Yahoo! Search Builder is a tool that lets you offer a powerful, customizable search experience on your own web site. Using Search Builder’s features and options, you build your own search service to get one that is right for you. You can focus your search results on a specific topic, choose background and border colors, and your search can even sport your own logo.

Yahoo! Search Builder gives you a tunable search service that lets you:

• Search the web, your site, and add news search.
• Style the search box to match your site.
• Customize the search experience to match your users’ needs.

You can build your search engine in four easy steps:

1. Define Your Search
   There are several types of search you can choose including web search, news search, and searching your own site content. Begin by choosing which types of search you want to offer to your users. Yahoo! Search Builder lets you to tune these searches to provide a tailored experience that works for you and your users.
2. Build Your Search Box
   Now create the look and style of your search box. Yahoo! Search Builder lets you choose the size and colors. You can also show your users the most popular searches on your site.
3. Design Your Search Results Page
   Just like the search box, you decide how you want your search results page to look. You choose the colors and the font. To customize the experience for your site you can add a logo, banner text, and choose from a few other options.
4. Publish Your Search Box.
   This is your final step. Yahoo! Search Builder lets you preview your search box and make any needed changes before publishing it. Once you are completely happy with the result, copy the code that Yahoo! Search Builder supplies and paste it into your web page or templates.

You can create a simple web search box without signing in. A simple search box lets you add web search to your site, select the search box size and colors, and include site search. Yahoo! Search Builder generates the code and you paste it in your page. If you want to add advanced features like customized results or co-branding, you will need to select the Build a Search Engine option and sign in with a Yahoo! ID.

In 1994, two electrical engineering grad students at Stanford University blew off their doctoral theses in pursuit of cataloging their favorite web sites. Holed up in a campus trailer, the pair created “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”, a catchy moniker later replaced with the more memorable Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle, or Yahoo!. Their procrastination-borne hobby eventually grew into a global network of branded properties that’s visited by approximately half of all people connected to the Internet. An awesome responsibility to be sure and one the people at Yahoo! don’t take lightly.

As part of that commitment, Yahoo! welcomes you to Yodel Anecdotal, where it invites you behind the screen of Yahoo!. Yodel Anecdotal provides insights into the company, its people, culture, and the things that occupy its people’s minds. It’ll cover emerging trends, provide some behind-the-scenes commentary, profile interesting Yahoos, spotlight of Yahoo!’s beloved users, reveal some of its quirks, tap into guest bloggers, sprinkle in some videos, podcasts and photo essays, and generally think out loud. It is based on WordPress CMS.

In spite of what you’ll read about Yahoo!, Yodel Anecdotal encourages you to post your comments, quibbles, questions, suggestions – let it know if Yodel Anecdotal is hitting the spot, missing the mark or if you simply see things a different way. While posting, please use good blogging manners. That means: stay on topic, be courteous and productive, and avoid profanity, racial slurs, patent rudeness or anything that violates its terms of service. Yodel Anecdotal is a moderated site and they’ll reject comments that paint outside these proverbial lines. Oh, and if you have a stupendous story you think you want to share with others, please contact them directly

Yahoo Messenger Version 8 (or, simply, YM 8 ) for Windows launches out of its BETA phase today. You can download its latest version HERE. The key new feature of Yahoo Messenger 8 is that it is open to third party developers to create widgets that work within the client.

Along with this new launch, Yahoo has 182 Plugins to be used with its Messenger. The five of the highest rated plugins are:

• Coupons and Recipes
  Print over $100 in coupons. Find and share delicious recipes and print name brand coupons from Coupons.com! You and your friends can swap recipes, ave on ingredients and more!
• NewsGator Technologies, Inc.
  NewsGator’s editors search hundreds of thousands of RSS feeds to find you the coolest video and audio podcasts and the most interesting stories from around the web, so you can view them right within your Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. Personalize your experience by creating a free NewsGator online account, selecting your own feeds, and reading your stories from within the NewsGator plug-in!
• PandoNetworks
  Easy, fast and reliable way to share large files – even folders – with your contact list, up to 1GB at a time!
• docbliny YME Taskbar is a Yahoo! Music Engine remote that allows you to control playback from a nifty XP taskbar toolbar.
• WackyB
  Access ALL the secret and hidden Emoticons / Smileys quick and easy. Click animated smiley to be insert automatically into your text. Full mouse over descriptions (and which versions of messenger can see them). Right mouse button click to preview all smileys animating

Yahoo is finally taking its new home page, previously in beta at yahoo.com/preview, live on the main yahoo.com site. We’ve all know this was coming for some time. Yahoo began testing the new home page with some users back in February. In May, Yahoo made the new page available to everyone at the yahoo.com/preview domain linked to above.

