Yahoo's recent, special and hot news

2007: Yahoo! Mail announces unlimited email storage

1. SanDisk launches 8GB flash card for photo storage.
2. Alienware introduces a desktop computer with 1 terabyte of storage.
3. Apple currently ships the newest 80GB iPod, launched in 2006 and holds up to 100 hours of video.

Yahoo! Search Crawler, Slurp, is moving

Well, the crawler finally decided to move and find a new home. We are moving our
crawler from inktomisearch.com to crawl.yahoo.net. The user-agent will continue
to be Yahoo! Slurp, hence you do not need to make any changes to your robots.txt
file. Nor are we changing the actual IP addresses of the crawler infrastructure
during this transition.

Yahoo! Search Support for 'NOYDIR' Meta Tags and Weather Update

Yahoo support for the Meta tag called ‘NOYDIR’ that will complement the ‘NOODP’ Meta tag, which is already in support. If you’re unfamiliar, the ‘NOODP’ Meta tag is basically a way for webmasters to indicate that Open Directory Project (ODP) titles and abstracts will not be used in search results for their pages. While Yahoo continue to pull from various sources to provide the best title and abstract for a given page in search results, we realize that webmasters may still want the ability to exclude titles and abstracts from the Yahoo! Directory.

Keeping Ad Tracking and Dead URLs out of Yahoo! Search

Ad tracking URLs

Ad tracking URLs are used by Webmasters to help determine what traffic
is coming in from advertisements (e.g., Yahoo! Sponsored Search and
Yahoo! Publisher Network) but aren’t necessary to include in the Yahoo! Search
index. Sometimes you might notice that these URLs still appear in the index.
That’s because they’ve appeared on pages that are “crawlable” or may have been
copied over to crawlable pages by users. If you don’t want Yahoo! Slurp, our Web
crawler to index these URLs you can use wildcards in robots.txt. For example, if
you are using the parameter 'ref' to track ad sources, you can use a rule like
the one below to keep your tracking URLs from being Slurped:

User-Agent: Yahoo! Slurp
Disallow: /*ref=YahooPublisherNetwork

Dead URLs

The best way to remove dead URLs from the Yahoo! Search index
is to return an HTTP Error 404 when our crawler requests the page. If you want
to act before the 404 discovery and URL removal process completes, you can use
Site Explorer to quickly delete the URLs from the index. One advantage to using
Site Explorer is that you can delete multiple URLs including an entire subpath
so long as the URL prefix is the same. As Danny Sullivan points out in his
deep-dive post on the delete function, if you delete
http://domain.com/subarea1/, then all the pages that begin with
“domain.com/subarea1” will get removed. E.g.:

http://domain.com/subarea1/page1.html
http://domain.com/subarea1/page45.html