A clever toolset newly announced by Yahoo offers WordPress bloggers a sidekick bearing additional content from Yahoo’s various content services, including the Flickr photo sharing site.

Yahoo Shortcuts have been seen in Yahoo’s pages as dashed underlined links. Doing a mouseover of one of these provides a popup with additional content related to the linked term.

The process takes a step forward for WordPress bloggers. After installing the plug-in, Yahoo Shortcuts watches what one writes. After the post is completed, the plug-in’s "Review this post" button leads to suggestions for Shortcut content.

Bloggers can leave suggested Shortcuts in place, or remove them as desired. When keeping the Shortcut, the blogger has the option to keep it as a link, or make it a badge that can be embedded in the post.

Yahoo’s Flickr integration with the WordPress plug-in will be the feature that catches a log of attention. The company said in the Shortcuts description it searches for relevant, Creative Commons-licensed photos based on terms appearing in the post.

Photos can be resized and placed anywhere within a post. The plug-in automatically attributes the photos to their owners who have made them available under those Creative Commons terms.

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Such a turkey tragedy, and other holiday dinner table disasters, can be avoided with a little help from a good recipe. Yahoo Search has a little something for the food-curious, a new round of Search Shortcuts.

Logged-in Yahoo users can rate recipes on Yahoo Food. When it comes to turkey recipes, quite a few suggest ways to use the leftovers beyond the usual “top turkey with stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and gravy; nuke for three minutes on High.”

As Kamae also noted, post-New Year’s searches for ideas for low-fat recipes and other diet suggestions will work the same way.

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We have to give credit to the witty Ya-Bing Chu of Yahoo Search. Despite his unfortunate devotion to Boston sports teams, he provided a clever little riff while discussing the NBA side of Search Shortcuts:

Looking for other NBA players to try? Let’s not forget Luol Deng-that’s-a-lot-of-money-to-turn-down! I don’t blame him, he’s gotta feed his family, or perhaps try to help with Travis Henry’s.

Nice little zinger to toss at Travis Henry. Who said search geeks are boring anyway?

The Sports Shortcuts work as do others in Yahoo Search. Do a query by a player’s name, and when a Shortcut (should they be called Sportcuts?) is available it will appear in the usual place, with stats and relevant Yahoo Fantasy Sports rankings as well.

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So recently the Gmail team has been working on a structural code change that we’ll be rolling out to Firefox 2 and IE 7 users over the coming weeks (with other browsers to follow). You won’t notice too many differences to start with, but we’re using a new model that enables us to iterate faster and share components (we now use the same rich text editor as Groups and Page Creator, and the Contact Manager can be seen in several Google apps). A few other things you will notice are some new keyboard shortcuts and the ability to bookmark specific messages and email searches.

Google Checkout Adds 5 New API Features

* Name Parsing: Provides the first name, last name, and full name of the buyer and
order recipient in separate fields new order notifications.

* Google Promo Notification: If an order is placed under a Google promotion, you can require new order notifications, charge amount notifications, and refund amount notifications to include the promotion amount.

* Ship-to Phone: Returns the buyer’s ship-to phone number in new order
notifications.

* Billing Phone: Returns the buyer’s billing phone number in new order
notifications.

* Improved Notifications: Prevents a merchant from improperly acknowledging a new order notification by requiring their acknowledgment to specify the serial number of the notification.

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The experiments include alternative views for search results, keyboard shortcuts and new navigation options. All the experiments represent some interesting improvements to the current Google search experience.

Descriptions of the new experiments as listed on the Google Experiments page:

Alternate views for search results:

See results on a timeline, map, or in context of other information types. With these views, Google’s technology extracts key dates, locations, measurements, and more from select search results so you can view the information in a different dimension.

Keyboard shortcuts:

Navigate search results quickly and easily, minimizing use of your mouse.

Left-hand search navigation:

Search deeper in a particular type of content- patents, products or news, for example. Google searches across all kinds of content, then ranks results by relevance.

If you want to see additional results of a particular content type, just click a link in the left-hand search navigation.

Right-hand contextual search navigation

Similar to the left-hand search navigation, right-hand contextual search navigation allows you to search deeper in a particular type of content or to search related terms – but from the right side of the page.

All the new experiments will be welcome additions to Google’s user interface and options. Unfortunately you can only sign up for one of them, so pick wisely and make sure to provide them with feedback – chances are, they’ll be released as permanent additions in the not too distant future. Sign up for Google Experiments here.

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Yahoo Shortcuts Searchers To Enhancements

Yahoo had revealed its Major League Baseball Shortcuts recently. With the close of SES San Jose for 2007, a trio of new ones have been opened for Yahoo searchers.

The Yahoo Search blog has a preview of the latest shortcuts. We’re thrilled that they finally rolled out one for the National Football League. Let’s face facts: which one are we looking forward to seeing play in a couple of weeks, the Reds or the Bengals?

Yahoo’s other two Shortcuts focus on topics that are of significant interest to searchers. Queries for consumer electronics items like laptops bring up a Shortcut with shopping results, including links to brands, specific models, and buying guide information from the Yahoo Tech site.

Medical conditions and medications have a set of Shortcuts available now. Searching for a pharmaceutical will bring up a Shortcut with its name, generic name if available, and linked articles and communities about the drug.

Looking up a medical condition yields similar information, but includes links to other resources when available. Yahoo does not appear to be using a specific health information partner for those resources, as we have seen Ask.com do with Healthline for its medical Smart Answers debut this month.

A search for “Excalibur Hotel,” for example, yields a result just above the number one spot that is marked with a “Yahoo! Shortcut” tag.  The number one result, which is for the same medieval-themed establishment, then has a dropdown menu featuring links to a map, seven photos, and over 600 user reviews (most of which recommend visiting the Excalibur).

Of course, not every hotel will be as popular, and Greg Sterling found that some of them get pretty skimpy Shortcuts.  After giving screenshots to prove his point, Sterling writes, “It would thus appear that Yahoo is experimenting with results to see how users interact with them.”

Internet Marketing Monitor’s Derick Alan did some investigating, and found, “[I]t appears that Yahoo! is looking for these specific criteria before adding a drop-down menu to the results: The hotel must have it’s own URL . . . .  It must have reviews on Yahoo! Local . . . .  It must have more than one picture on Yahoo! Local . . . .  And once these criteria are met, only the first result to be listed gets the special treatment.”

Assuming that this isn’t the final setting for Shortcuts, the company hasn’t announced what’s in store.  And even if these spotty Yahoo Shortcuts do represent a finished product, they’re a nice feature.

I’m a sports fan, I should be excited about the Sports Shortcut debuting on Yahoo Search. It appears some testing still needs to take place.

Like other Yahoo Shortcuts, the Sports Shortcut delivers a block of information about an athlete. Yahoo Search’s Ya-Bing Chu gives Dontrelle Willis as a search example. The shortcut…doesn’t show up in Firefox.

Strange. I tried it in Opera, Safari, and even IE, and there’s Willis, beaming out of his Shortcut over his 4.98 ERA. (Note to non-baseball fans: that’s an atrocious Earned Runs Average). Same thing happened when searching for Seattle’s dynamic leadoff hitter, Ichiro.

The Shortcut seems to be just for baseball players right now. A search for Peyton Manning didn’t bring up a Shortcut. Neither does a query for Eli Manning, but it’s not like he deserves one.

Omitting Firefox from the Shortcut looks like a strange oversight. We may have to blame Chu for this, as he is a Red Sox fan. Let’s hope Yahoo can get a New York fan to look into this.