Yahoo News

Yahoo Say Large User Base Gives Them Competitive Advantage In Search

Sun, 06 Nov 2005 23:44:55 GMT

In a NY Times article, Yahoo discuss their plans for social driven search, and impart how they view their large user base from their array of services as giving a "crucial competitive advantage" over their search engine rivals:

But Mr. Nazem and everyone else really wanted to discuss what lay beyond these keyword searches of the entire Web. "You can look at the evolution of search as a play in three acts," said Jeff Weiner, the senior vice president for search and marketing. "The first is the 'public' Web, where if different people type the same query they'll all get the same results." The second, he said, was purely personal search - finding a file or photo, usually on your own machine.
"The third is the one that we are very interested in," Mr. Weiner said. This is "social" or "community" searching, in which each attempt to find the right restaurant listing, medical advice site, vacation tip or other bit of information takes advantage of other people's successes and failures in locating the same information.

Found via Search Engine Blog

Yahoo Adds Blog Results to News Search

Tue, 11 Oct 2005 10:30:32 GMT

As anticipated Yahoo have made their move into blog search. What they haven't done though is offer the dedicated search (ala Google Blog Search) that many would have expected, instead Yahoo have integrated blog results into Yahoo! News:

Today we've begun the integration of blogs in Yahoo! News Search. Now when you search on Yahoo! News you will see blog results as well as content from thousands of trusted news sites. The experiences and opinions published on blogs make a great addition to the mainstream news people read everyday. And major world events are further fueling the growth of blogs as platforms for anyone who wants to have a public voice. At times, even everyday bloggers beat the mainstream media to a story.

Yahoo! Podcasts Now Live

Mon, 10 Oct 2005 09:06:17 GMT

We announced earlier this morning Yahoo's plans to launch their podcast search service sometime today. Well, the service is now live and available at this url. Also, there's the introduction from the Yahoo Search Blog which I forgot to link earlier.

Yahoo Launching Podcast Search Engine Today

Mon, 10 Oct 2005 05:12:00 GMT

According to CNET, Yahoo, today intend to launch a new BETA podcast search engine:

Yahoo Podcasting is intended to allow people to easily search podcasts through keyword, categories or tagging, which is user-generated topic coding. The beta site also will highlight podcasts of note, those that are particularly popular and user recommendations and ratings, said Geoff Ralston, Yahoo's chief product officer.

Yahoo Release User Product Review API

Thu, 06 Oct 2005 15:01:10 GMT

Yahoo developer network yesterday released their User Product Review API:

The User Product Review service allows you to display user reviews about a particular product. These reviews can be sorted in three ways: latest reviews, most recommended reviews or the highest rated reviews;either in ascending or descending order. See also the Product Search, the Merchant Search and the Catalog Listings services.

Yahoo Acquires Upcoming.com

Wed, 05 Oct 2005 13:45:28 GMT

To follow a long line of recent Web 2.0 / social software acquisitions, Yahoo! have taken ownership upcoming.org -- a social event calender. Paul Levine on Yahoo Search Blog, explains their move:

As readers of the Yahoo! Search blog know, our vision is a far-reaching one -- to enable people to find, use, share, and expand all human knowledge. Events are a particularly exciting area of human knowledge -- chock full of rich local, social, and temporal data. People want to find out what's going on near them, know what their friends are seeing and doing, and plan their outings. And they want to do it when they want, wherever they are, on any device, in a way that's relevant to them. Today we've taken a big step toward helping users in this area. We've acquired upcoming.org, a leader in this emerging space.

Yahoo Back Alliance To Digitize Books

Mon, 03 Oct 2005 16:44:37 GMT

Amidst the recent controversy over Google's library scanning project, Yahoo! have stepped up alongside the likes of Internet Archive, O'Reilly Media, and Adobe, to launch The Open Content Alliance, an all-round more publisher friendly solution.

The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. Content in the OCA archive will be accessible soon through this website and through Yahoo!

The OCA will encourage the greatest possible degree of access to and reuse of collections in the archive, while respecting the content owners and contributors. Contributors to the OCA must agree to the principles set forth in the Call for Participation.

The Open Content Alliance is opt-in only for copyrighted material, unlike Google's planned book digitization project which is opt-out. This key difference will likely avoid the type of fears publishers have expressed with Google's program over content being re-distributed outside of their control. Many critics of Google's project have already become members of the new alliance.

Yahoo Blog Search Coming Soon

Sat, 01 Oct 2005 20:08:07 GMT

In a follow up to Google's fairly modest Blog Search released less than a month ago, Yahoo announce their plans to release their own blog search tool within the next week, reports BusinessWeek

Both blog search engines have to compete with the likes of technorati, which currently holds the lead in this niche.

Yahoo Release Site Explorer Tool

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 14:24:41 GMT

Yahoo have released their much anticipated Site Explorer for webmasters and SEOs.

The service allows you to explore indexed pages, and backlinks for any given URL.

To be honest, given some of the buzz around it, it's slightly disappointing. With the exception of being able to export data, it doesn't offer anything new that can't be achived using their regular search. That said, the service is still BETA, and they are requesting feedback, so this situation could change.

The main purpose seems to be to encourage webmasters and SEO's away from using their regular search for site analysis.

Yahoo Testing New Tools For Advertisers

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 06:13:25 GMT

ClickZ reports, that Yahoo are testing a some new promising research/reporting tools for advertisers on their YSM service

The new tools are, Buzz Index:

Buzz Index -- not to be confused with the company's existing consumer-facing tool of the same name -- is a keyword discovery tool with attached demographic data

and, Search Share of Voice:

Search Share of Voice is a metric analogous to the traditional marketing measurement.

Currently these additional services are limited to being tested by 10-15 of the YSM's top advertisers, but are expected to made fully available in the coming months.