 202%, and searches for “data entry jobs” is up 134% ??in the past 30 days.
• “Oregon state jobs” searches this month on Yahoo! are up 815% and searches for “City of Houston employment” are up 188% in the past 30 days.
• Yahoo! searches for “employment opportunities” this month are spiking 183%.
• Also spiking this month: “unemployment claims,” “unemployment rate by state,” “examples of resumes.”

Will she or won’t she? And here we are again, another week and another non-announcement from tea party candidate, Sarah Palin. After Palin’s much-anticipated speeches over Labor Day weekend in Iowa, searches on Yahoo! for “Sarah Palin” are spiking 383% this week and it seems that America’s favorite GOP leading lady has us right where she wants us—Sarah Palin is leading the entire field and has received more searches on Yahoo! in the past 30 days than any other 2012 Presidential hopeful.
Michele Bachmann, another famous GOP candidate, is spiking 42% on Yahoo! this week and people are searching for “Michele Bachmann’s husband” (up 101% this month).  Even though Palin is getting more than double the searches of Bachmann in the past 30 days on Yahoo!, Bachmann is the overall top searched 2012 presidential hopeful.
According to Yahoo!, top political searches in the past 30 days are:

• Sarah Palin
• President Obama
• Michelle Bachmann
• Rush Limbaugh
• Ann Coulter
• Ron Paul
• Mitt Romney
• Joe Biden
• John McCain
• Michelle Obama

What is Yahoo! Search Data?
People power: We sift through billions of Yahoo! searches to uncover trends, burning questions, popular personalities and hot ideas. Yahoo! has been extremely successful in sifting through searches for trend-spotting, historical insight, forecasting projections, and big-picture analysis.
Follow Yahoo! Search on Twitter: @YahooSearch @YahooSearchData

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Kim Kardashian Wedding

Kim Kardashian is set to tie the knot with her NBA player fiancé Kris Humphries on August 20^th so it comes as no surprise that searches for Kim Kardashian are spiking 681% this month on Yahoo! and are nearly 8 times higher than those for either of her sister’s Kourtney or Khloe.
According to Yahoo!, 90% of searches for “Kardashian Wedding” are from women between the ages of 25-44 with California, Texas, New York, Louisiana and Minnesota searching the most for Kim’s big day. Even though women are searching the most for Kim’s wedding, turns out they’re not as interested in her everyday life as 61% of searches for “Kim Kardashian” come from men!
Keeping Up. Kim’s not the only popular family member, since the beginning of the season searches on Yahoo! have more than doubled for the show on E! and it seems the youngest siblings are gaining popularity among online users. After appearances at the Teen Choice Awards and Justin Bieber’s shout out on Twitter last week, searches for Kim’s half-sister “Kendall Jenner” are spiking 1308% on Yahoo!.
Kim vs. Khloe. Since Khloe and Lamar’s courtship only lasted one month before they took the plunge, it’s hard to compare the two weddings in terms of popularity, but according to Yahoo!, Khloe has only ever surpassed her sister Kim in online searches the week of her wedding to Lamar in 2009 and even then her first place status only lasted 9 days. However, that has not stopped online comparisons between the sister’s bling. According to Yahoo!, 11% of searches for “Kardashian ring” were from people comparing the size of Khloe’s ring to Kim’s (9 carats to 20.5 respectively.)
The groom, Kris Humphries and his brother-in-law to be, Lamar Odom are sports celebrities in their own right, and wn compared to each other in search are running neck and neck. Check out the Yahoo! Clues comparison on the NBA superstars here.
Kardashian Kuestions: Seems people are turning to Yahoo! to ask burning questions about the close knit family from “Why are the Kardashians famous?” “Who is Kim Kardashian’s father?” and “How much does Kim Kardashian weigh?” to questions about their height:

