The holiday season is chock full of characters, stories and traditions - all of which see their fair share of search activity. In fact, we hear there's a bit of competition among Santa's cast and crew for the top billing in search. To relieve a bit of pressure (December is a stressful time of year for these guys), Santa Claus returned to the frozen stage this month to oversee some one-on-one action in the Search Smackdown. He got out his list and set up some Yuletide matches in the Buzz Arena...and man, will the reindeer fur fly.

Based on this season's search data, we've got the Search odds right here, and a few highlights from their past matches. All we gotta say is, when Jack "The Cannibal" Frost comes nipping at your nose, you better not cry, you better watch out.

Smack Down	Red Corner	Green Corner	And the Buzz Goes To...	Odds
Vengeance	Rudolph "Red-Nosed" Reindeer	Dasher and Dancer et al	Vengeance is sweet. The reject reindeer outshined the tag team by way more than a nose, although that was too bad about Grandma getting in the way.	2:1 Rudolph
Snowblind	Jack "The Cannibal" Frost	Frosty the Snowman	Frosty proved too slippery for the nimble Jack, although he better watch his addiction to that corn-cob pipe.	9:1 Frosty
Extreme Fighting	Blister the Heat Miser	Snow Miser aka Mr. Icicle	Mr. Icicle may have the cooler ragtime routine, but his hotheaded half-brother burns him in Buzz by nine-fold. Now we know the reason behind global warming.	11:1 Heat Miser
Buzz Office Rumble	"Home Alone"	"A Christmas Story"	The McAllister kid can lay a mean booby trap, but all the blow torches in the basement can't match a Red Ryder -- plus that underhanded tongue-on-flagpole trick should freeze any loner in his tracks.	6:1 Christmas Story
The Unforgiven	Grinch	Scrooge	A face-off for the ages: the cave-dweller with the super-shrunken heart against that squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner. Ah, but that Broadway endorsement clinched the Buzz for the Grinch.	6:1 Grinch

That may be a bit of a stretch, but there's no doubt that online search behavior can be an insightful window in the minds of consumers and voters. For this reason, our friends at Yahoo! News included Yahoo! Buzz data (which is based on search usage) in their new Political Dashboard. In addition to Buzz data, the dashboard includes traditional opinion poll data, campaign fundraising tallies and even predictions market data based on a sort of stock market for politicians.

Check out Yodel Anecdotal for more info and let us know what you think below.

Graham Mudd
Yahoo! Search

Writing a good blog post is more than just putting words on paper. It's also about rounding out ideas, opinions and thoughts with content that supports your statements -- be it maps, pictures or links. And sometimes, the hassle of digging up that supporting content is the most painful part. So, to help bloggers address these pain points, we built Yahoo! Shortcuts for Wordpress -- a technology that sits in the background and finds and offers content to help build out your post in real-time. Shortcuts lift the burden of finding additional content and integrating it into your posts so that you can focus on the meat -- the writing.

So, how does it work? Simply download the Yahoo! Shortcuts plug-in and as your typing it will begin to find terms in your post such as company names and tickers, locations, news and product names -- and, with no additional effort, integrates a roll-over or preview badge into your post. For example, "Crater Lake" brings up a map of Crater Lake to answer the "where the heck is that" question and "Citigroup" calls up a dynamic finance chart of the company's stock performance. The product Shortcut (e.g. Nintendo Wii) displays the latest product reviews and price comparisons from retailers across the web via Yahoo! Shopping.

And, because a picture is worth a thousand words we didn't stop there. While these days it is popular to release new features every half hour or so, we decided to hold the product and dive deeper to offer images, as well. Now, under Creative Commons licensing, we'll recommend Flickr images based on the key themes of your post, with proper attribution to the original author of the picture included. For a complete list of Shortcuts available, check out this site.

All of these capabilities are built on the premise of giving the publisher control -- you can decide whether to keep or reject the recommended content and how it is visually presented. To see these controls in action watch this short tutorial.

You can learn more about it at Yodel Anecdotal . And if you're one of the first 500 bloggers to install and use the plug-in we'll send you one of these cool t-shirts.

We'll continue to roll-out new versions to provide an open environment for developers to create their own modules for content within and outside of the Yahoo! network. So, stay tuned for future updates. If you have some ideas on which platforms to support next, let us know in the comments below.

Ariel Seidman & Luke Wroblewski
Yahoo! Search

Socializing isn't quite what it used to be. For many people, it's no longer just about catching up with your pals at an evening happy hour; it's also about staying connected to a wider group by using the web as a networking tool. Not only do social networking sites help keep us in contact with connections near and far, they also make it easy for us to share our daily lives, interests and personality with friends and family. And today, Yahoo! UK & Ireland is helping to improve the socializing experience for users on the leading UK social networking site, Bebo, with the integration of Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! Music.

