Since launching SearchMonkey last May and Yahoo! Search BOSS last July, we’ve reached some impressive milestones: BOSS is now serving 30 million queries a day, and SearchMonkey is celebrating its first anniversary with 70 million enhanced results viewed daily.

Along the way, we’ve made great headway in opening up Yahoo! Search by accelerating the adoption of structured data across the Web and empowering developers to innovate in search. Here’s a look at some of the important initiatives we’ve accomplished with SearchMonkey and BOSS.

With BOSS, we’ve made key updates including allowing developers to Find Images to Use and Reuse with the New Creative Commons Filter
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Finding a great image online elicits a little thrill, but it can be tricky - if you’re looking for a pic to pop into a presentation or illustrate a Web page, you need to know if you’re allowed to use that photo, and how you can use it. Today, Yahoo! Image Search is launching a Creative Commons license filter that allows you to simply and quickly find images that are available for reuse.

When you use Yahoo! Image Search, you’ll now see a checkbox for Creative Commons allowing you to filter for images from Flickr that can be used commercially or that can be modified (remixed, tweaked, or built upon) with restrictions set by the image’s creator.

Follow Your Favorite Sports Team with Yahoo! Search
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Working on the new Yahoo! Search sports team shortcut has made me a new sports fan (I’m still mourning over the Celtics’ loss). Being a new fan, I’ve also learned how hectic it can be to follow your favorite professional and college sports teams. That’s exactly why we developed the new sports team shortcut.

Starting today, when you search for your favorite major league or college sports team on Yahoo! Search, a new shortcut appears with the real time score, the last game’s score, and the date and time of the next game. You’ll also find quick links to the team’s page, as well as news, scores, schedules, stats, and photos. Instead of having to click through search results a couple of times a day, you can use the shortcut to follow tonight’s pivotal game when the Nuggets take on the

Today we welcome Yoelle Maarek to Yahoo! as Senior Director of Yahoo! Research. She will be leading the Yahoo! Lab in Haifa, Israel along with Ronny Lempel. Their teams help further Yahoo!’s commitment to discovering new technologies that deliver compelling experiences on the Web.

You might know Yoelle as the former engineering director at the Google Haifa Engineering Center, which she founded in 2006. Her team launched features such as Google Suggest, Searching Ads, and Interactive Annotations on YouTube. Prior to Google, Yoelle was with IBM Research, where she held series of technical and management po

We’re rolling out some updates to our crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms over the next few days. During this process, you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.

To share your thoughts or check in with other Yahoo! Search users, please visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board.

Dan Rampton
Yahoo! Search