• How tall is Kendall Jenner? (also: How tall is Kendall Kardashian?) (6’!)
• Kim Kardashian Height, How tall is Kim Kardashian?  (5’2)
• How tall is Khloe Kardashian? (5’10)
• How tall is Kourtney Kardashian? (5’)
• How tall is Kylie Jenner? (5’9)
• How tall is Kris Humphries? (6’9)
• How tall is Bruce Jenner? (6’2)

According to Yahoo!, Top Ranked Female Celebrities (past 6 months):

1. Jennifer Lopez
2. Kim Kardashian
3. Jennifer Aniston
4. Lindsay Lohan
5. Mila Kunis

According to Yahoo!, Top Ranked Reality TV Stars (past 6 months):

1. Kim Kardashian
2. Heidi Montag
3. Kate Gosselin
4. Paris Hilton
5. Khloe Kardashian?

Would you like to explore Yahoo! search trends? Check out Yahoo! Clues.

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Yahoo! Image Search Boasts New Design, Galleries and Facebook

Image Search Boasts New Design Today, we are unveiling a brand new design for the Yahoo! Image Search results page – one that provides you with a completely immersive and engaging image browsing experience.

The new search results page sports a neatly tiled look, with each image equally sized, then becoming larger when you hover over one.
In addition to displaying the best images from the web, the new Image Search includes three new category tabs to better categorize and present the images that interest you:

• Latest:  The “Latest” tab will automatically appear for image search results of trending topics, such as images of events, celebrities and news. For example, the “Latest” tab appears in a “President Obama” search shown below.
• Galleries:  The “Galleries” tab will appear for image search results that include photo galleries from Yahoo! News, Flickr and OMG.
• Facebook: If you choose to connect your Facebook account with Yahoo! Image Search, a “Facebook” tab will automatically appear if your search results include matches from your Facebook friends’ name, photo album names or album descriptions.

One of the most significant changes we’ve made to Yahoo! Image Search is the way images are displayed and navigated. By clicking on any image on the search results page, the image will appear on a fresh page allowing users to browse effortlessly through full-size images with a simple click on the desktop browser.

That’s right, no more clicking back and forth between pages to few the next image result. Available for all four sections– Top Images, Latest, Galleries and Facebook – we believe this provides the most clear viewing experience, letting you easily flip through images without missing a single detail.
We’re still enhancing Yahoo! Image search to bring you a stunning image search experience that is fast, clean, timely and personal.  Stay tuned for more design changes and integrations in the coming weeks.
Check out the new Yahoo! Image Search results page today by doing a search on images.yahoo.com.
– Girish Ananthakrishnan, Image Search product team

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Yahoo! Search BOSS Adds Blog Search

 
Yahoo! Search BOSS continues to thrive with today’s introduction of our fifth service, Blog Search (Beta).
A custom blog index
Developers looking for a blog search API often find the APIs that do exist are providing a variation of a web index. We decided to take a different approach. Yahoo! developed a custom blog index where the relevancy is specifically tuned for blogs. This allows us to provide you a wealth of data such as the provider, the author, date of post and in certain cases, contextually relevant terms associated with the article. Explore the documentation to learn more.
Complex queries
By their very nature, web indices used for blog search cannot provide the complex functionality that developers demand. For example, try finding a commercial API that will give you all the blog articles written on “Yahoo” in the last week sorted by date. Yes, I know, I couldn’t find one either. Developers can now make that exact query on BOSS and build a rich powerful application. As always, BOSS developers get maximum flexibility on the display of this data.
How much does it cost?
If you are thinking, wow that is cool, but it must be expensive, you are wrong. We are charging only $ 0.10 for 1000 queries.
Can I show Ads and make money on my search?
Yahoo! Search BOSS allows users to apply for advertising as a part of the sign up process, which provides you an opportunity to make money. We encourage users to build a commercial offering by leveraging BOSS.
How do I sign up?
If you have already signed up for BOSS, then you can start using Blog Search (Beta) immediately. Yes, read the documentation and start updating your site to make the appropriate calls. If you are new to BOSS, follow the simple step-by-step instructions and sign up at our BOSS site. Also explore the other services such as web search, image search and news search that we offer through BOSS.
What’s next?
As we said before, BOSS continues to hold great promise. We have hundreds of developer sites using it for millions of queries every day. We have seen fascinating applications in social, mobile and on the web that are using the service. Our goal is to nurture and grow this ecosystem by continuing to add new services and helping you monetize your offering. So without giving too much away, our next goal is to shake things up in mobile. Yes, get ready!! And no, we don’t plan a BOSS OS.
– Rahul Hampole, Yahoo! Search BOSS team

