Yahoo News Adds Blogs to Results Set

Searches for News will Return Blogs & Traditional News Sites

[martinibuster]

From the San Jose Mercury News [mercurynews.com]:

Yahoo Inc.'s online news search tool on Monday added Internet journal entries as a supplement to professional media offerings -- an experiment that figures to test the public's appetite for information from alternative sources.

Under Yahoo's new approach, a keyword search for online news will include a list of relevant Web logs, or ``blogs,'' displayed in a box to the right of the results collected from mainstream journalism.

[TomWaits]

Their blog search is sparse.

[weeks]

This is going to be weird. I tried it on Helen Miers and you get bad jokes with news. Could be interesting.

I wonder what could be done with this with local news.

[martinibuster]

I just did a search for Google and came upon some interesting sites that I wouldn't have ever bumped into. That part is really cool.

But there is also a blog in there that isn't very helpful, just some guy remarking on the Google serps for his first name.

I also did a search for earthquake El Salvador and got some kooky responses. That might be because there may not be any decent blog posts about the earthquake, or else that Yahoo needs to tweak the service more.

This is still in beta, and it looks like Yahoo still needs to work on it. Nevertheless, people who like discovering new sources of information might find interest in playing around with it.

On the Yahoo News page [news.yahoo.com], there's a drop down for News & Blogs, and just News, without blogs.

[pleeker]

To follow up on martinibuster's post, I also uncovered some new sites I'd never seen before while playing with it today. I also like the Flickr photo integration.

Still, unlike G, when Yahoo calls something "beta" you know it means something. :) It'll get better, and I'm very interested to see how. Of all the recent SE announcements, this one grabs me the most because News Search is big, and Yahoo is putting blogs right there in the main SERPs -- you don't have to go out of your way to do a blog search.

[Erku]

How much traffic does Yahoo News have?

[roddy]

I can get my site's RSS content to appear in that sidebar if I choose my search terms carefully, which is kind of cool. It's a more respectable place than I would normally expect to be seen.

Odd thing is that the text snippets below the link are sometimes completely random, nothing to do with my site or the topic I'm searching for. As you say, beta means beta.

Interesting stuff though.

[Matt Mickiewicz]

Is there a way to submit blogs/RSS feeds to Yahoo (something similar to what Google News offers)?

[bla123]

I heard that yahoo will automaticly add blogs from blo.gs