The new Yahoo! home page includes enhancements that allow consumers to turn to the Web daily to read news, search for information, stay in touch with their community and discover what’s happening around the globe. It combines frequently updated news and entertainment with useful tools for searching, connecting, sharing and communicating online — all on one simple, easy-to-use Web page.

The new home page has a significantly different layout than the current look, as well as some Ajax integration, DHTML and more personalization features. Other new features are discussed in a Yahoo’s blog post discussing the new home page on May 15, 2006. In that post, they call it “the most significant redesign of the www.yahoo.com home page ever”. Given that Yahoo is the largest site on the Internet (despite recent gains by MySpace), their embrace of new web technologies is an important evolution. Millions of people may have their first interaction with Ajax in the coming days.

The International Federation for the Phonographic Industry has announced that it will file suit against Yahoo! China for copyright infringement under a new law that came into effect in China this weekend. The Federation says that around 90% of all music sold in China is pirated and Yahoo! China includes links to unaffiliated sites selling pirated music.

When Google lost its appeal in a French court last week and was ruled guilty for including search results for counterfeit Louis Vuitton hand bags, most international observers thought it indicated an unrealistic and anti-American sentiment in France. For some reason intellectual property infringement in music is taken far more seriously. Specifically, it indicates a serious misplacement of priorities by US influence wielders. Estimating damages from such practices in the developing world seems unrealistic, as it’s hard to imagine that most pirated goods would be bought at full market value if pirated alternatives were unavailable.

Of all the laws to change in China, what a shame this is the one that international influence worked its power on. What will Yahoo! Music do? They weren’t willing to challenge Chinese law on human rights, will they do so when it comes to search results and listings? If it makes sense for Yahoo! to change their practices in China, does it make sense for Google to change its practices in France? What does this mean for search? We’ll just have to wait and see.

The Yahoo! IM team just released the 3.0 version of Yahoo! IM for Mac. Yahoo! Messenger for Mac was last updated in September, 2003.

Its feature set is interesting, but it appears to lack two of the PC version’s most compelling qualities: VOIP and the growing library of plugins built on the recently released software development kit. It’s hard imagine using any single IM client on my Mac when Adium is available to connect with all major IM systems at once.

Here’s what it does have:

• A new interface built in Cocoa, very OS X looking.
• Avatars and animated emoticons, which I’m sure will appeal to a wide audience.
• Webcam support, compatible across PCs and Macs - though I personally IM when I don’t want to communicate intimately.
• Custom stealth settings, eg. everybody but my ex-girlfriend can see that I’m available if I don’t want to talk to her.
• Visual notifications using the Growl system.
• IM alerts for Yahoo! Calendar, Mail and Personals. Good idea on their part, but IM alerts for any RSS feed would be even better.

Coming soon: chat with Windows Live (MSN) users. It will be a beautiful day if even the smallest amount of forward progress towards IM compatibility appears. Hopefully the VOIP and plug-ins available to PC users are included in the future features of Yahoo! Messenger Mac.

Yahoo! Releases Instant Search, which is much like Google Suggest. Just that it shows up one result at a time with title and description which looks more like a search result rather than normal drop down suggetions.

Check out a whole range of other Yahoo! Beta’s at http://next.yahoo.com/

Yahoo! Local Blog: “Starting today, we’re happy to announce Yahoo! Local fully supports the hCalendar, hCard, and hReview microformats on almost all business listings, search results, events, and reviews.” Ultimately, standards for open data interchange (including but not limited to microformats) will turn out to be more important for the web than open APIs or even open source software…