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Search Alliance Transitions in France, Germany, India, Italy, Spain and UK

Search Alliance Transitions in France, Germany, India, Italy, Spain and UK We’re pleased to announce additional progress of our Search Alliance with Microsoft. This week we have transitioned algorithmic results to Microsoft in France, Germany, India, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom.
Just last week we ??announced Yahoo! transitioned certain back-end functions for Yahoo! Search over to Microsoft’s search platform in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, New Zealand, Peru and Venezuela.
Today’s announcement of six new countries brings us to total of 17 countries: (in alphabetical order) Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada (English), Chile, Columbia, France, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Spain, the United Kingdom, United States, and Venezuela.
As always, our top priority is to provide a quality transition experience and we are working closely with local teams to understand the specific needs of each country. We will continue to keep you updated as we expect to transition additional countries across Europe and Asia in the coming months.
Kartik Ramakrishnan, Vice President, Search Engineering, Yahoo!

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Getting it Right with Enterprise SEO

Getting it Right with Enterprise SEO Yahoo!’s David Roth recently sat down with Markus Renström, our head of SEO, and discussed the recent significant success SEO has been enjoying at Yahoo!. He detailed this information in the Industrial Strength column in Search Engine Land. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

At many large companies, SEO is an uphill battle, so any victory should be fully celebrated. I asked what happened that enabled him to be so wildly successful in this case, and he told me there were three things that caused an SEO tipping point:

1. Executive Support

2. SEO involvement early in the project

3. SEO ownership of standards

Executive Support

As I’ve mentioned before, executive support is a prerequisite for SEO success in a big organization, so it’s great having leadership that is vocal about SEO.

As you may know, Yahoo! recently hired a new Chief Product Officer. He is a sharp, energetic leader who also happens to be a big fan of SEO – he mentions it at all-hands meetings, and even includes it as part of his monthly business reviews at CEO staff meetings. Since his arrival, many Yahoo! products are evolving with the imprint of his leadership.

One recent project involved a retooling of the building blocks of some of our media properties. The project, Yahoo! Publishing Platform, was meant to standardize publishing for our content-oriented properties such as news, sports, and finance, globally. News ended up being at the top of the list, and the product folks in News are huge fans of SEO.

To read more, check out the full column on Search Engine Land.

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Teens going online to prepare for college life

Going off to college and living away from home for the first time can be exciting for some teens, while daunting for others. In both cases, it seems college-bound teens are turning online for answers on the next chapter of their life as college-related searches spike this month on Yahoo!.
Fresh searches. While some freshmen search this month on Yahoo! for “styles for freshman back to school,” others simply are more focused on finding answers on “how to survive freshman year.” Below are a few searches showing the mindset of incoming freshmen this year:

• Yahoo! searches are up 41% this week for “college dorm checklist,” and we’re seeing searches for “list of items for college freshmen,” “dorm checklist,” and “first apartment checklist.”
• It seems incoming freshmen are looking to make the most out of their dorm rooms as searches spike this month for “dorm room ideas.” Of those searches, 45% are by males this month on Yahoo!. Look-ups for “dorm bedding” are off the charts this month on Yahoo! as well.
• The college experience wouldn’t be the same without friends, and we’re seeing searches spike this month on Yahoo! for “how to make friends.”
• No one wants to be a starving student. Searches on Yahoo! this month for basic cooking 101 lessons include “how to cook spaghetti,” “how to boil eggs,” and “how to make scrambled eggs.”
• Clothes don’t wash themselves and now that Mom isn’t around to help searches are up this month on Yahoo! for “how to do laundry.”
• We’re seeing some searches this month on Yahoo! spike for “what should I major in?” “how to choose a major” and “ten best majors.”

