While it was widely anticipated that we'd be launching a dedicated blog search engine, we didn't. Instead, we've incorporated blog results in Yahoo! News Search.
Why?
Just to mess with you, that's 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.
Which would you choose?
We decided that blogs had been captives of specialty search engines long enough.
See Also: Yahoo Adds Blogs to Its News Section (AP).
Update: Dave seems to think that bloggers weren't notified in advance. That's not true at all.
Posted by jzawodn at October 10, 2005 08:09 PM
Translation of your update:
Dave wonders why Yahoo! didn't join Scoble, other bloggers in stroking his ego.
I think integrating blogs with the main search results is a great idea. However, I had to do a search several times before I saw the blog results. Why? Because they look like ads, and Yahoo! and Google have trained me to ignore text like that...
I have to agree with Stephen here, the blog results do look like ads. Heck, I searched for something I just posted so I knew exactly what I was looking for. And still I missed the results.
And this new feature is very topical. Note that the headline on Drudge at this very moment is "Shield Law Sponsor: Bloggers 'Probably Not' Considered Journos..."
I say if you're mixed into Yahoo! News, then you are a journalist. (I like to set the bar pretty low when it comes to qualifying the freedom of speech and press for protection under the law.)
The design is a tricky one to get right. But if enough people feel this way, we may have to tweak it--or rethink it a bit.
I guess that's why we call this "beta", huh? :-)
But please don't get me wrong -- as betas go, this is one of the coolest I've seen in a while. Not just because of the functionality, but because of the strong statement it makes about what constitutes "news." I have certainly found the artificial distinction between official/print/media news coverage and blog coverage to be a frustration. As many have noted, some of the best coverage of current events is done by the people that have been covering that scene the longest, often in their own blogs.
I believe that this is a harbinger of a trend that will reshape media and politics forever and for the better.
You can get blog search with this URL:
http://blog.news.search.yahoo.com/blog/search?p=
I'd have to agree that putting the blog results in a box that looks exactly like AdWords is odd.
I love the system. Think about it: If you are blind to adds, then you are web-savvy enough to find the blog search on your own (and you're part of the 1% of the web already using blog search). If you do look at the ads, then you will see blog search and discover the wild and wacky world of independent citizen media.
And if you think people don't click on those ads, try to remember that they power two companies with a combined market cap of $120 billion.
Heh.
I hadn't thought of it that way. But now tha I do, I'm both impressed and amused. :-)
A small bug (I've submitted this via the feedback link as well):
The link to the RSS feed for blog search results doesn't work: http://internal.api.search.yahoo.com/BlogSearchService/rss/blogSearch.xml?appid=YahooRSSSearch&query=test&start=1&results=10&sort=date
gives: You don't have permission to access /BlogSearchService/rss/blogSearch.xml on this server.
Here's is a great example of the blogs kicking in for a news search. This search:
http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/search?p=IIPM
shows up recent blog information that is significantly more relevant. See this for more background:
Nick, we'll get that fixed tomorrow. I suspect I know exactly what the problem is.
I do like the way you put it into the news section and agree with the statement that news and blogs should be seperated (they are different sources) but I would like to click on 'BLOGS BETA' directly (and not need to scroll to the bottom) and have a setting for 'just blogs'.
I find the search results quite irritating because they are so few but I can accept you are starting to build this.
What I totally hate is the same mistake Google makes. When i have a blogsearch, 99% of my searches are not by relevance but by date.
I want to see what is new and fresh and not what anytime since you started putting content into it was suggested as best. This drives me nuts and is the reason why I dissed the search on Google groups a long time ago and do not use Google blogsearch either.
And yes, I do understand what a big thing it is 'just' to include some blogsearch. ;)
Cool. If only Yahoo would not craft a seven level subdomain for each service.
Thumbs up, thumbs down:
1) I like blogs being rolled into news, and I applaud Y! for this.
2) What Ozh said about yahoo subdomains.
