Wondering where your morning fix of Joe Beaulaurier and Chris Price has gone? We wanted to expose their obsessive and expert coverage of Yahoo! to a larger audience, and we asked them to join the Download Squad team. Download Squad is our blog about the user experience in all kinds of software and online services. Joe and Chris accepted our offer, so as of today you will find their posts on Download Squad.

You can roll your Download Squad experience in several different ways:

BOOKMARKS

Main blog:
http://www.downloadsquad.com

The Yahoo! category:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/category/yahoo/

All Joe Beaulaurier all the time:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/bloggers/joe-beaulaurier/

All Chris Price all the time:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/bloggers/chris-price/

RSS FEEDS

Main blog:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/rss.xml

The Yahoo! category feed:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/category/yahoo/rss.xml

The Unofficial Yahoo! Weblog will remain exactly where it is, with its tremendous archive of blog entries. Use it as a reference point, and point your browser/newsreader to Download Squad for the continuous Yahoo! updating you've come to expect. Thanks for reading!

It is with great delight that I introduce two new bloggers to The Unofficial Yahoo! Weblog: Joe Beaulaurier and Christopher Price. Joe and Chris will make a dynamic team. Both of these gents have long (make that l-o-o-o-n-g) experienc as expert yahoo! users and observers of one of the Web's oldest service platforms. Joe is a bread-and-butter man who values the traditional services that made Yahoo! great and continue to anchor the domain. Chris has one foot in the Web 2.0 future, and grooves on the tag-enriched social communal goodness in which Yahoo! is currently steeped.

In the next day or two you'll start hearing from Joe and Chris about all manner of news and observations related to Yahoo! I, and everyone here, are thrilled to have them on board.

I'm bemused and disgruntled by blogger reaction to the recently quoted statement of Susan Decker, Yahoo! CFO, to the effect that Yahoo! does not aspire to unseat Google as the marketshare leader in search. ("We don't think it's reasonable to assume we're going to gain a lot of share from Google. It's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.") Steve Rubel (who, by the way, changed his site design) overreacts grotesquely: "So if Yahoo! isn't about search anymore, just what is it about?" He continues riffing on this rant even more absurdly. Steve even proclaims a personal boycott of Yahoo! Search. This is preposterous. Danny Sullivan is moderate but still unhappy: "...it still seems like you would want being number one as a goal, even if you think it may be unrealistic or one that will take a long time to achieve."

Personally, I appreciate the realism expressed by Decker. And I thought transparency and honesty were values held close to the hearts of bloggers. Apparently not. Let a corporate executive level with shareholders and customers, and the bloggers excoriate her for poisoning morale and abandoning the company's business model. Ridiculous.

If you are a regular reader of The Unofficial Yahoo! Weblog, you might have been wishing for more entries recently. So do we. I have accepted the position of Associate Editor here at Weblogs, Inc., and can no longer blog as intensively as I once did. Accordingly, there is an opportunity here for sharp, opinionated, knowledgeable followers of the Yahoo! scene. Please send query letters and requests for consideration to me privately (brad-at-weblogsinc.com). Include the words "yahoo blogger" in your subject line. Do not respond in the comments section. (But feel free to leave a comment, as always!)

Bloggers at Weblogs, Inc. are paid writers. The income is at a part-time or hobbyist level at first, depending partly on how much time you put into it.

Obviously, I am looking for someone with a background in following Yahoo! and the search field generally. Good, clean writing is key, with a healthy mix of commentary along with getting the facts straight. All points along the opinion spectrum are interesting to me, except the extremes of hostility or fanboyishness.

I look forward to hearing from all interested individuals.

O'Reilly has released a companion book (or a competing book) to Google Hacks; it's the long-overdue Yahoo! Hacks. Author Paul Bausch posted a description in the Yahoo! search blog. O'Reilly is giving away selected hacks here. As always with the Hack series, this book reveals some service features that don't require hacking of any sort but are generally underpublicized, then expands on them with snippets of code that make Yahoo! behave in customizable ways.

Yahoo! announces its quarterlies after the market closes today, and this piece by Jonathan Berr at TheStreet.com provides a fairly optimistic rundown of the company as an investment prospect. The upshot of Berr's analysis is that Yahoo! is a safer and more conservatvie bet in the Internet and search advertising space.

A free speech case that has plagued Yahoo! for several years has reached another milestone. A U.S. Court of Appeals overturned a previous ruling favorable to Yahoo! and evading the core issue of liability. The argument revolves around Yahoo! Auctions in France, where the company was sued for allowing Nazi paraphernailia to be placed on sale. Yahoo! removed the items and changed its policies in France, but continued litigating the case on principle. Yahoo! is potentially liable for a punitive settlement of $15-million dollars. In 2002 Yahoo! received protection from a U.S. court, saying it did not need to pay the fine. Today's turn-around startlingly evades the liability issue and declares the case moot because France is "unlikely" to levy the fine.