With the addition of Yahoo! Answers to Bebo's new application platform, Bebo users are now able to tap into each other's knowledge and expertise, benefiting themselves, their friends and the wider Yahoo! Answers community of millions of users. Bebo users can publish and share their Q&As with their friends and promote their reputation and participation in the Yahoo! Answers community via a module displayed on their user profile. They can also ask and answer questions directly within Bebo, and view Q&As from their Bebo friends.

We've also launched three new Yahoo! Music video channels -- Top Music, Rock and Urban -- so users can subscribe to the latest videos or add their favorite songs to their Bebo profile for all their friends to enjoy.

By making Yahoo! products and services more accessible off of the Yahoo! Network, we hope you find it easier to interact and share interests with your own communities. Don't forget to let us know what you think by commenting here.

Dan Peters
Yahoo! UK

We saw, we spoke, we sipped cocktails, and now that all is said and done, this year's WebmasterWorld conference in Las Vegas was full of industry hot buttons, interesting debates and stand-out keynotes. Here's a snapshot of what I took away from the event:

Key Conference Theme
Walking around the conference, one key theme that really caught my attention was the discussion of social media as it relates to marketing and search. With social media such as Digg.com and blogs proliferating, digital marketers now have the choice to optimize for organic/PPC listings or use social media to generate traffic. Their viral effect, in particular, was discussed in great detail throughout the event as was the need for modern SEOs to consider developing social media campaigns, using social widgets and creating videos and images as ways to get the Web to talk about their sites.

Key Debate
There was an interesting debate between Gord Hotchkiss and Greg Boser on the meaning and significance of universal search, particularly with regard to which experience is better -- integrating images and videos throughout the search results page or using clean separation of images, videos and traditional web results. SEOing for universal search can be a challenge, as the space is a moving target and lacks a steady definition.

Noteworthy Keynote
I thought that Richard Rosenblatt's keynote on Wednesday delivered sound insight. According to Richard, most content online today is about sports, politics, news, and other common topics, leaving long tail topics underserved. He emphasized that there is significant demand for quality content in the long tail and therefore an unaddressed opportunity to create content and capitalize on the monetization opportunities. Susan Esparza at Bruce Clay, Inc. lived blogged from the address, where Richard revealed, "The old model was about owning a generic domain name (pets.com). The new is that the search engines don't care where you are. Get a one or two word domain on a nontraditional domain. Target the wide body and the long tail."

Another panel that received some industry attention was "SEO and Big Search" with Dave Roth, Yahoo!'s Director of Search Engine Marketing, and his counterparts at AOL and Google. Tamar Weinberg at Search Engine Roundtable recaps his discussion of how to do SEO and SEM at a place like Yahoo!.

Industry Recaps
With a slew of industry influencers live blogging from the event, there's already been a number of panel recaps. Check out Search Engine Roundtable for more detailed information. They list both WebmasterWorld and SES Chicago panels and give readers a breakdown of their top five stories across both conferences by pageviews.

Overall, the discussions that took place at WebmasterWorld really brought a number of significant shifts in effective SEO to the forefront. Social media is not only impacting and changing our culture, but also the way in which SEO can and should be done. As social media continues to evolve and penetrate the search and marketing industry, I anticipate that optimizing for it will be an increasingly critically component of the SEO mix.

Sharad Verma
Yahoo! Search

Today we're announcing support for tags that give webmasters even more flexibility over which pages and documents are crawled and indexed by Yahoo! Search. Specifically, we're extending our support of page level exclusion tags -- NOINDEX, NOARCHIVE, NOSNIPPET, NOFOLLOW -- to provide additional control for archiving and summarization of ANY file type. Previously, these page level tags could only be expressed within html pages through the META directive (for e.g. <META NAME="Slurp" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">), but based on feedback from our webmasters, Yahoo! now enables these tags to be expressed through X-Robots-Tag directive in the http header, giving webmasters the flexibility to achieve exclusions on PDF, Word documents, PowerPoint, video, and other file types, including html files, and increasing their coverage through a simplified process. Additionally, webmasters no longer need access to html templates in order to express exclusions for html files. To take advantage of this feature, simply add the following page level tags to the X-Robots-Tag directive in the HTTP Header. Here are a few examples:

• X-Robots-Tag: NOINDEX -- If you don't want to show the URL in the Yahoo! Search results.

  Note: We'll still need to crawl the page to see and apply the tag, so if you don't wish to have the page crawled, use robots disallow on robots.txt.

• X-Robots-Tag: NOARCHIVE -- If you don't want to display cache link in the search results page.
• X-Robots-Tag: NOSNIPPET -- If you don't want to display summary in the search results page.
• X-Robots-Tag: NOFOLLOW -- If you don't want Yahoo! to crawl links in the page.

Along with this change, we'll be rolling out additional changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days. We expect the update will be completed early next week, but you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index during this process.

We're at SES in Chicago and WebmasterWorld's PubCon in Las Vegas, participating in a few different panels this week. Please find us if you have any questions or suggestions or drop us your feedback here.

Sharad Verma
Yahoo! Search