The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance team has reached yet another important milestone today. As planned, we are moving forward with the global transition of certain Yahoo! Search back-end functions to Microsoft's search platform, and have just completed this process for organic search in Australia, Brazil and Mexico. This news is another step forward for the Yahoo!

With another holiday shopping season behind us, you're likely well aware that shopping for the perfect gift can be an overwhelming challenge. Yahoo! Search wants to make shopping enjoyable and empower people with useful information to make an educated decision. To better understand how search plays a role for some shoppers, we set out to answer the question: How are people who use search as part of their shopping process different from other shoppers? Yahoo!

The top 10 searches of 2001 provided a telling snapshot of the times. Yahoo! users wanted to know about file sharing, car racing, and taxes with queries for Napster , NASCAR , and the IRS taking positions No. 4, No. 9, and No. 10. The most poignant entry on the list, World Trade Center , captured a national tragedy in just three words. Its placement at No. 6, shows just how hungry searchers were for details, information, and insight on the events of 9/11.

One of the most anticipated movies of the year will premier tomorrow across the country: Disney's TRON: Legacy . The high tech adventure film is also serving as the perfect example to showcase the new, rich search experiences that only Yahoo! can deliver for movie searches. We've partnered with Disney to create a dynamic, "Tron-ized" advertisement to demonstrate how searches on Yahoo! comes to life for specific movie queries like TRON: Legacy.

Last month, we gave you a sneak peek of the new Yahoo! Search Restaurant Comparison Quick App in beta testing. Today we are officially rolling it out for all our users. The Restaurant Comparison Quick App consolidates key comparison points like price, distance, cuisine type, atmosphere, and ratings in a single side-by-side view. When you search for a restaurant, the App also displays similar restaurants nearby. This way, you can find the restaurant you want in a single,

People love to check out multimedia search on Yahoo!, and we love helping them find what they're looking for, whether through web, image, or video search. One of the most interesting challenges in multimedia search is how to go beyond plain text and match queries to images so that users can more easily find the image they want. This was exactly the challenge we posed to the Association for Computing Machinery's Multimedia Conference held this year in Italy.

What do BP oil spill, the World Cup, and Miley Cyrus have in common? They are among the most-searched topics on Yahoo! this year. Today, the Yahoo! Year in Review returns for a look at what set society in motion this year through the lens of what people are searching for on Yahoo!. On the 2010 Year in Review site, you'll find top 10 lists that record this year's pop culture trends and guilty pleasures. You'll also find top-asked questions )"How to tie a tie?"(,

This month at Yahoo! Search you kept us busy with queries about who was leading the pack in sports, politics, music, and matrimony. Here's a look back at a busy November and what people searched for on Yahoo! Search. The first big winners of the month arrived on the very first day when the San Francisco Giants triumphed in the World Series , scoring their first championship since 1954. Searches for the Giants rose by more than 160% from the day before their win,

We've explored many new product ideas in Asian markets that folks in other parts of the world don't often hear about. This week we're excited to share another new experimental product called Yahoo! KPost, which is now available in Hong Kong and Korea. Here's an overview of what KPost is all about. At Yahoo!, we want to help you stay informed and share your knowledge about things that matter to you. Yahoo!

We have improved our Shopping Shortcuts to include even more of the hottest items for this holiday season. Our Shopping Shortcuts show you some of the most popular products and let you see what others think about an item you are interested in. You can also learn about possible alternatives and choose the best place to buy when you are ready to make the purchase. Search for " gps " and the Shopping Shortcut will show you the top GPS products, along with price, rating,