Thgis case, academic though it might seem, touches on two important and current issues. First, compliance with the laws of foreign governments, and second, the safe harbor of online service providers that are misused by customers. Nothing was resolved on either count in this latest ruling.

Ian Rogers at Yahoo! announced that Y! has acquired Webjay, an open-standard music playlisting company. This fits right in with Yahoo! Music Engine's commitment to XSPF, the extensible playlist format, which was developed at Yahoo! in collaboration with Webjay's Lucas Gonze. On its own, Webjay has been creating playlist-sharing interfaces in which users can string together media from legit sources all over the Internet and share the sounds. Ian makes this merger sound like a heavenly and productive match; it is definitely Web 2.0-ish, and seems to further Yahoo!'s commitment to flexible user experience.

I'm watching Two And A Half Men. Marginally funny. But it's available now, along with other CBS sitcoms (reportedly online but which I can't find), through Yahoo! Video. Yet another in the sudden stream of TV on-demand deals being struck here, there, and the other place.

Just about a week after Google announced its music search results, Yahoo! reminded everyone of its dynamic audio-search capability by placing a Music icon on the home page and blogging about it. Yahoo!'s audio search service is aggressively democratic in its accessibility to both developers and musicians. Developers can use the Audio Search API to build music-search services on the back of Yahoo!'s engine. Musicians can use the media-RSS format that Yahoo! invented to easily submit their recorded and posted content to the engine.

Speaking of keepiung step with Google, when I checked Yahoo!'s home page for the Music icon, I noticed that a banner at page top suggested that I (and presumably suggests to all visitors using Firefox) change my default browser search engine to Yahoo!.

As a method of bookmarking, Yahoo! new Open Shortcut system seems a little useless. You can use a shortcut to simply store a plain URL, and navigate to that site from any Yahoo! search box. But who doesn't already have enough bookmarking solutions? Far more useful is to use Open Shortcuts as a way of searching within specified and saved domains. This thing really becomes handy when you consider that you can launch a shortcut search from any connected computer, as long as you're signed into Yahoo!.

A few days can seem like a few years when you're addicted to blogging. The withdrawal was getting desperate. Our technical work now finished, this blog hereby resumes its part in the ongoing discussion. Upcoming in the next month will be at least one new writer in this space, and a new year's eager anticipation of the continued fast evolution of the search space in 2006. As always, thanks for reading, and happy holidays.

This weekend it's going to be quiet as a library in here. We're doing some maintenance—big, important stuff that I'd tell you about except then I'd have to be killed, and besides, I don't undertand it in the slightest. Posting in this blog will be light to nonexistent, and the comment sections will be entirely broken. Save up your rants and raves 'til Monday morning. Thanks!

The search industry was rocked on Tuesday by the news that Alexa had opened its search index to developers, or anyone else willing to pay per-use rates to access and manipulate the Alexa index for whatever purpose. As John Battelle put it, Alexa is "turning the index inside out," enabling all kinds of imaginative vertical engines. Alexa put up a topsy-turvy image-search tool as an example; instead of finding images that match contextual keywords, it finds images according to camera metadata such as brand, model, and image size. At first glance, the service seems revolutionary, taking Google's and Yahoo!'s API generosity to a whole new level and opening the door to more complete search-oriented Web services than a mere Google Maps mashup.

Danny Sullivan attempts to debunk the enthusiasm, though, with a historically informed post that makes Alexa's venture seem like old news, and rather expensive to boot. Danny also points out that Alexa itself actually uses Google to expand its search results; Alexa indexes 4-5 billion Web pages, making it a runt compared to the powerhouse consumer services.

The tale will be told by developers. If they are attracted to the deal, and if news-making products and playgrounds emerge from it, Alexa will have a hit, and perhaps will truly roil the industry. It doesn't necessarily matter whether something is new and groundbreaking; it just have to have the right combination of winning elements.

Yahoo! has agreed to provide Movable Type as the default blogging solution in its extensive small-business suite of services. The other hand will get washed as parent company Six Apart directs small-business traffic to Yahoo! for a complete ISP/merchant/blogging package. There's nothing new about Web-hosting accounts with Movable Type pre-installed; the Movable Type site has a recommendation page for such services, to which Yahoo! has not been added.

When I first glanced at the e-mail press release about this announcement, I expected to read that Yahoo! had acquired Six Apart—that would be an appropriate complement to Google's ownership of Blogger.com. Of course, Yahoo! provides a newbie-friendly blogging experience with Yahoo! 360, which could possibly be interpreted as competition to the much more established (and feature-rich) Blogger. But Six Apart's three platform levels (Movable Type, TypePad, and Live Journal) cover all the bases and could vault Yahoo! into a whole new position in the blogging wars.