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During a press conference today, Yahoo announced a large number of updates to Yahoo Mail, Search, and Messenger. Yahoo Mail, for example, will now feature status updates from a user's friends on its homepage. Yahoo Search will also receive a major redesign in the near future. Even though Yahoo will obviously switch to Microsoft Bing soon, Yahoo wants to align the look and feel of its homepage and search application. In the process, Yahoo will now also highlight more of its search services, including Search Monkey, right on its search results pages.

A few months from now, Yahoo's search engine will be "powered by Bing." After months of back and forth between Microsoft and Yahoo, the two companies finally announced a deal today that will bring Microsoft's search engine to Yahoo's properties, while Yahoo will become the sales force for both companies' premium search advertisers. Barring any roadblocks from industry and government regulators, this deal will grant Microsoft an exclusive license to Yahoo's core search technologies for 10 years. Yahoo expects that this deal will increase the company's cash flow by about $275 million.

Yahoo today announced a new feature for SearchMonkey that makes it very easy for site owners to embed flash videos, games, and documents directly on the Yahoo Search results page. The first sites to make use of this new feature are Hulu, Metacafe, and YouTube. Whenever a video from these sites appears in your search results, you can now watch it immediately in an embedded player right on the search results page.

Google may be outperforming Yahoo Search in terms of market share, but with programs like Search Monkey and BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service), Yahoo is still trying to innovate in the search space. Today, Yahoo announced a new feature that integrates Yahoo Search with some of Facebook's core functions. Whenever you see a Facebook profile in your search results, you can now directly add somebody as a friend, send messages, see their friends, or poke them.

It was 5 years ago today that Yahoo! stopped using Google to power its searches and started using its own search technology, the company wrote today in a blog post. Everyone knows that things aren't looking good for Yahoo! in business terms, and the company's search and advertising market shares look even worse. But you know what deserves some celebration on this 5th birthday? The search team's work on some really cool search related technologies.

Yahoo! Search Monkey, BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) and Delicious are three big wins for the Yahoo! search team - even if no one has yet figured out how to turn them into money. That's not the only reason why we're all here on the web is it? Isn't it largely for love of innovation? Yahoo! in general, including the search team, deserve applause for their embrace of innovation.