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October 11, 2005

Yahoo! News Integrates Blogs

If I post something interesting on my other blog generally (with a few exceptions) it gets no news coverage. If a friend pastes the same post to his blog then it ends up on Moreover, Yahoo! News, and Google News. To be honest, I could do a much better job of editing and do not fault them for not including me in news results, but the times they are a changing…

Today Yahoo! took quite the plunge, and added blogs to their news search results. Jeremy Zawodny explained why:

Seriously, aside from all the stuff you might read, look at it from an insider’s point of view. Tasked with figuring out how to expose the growing mass of blog content in our index, we figured there were two options.

Option one is to build Yet Another Blog Search Vertical (Technorati, Feedster, Google Blog Search, etc.) that most people would never see.

Option two is to integrate the results somewhere that millions of people could see them in context.

There are some good ways to track buzz for free. With the added exposure Yahoo! News is offering bloggers you can expect a ton of automated posts about today’s top news, and expect that every day. 🙂

In a Forbes.com article Yahoo! stated the blog relevancy rankings may be due in part to the number of My Yahoo! subscribers.

How will Yahoo! determine which search results to display in its blogs column? That’s a closely guarded secret. Yahoo! is loath to give content providers the tools that might help them game the system for better visibility. The company won’t discuss specifics but says that blog-search results are based in part on the popularity of the blogs within MyYahoo, as measured by a computer algorithm.

You can try their news search with blogs on to the side, or search through blogs

Interesting to note that some are turned off by how they place blog content near where they normally place ads. In a bid to make advertising seem more appealing search engines may continue adding content to typical ad space.

This blog is all of 3 days old, and only has maybe a half dozen backlinks. This morning it was not in the Yahoo! Search index yet, and I subscribed to it via My Yahoo! at 930 am Eastern. I will mention when I see it in the news results.

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