People in my opinion don't want blog results beside news results, they want to just navigate to the blog search to begin with. It is a really dumb idea. People seperate their news and blog searches on purpose. Having blog results and news results on the same page just further confuses the consumer, like Yahoo have been doing with search for a while. Ever since Yahoo started bringing out new angles for searching, people have been put off Yahoo search. All the stuff Yahoo has been showcasing on next.yahoo.com just confuses the consumer. If they want to search for something, but don't expect to be bombarded with more than one way to search. Yahoo need to start taking note of what Google is upto, inside of constantly trying to develop retro Google products. Yahoo stop trying to be retro and just keep things simple.
People are trying to reach
http://blog.news.search.yahoo.com/ but can't reach it, so users are going back to Google's blog search straight away.
Well done Yahoo, yet another attempt to be different from Google and losing search users.
Remember, first impressions matter.
:(
Get this on a tab for average users >>
http://blog.news.search.yahoo.com/blog/search?p=
You should have blog and news in addition to a blog only search tab.
I think what Yahoo is doing is excellent, because private blogs should be considered news depending on some kind of ranking which hopefully could be a measure the quality of the writing somehow.
Not knowing a lot about it, I have some questions though about how the search adapts to the fact that now blog entries are considered "news", i.e. the results have to be actually new.
It seems to me there are three categories right now:
1. Traditional search. You create a web page, and it won't appear in search on Yahoo or Google for at least several days. So Yahoo and Google created a second category:
2. News. There is a predetermined (perhaps dynamic) list of news sites, and a news article posted on one of these sites appears in the search results within minutes.
3. "Blog search verticals" as Jeremy calls them. Here I don't know the technology too well, but I think this is really in category 1 in terms of timeliness, a search bot has to find the blog - even if this search bot searches only for RSS content, or somehow weeds out blog html content.
So my question is when you mix the results of search in categories 2 and 3 won't you get a bit of a problem because of this timing issue?
I would want to somehow rank blogs and qualify them to become part of the list of news sites. Maybe that's how this already works I don't know.
The key question is, if a high ranking blogger makes a post, does it appear in the search results immediately ?
I tried to find this blog entry using the search and I was unable to. I would have thought that Jeremy ranks pretty high, so I wonder if this timeliness issue is the problem.
Cyrillic searches show garbled charsets 85% of the time, btw. Strange.
I disagree with RandomLoser: Only geeks want "blog search." Regular users want to do a News Search, and as of now, that includes both mainstream journalism and blogging. If anything, you should integrate the results more, not less.
I don't know about all people but I want search, not news search or blog search or news search with blog search in a box on the right.
Dave, surely sometimes you want the best information on a topic, and sometimes you want recent (but still relevant) information on a topic? That's what I mean by "news search". Or "timely search" (not sure on the most clear name...)
Regarding the blog results looking like ads, a couple of simple suggestions.
1) BIGGER HEADING. The small "Blogs Beta" heading makes it feel a bit like that whole box is being concealed, or surreptitiously slipped in, or something. Put a big "News Outlets" heading above the left column, and a big "Bloggers" heading above the right. Extra visibility and a feeling of balance between the two. And speaking of balance,
2) BIGGER COLUMN. The small box gives it that "float: right;" feeling. For folks to feel like the blogs results aren't throwaway data, the blogs column should be only marginally smaller than the news column, if at all. It should intrude upon the news results' peripheral vision. The news results don't need that much space anyway.
Stephen, and only geeks want to do multiple word searches and other stuff you find in 'advanced search' of the normal search.
Why is it still there? Because there are people who care - and know at the same time that Joe User is not capable to seperate a searchbox and the box where you put the address into it. No, I am not making this up, get experience in training newbies and you learn that.
Fact is: There is no problem for Yahoo or any other to built the concept around simple things for the normal user and some special selections for advanced users.
Stephen, absolutely there are times when I want chronologic searching and other times when I want ranked searching. No need to invent different search engines for that, as Yahoo has shown, just give me the option of viewing by date or viewing by relevancy.
Having blog results and news results on the same page just further confuses the consumer, like Yahoo have been doing with search for a while. Ever since Yahoo started bringing out new angles for searching, people have been put off Yahoo search.
And all it.
