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If Yahoo has its way, it’ll soon be the place to go for information about movies, TV shows, and the celebrities who star in them.  Yahoo announced several upgrades to its search engine this morning, and they’re all meant to make entertainment-related queries turn up much better results.

A Yahoo representative told WebProNews, "Today Yahoo! Search is unveiling new ways for people to explore information on their favorite celebs and TV shows by providing the most comprehensive and up to the moment entertainment news and content.  With Yahoo! Search’s celebrity shortcuts, people can see news, photos, movies and even the celebrity’s official tweets right on the search results page."

What’s more, "Yahoo! is also introducing a TV shortcut so people can search for their favorite TV shows and see videos, episode lists, schedules and ratings from Yahoo! TV."  And "we are launching new celebrity-related suggestions on the left-side of the Yahoo! Search results page for entertainment queries, with links to results for related people, movies, etc."

You can see an example of how this all comes together below.  The results page packs in a whole lot of information, but still manages to not look overly cluttered or messy. 

Yahoo appears to have leapfrogged well ahead of Google and Bing with these upgrades.

Last week, we reported that Facebook wanted to hire two people in Washington, D.C., and then dissected the official descriptions of the positions as best we could.  Still, the bullet points left a lot unclear, so it’s noteworthy that Facebook provided some clarifying paragraphs today.

Adam Conner was the first member of Facebook’s D.C. team, and a post he wrote for the company’s internal blog was actually promoted to its public blog this afternoon.  Conner – who also deserves applause for being a Conan supporter – did a good job of explaining some of his responsibilities and favorite moments.

Here’s one excerpt that reveals just how politically connected Facebook may be: Conner wrote, "The week of January 11-17 was pretty cool, helping to pull together the Global Disaster Relief Page in just few hours.  I went on vacation that weekend and was on the phone in Mexico convincing President Clinton to plug our Facebook page as part of the relief efforts."

As for the more day-to-day stuff, Conner described his duties by writing, "I get to sit in meetings with vaguely important and occasionally actually important people and explain why Facebook is like the wheel or fire and how not using it really isn’t an option anymore."

It sounds like the social network’s well on its way to being omnipresent in Washington, then, especially as it adds two more employees.

YouTube Partners are, pretty much by definition, some of YouTube’s most important users.  They create original content, don’t violate copyright laws, and have huge audiences.  It makes sense, then, that YouTube is now looking hard for ways to improve its Partner Program.

The hunt has taken the form of a crowdsourced project.  Just as the Ideas Page for YouTube was created not too long ago for the sake of the whole site, the new Product Ideas Page for the YouTube Partner Program covers this single subject.  People can submit ideas and vote on which ones they think are best.

It’s an effective process.  On the YouTube Biz Blog, Filipe Lima noted with respect to the first effort, "It was a success, receiving almost 3,000 ideas and more than 300,000 votes.  We even launched a few features that directly addressed some of the requests – namely, an HTML5 Beta (there were many HTML5 advocates who participated) and a sneak peek of our new cleaner video page (some desired a ‘less cluttered’ YouTube)."

So now we’ll see where round two takes us.

The deadline for both new submissions and votes is April 12th.  If you have any suggestions, get them in earlier, though, for the sake of giving them more time to become popular.

Gowalla is a service that has been getting a lot of buzz lately. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a location-based social networksing service that comes in the form of mobile apps. Gowalla announced today, the availability of Gowalla 2.0 for the iPhone 3G and 3GS platforms.

Gowalla highlights the following new features with this version:

- Design – Gowalla developers have created a fresh new experience that is more flexible, readable and usable.

- Photos – Gowalla 2.0 gives users the ability to not only check in and create new spots; they can also upload a photo after checking in, browse photos from friends and see photos taken at that spot.

- Checkin Commenting – Now when a friend checks in someplace, other users in the community are able to tell that friend what they think.

- Multiple checkin messages – Users now have more opportunities to add messages even after they’ve left a checkin spot. Skipped typing a message? Come back and add one.

- Hot spots – The most popular spots nearby will be highlighted for users in a particular area to discover.

- Browse friends – and friends of friends. Browsing friends’ bookmarked spots and creating trips are two new features put in place by Gowalla’s developers by popular demand.

- Facebook, Twitter and web links – Building your Gowalla network is easier than ever with more ways to stay connected with friends through Facebook, Twitter and web links.

- Spot details – Address, phone numbers, Twitter names, Facebook pages and website will now be available in several checkin spots.

Gowalla will be heavily involved in SXSW (of which WebProNews will be covering the Interactive portion). Gowalla has updated its SXSW mini-site that details all of the SXSW initiatives the company will be rolling out, including: real world rewards, competitions, challenges and events.

When Twitter users go to post a new tweet, they have in the past used a button that says "update" (at least from Twitter.com…that varies when you get into all the different apps Twitter users use). Now, that button says "Tweet".

We’re not sure exactly when the change was made, but it appears to have been very recently, as there is quite an outpour of Tweets from users mentioning that they are now seeing the "tweet" button. Perhaps this is Twitter way of asserting some kind of ownership of the word and the brand that it carries.

Twitter made "retweeting" an official feature last year, after the community-born practice grew to mainstream use.

Interestingly, Retweet.com just sold for $250,000 this week.

The tweet button isn’t the only new thing going on with Twitter’s website this week. Twitter is currently in the process of rolling out geolocation features on the site, after having had such capabilities available via the API since November.

Twitter CEO Evan Williams will be speaking at SXSW early next week (WebProNews will be there covering it). We may get more interesting news from the company there (some expect an ad platform to be announced).

Update: Looks like some have noticed this for at least a couple days.

Last fall, Twitter started including geolocation information in its API, but it was not available through Twitter.com. That appears to be in the process of changing now.

This week, Twitter has been rolling out (it appears to still be in the process) geolocation info on tweets at Twitter.com. Various reports from users have been circulating, with those who have access to the feature pointing to a little blue icon by the tweet source on individual tweets, which when clicked, shows location information on a Map (powered by Google Maps).

The feature (as most new Twitter features do) is already receiving some criticism from users who have access to it. For example, Kim-Mai Cutler with VentureBeat says Twitter’s geotagging is "far from what Twitter needs to be a real player in location."

Cutler adds, "First, the new maps feature isn’t turned on for Twitter’s search results. The whole point of location-based search is to be able to find what’s actually happening around you right now. Instead, Twitter tosses a few such tweets into a wash of noise…"

Earlier this week, news of Facebook readying location features surfaced. The company is expected to launch something along these lines at its f8 conference in May. Location players getting the most buzz currently are Gowalla and Foursquare. They you have Google, of course. This may be the most interesting space to watch as the year progresses. It will be quite interesting to see how mainstream location sharing becomes when it comes to consumers.

Are you seeing the geolocation information showing up at Twitter.com? Do you intend to share your location when tweeting?