In a post on the Yahoo Developer Network blog, VP Social Platforms at Yahoo Neal Sample broke the news.

It's hard not to be disappointed by news like this, but perhaps some innovative engineers will be set free to work on other things. And perhaps some unfulfilled dreams will be allowed to die, so that they might be reborn to try again elsewhere.

Paul Graham's essay about what happened to Yahoo is worth reading, as well. (As is this counter argument from Yahoo evangelist Tom Hughes-Croucher.)

There are other cool projects in the works at Yahoo. I hope they find more success than these ones have, with the exception of YQL.

Whenever you do a search on Duck Duck Go, the service will try to bring up the most 'official' page first, and if the search terms has a Wikipedia page, it will also include a short blurb from Wikipedia, as well as related search terms in a box at the top of the page.

For some topics, Duck Duck Go features special category pages, and it can also recognize calculations, phone numbers, zip codes, ISBN numbers, and product codes, as well as street and IP addresses.

Judging from the results we have seen, it seems like Duck Duck Go actually gets a lot of its information from Wikipedia, though it also uses Yahoo's BOSS service to provide users with standard search results when the service can't find better information on Wikipedia.

Duck Duck Go also does a great job at providing users with options for disambiguation, which also look like they are based on Wikipedia's disambiguation pages. If you search for "Berlin," for example, Duck Duck Go will ask you if you are looking for the German capital, an album from Lou Reed, or a town in Connecticut.

Firefox Toolbar and iPhone App

Duck Duck Go also has a Firefox toolbar, which just came out of beta today, and the company boasts that this toolbar can prevent users from going to over 44 million spam or parked domains (based on a list maintained by the Parked Domains Project).

The company also provides an iPhone app, as well as a number of blog widgets that are not directly related to its core business.

We like the simplicity of the service, and the company's focus on getting users to results quickly by mashing up data from Yahoo and Wikipedia works well for most search terms. In many ways, it actually feels a bit like an automated version of Mahalo. Of course, Duck Duck Go's name might not exactly help it gain mainstream traction, but other search engines before it also had seemingly silly names and they did quite well in the marketplace.

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.

SearchMonkey

SearchMonkey is really exciting, though. It's a way for site owners to add structured, dynamic data to their search results listings. It's a semantic web play and if it succeeds it should make search results all over the web much more useful. Think movie ratings displayed automatically next to a Netflix page when you search for a movie title, for starters.

BOSS

Yahoo! BOSS is another technology we find quite interesting. It's a way to use the Yahoo! index of web pages and the varoom to make searches go, but to perform those searches and show results on your own web page. People use it to make topical search engines on a wide variety of sites, but there's no better example of a great implementation than what TechCrunch has done with BOSS in their site search. A week ago today Yahoo announced that SearchMonkey markup will now be included in BOSS - enabling, in effect, custom semantic search engines powered by Yahoo! but on any website. That's powerful stuff.

Delicious

Those two innovations are big and ambitious but they are also quite new and unproven. The most solidly exciting project that Yahoo! Search has touched in the past 5 years? In our mind it's social bookmarking service Delicious. Acquired at the end of 2005, Delicious is one of the most powerful apps on the web today. Really! We use it all day long, mostly for search. Several of the ways we use it are things we wouldn't tell you about even if you pulled out our toenails, they are so useful. We will say, though, that Delicious is still the best way to track faint signals of interest by large groups of people on the web.

Founder Joshua Schachter, who joined Google last month, says Delicious would have been even more incredible had the clumsy ogres at Yahoo! not crushed it like a delicate kitten they wanted to but were unable to love properly.

If you're not familiar with Delicious (but you're still reading this far into this article?) you should check out CommonCraft's video Social Bookmarking in Plain English.

So on the Search team's 5th birthday we've got two huge technologies that were just born and one old, underdeveloped app that the founder says was suffocated by Yahoo. That's what we've got to celebrate. But in this world of advertising obsessed boredom, walled gardens and half-baked services on the part of most major consumer tech vendors - these three technologies are really something to be thankful for! That's not even mentioning Yahoo's other properties that do so much to enrich our lives, like Flickr, Pipes and Upcoming.

Yes, Yahoo! - you may get teased all the time about your trouble turning mind blowing traffic into search share and money, but on this birthday of your own search technology - we think you deserve a lot of credit for recognizing and working on some really exciting search related tools and services.

People should stop giving you such a hard time about your problems, too. We'd love to see those critics pull off what you've already done, much less beat Google.

Disclaimer: The author is a member of the Yahoo! Product Advisory Council - which means I get to visit Yahoo! a few times a year, see new products under embargo and share good times and bad with some Yahoos over dinner. At least for as long as they put up with semi-snarky blog posts like this and keep inviting me back.