Time to grow up. It’s a promising sign that 1 in 4 searches this year for “how to save money” on Yahoo! are by people under the age of 24. With many schools raising the cost of tuition, more college-bound teens are worrying about how they are going to pay for school and are researching loans, federal aid and grants this year. According to Yahoo!, searches for “FAFSA” are 8% higher than the same period in 2010.

• “Tuition” searches are spiking off the charts this month on Yahoo! and searches for “student loans” are up 17% this month on Yahoo!.
• People under the age of 24 are searching for “how to make a budget” this month on Yahoo!.
• It appears some incoming freshmen only know how to use plastic as searches for “how to write a check” spike this month on Yahoo!.
• Searches for “cheap textbooks” are spiking 30% this week on Yahoo!, and some students are even searching for ways to “rent textbooks” as more stores offer affordable rental options.
• Seems some teens are already saying goodbye to mall jobs and opting for internships. Searches for “internships” are spiking 151% this month on Yahoo! and it looks like the ladies are more prepared as females age 24 and below search 37% more for internships than males in the same age group.

Greek life. As students head off to school, some are already thinking about Greek life and are turning to the Web to see experiences of others and are searching “reasons to join Greek life,” “Greek life policies” and are even researching the differences between “paper vs pledging” this month on Yahoo!.

• When it comes to frats, it seems students are more concerned with the initiation process. Searches for “fraternity hazing” are up this month on Yahoo!, and we’re seeing some searches spike for “best fraternity houses,” “what is fraternity hazing,” and  “what is initiation night for a fraternity like.”
• Not sure if a sorority is right for you? Searches are up this month for “how to know if a sorority is right for you” and “sorority initiation.” We’re also seeing some searches for “how to write a sorority rush resume,” “sorority initiation dresses,” “sorority tiers,” “sorority paddling stories,” and “sorority hazing pics”

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Want to explore Yahoo! search trends on your own? Check out clues.yahoo.com to see what users are searching for on Yahoo!.
Yahoo! Search Blog

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Download Yahoo Messenger 11 Beta Offline

Download Yahoo Messenger 11 Beta Full Offline Standalone Setup Installer

As the form of challenge to instant messenger, Yahoo has introduced a new upgraded version, and it is called as Yahoo Messenger 11 Beta 1.

The new version of Yahoo Messenger has been built with couple of new attributes, consisting of social gaming like Happy Manner, happy harvest, Draw My Thing, Pool, Balloono, Fishville, Mafia Wars, and it directly connects and manages social networking website such as Twitter, FaceBook, Flicker, and Yahoo Pulse.

Features of Yahoo Messenger Beta 11:

Keep in touch with anywhere in the world: You can connect with the various social networking sites as it allows you to view the status, comments like the updates from Twitter, FaceBook, Flicker, and Yahoo Pulse.

Post One Status to Multiple sites: Since you are able to connect with multiple social media websites using this new Yahoo Messenger, you can simultaneously write a new status message on all of them at one go.

Chat with FaceBook Friends: Just like adding Window Live id, now you can also add FaceBook friends to your Yahoo contacts and chat with them.

Rich Experience across the devices: With this version of Yahoo Messenger, you can make video calls, share pictures and videos between PCs.

Contact from anywhere: You could start Instant messenger in PC, and then you can continue using them with internet enabled devices such as Android based mobiles and iPhone.

Quick Access to recent interaction: You can recover latest instant messenger discussion from any computer, where you have signed into yahoo messenger.

Download Yahoo Messenger here.

Download Direct offline installer here.

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