You the Media
During Hurricane Katrina millions of people came to Yahoo! News for authoritative information. At the same time thousands of bloggers were posting first-hand accounts, photos, personal stories, and opinions. But without mainstream exposure, many important voices went unheard.
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.
In addition to blog posts, we will also be including Flickr photos and links from My Web, tapping into a large grassroots media network. By bringing mainstream and personal media together we can offer a greater variety of sources and viewpoints to the millions of people who want to find out what’s going on in the world.
The search index we are beta testing currently contains content from a subset of blogs, but look for this to continue growing and ultimately include the 20+ million blogs from the blo.gs ping stream.
We’re starting with News Search because we thought about all the places we could surface blog results on Yahoo! and Yahoo! News Search was the top of the list. Over time, expect to see more and more community created content (including Podcasts–see interview) appearing where they make the most sense.
Give it a try and let us know what you think.
Thanks,
Brian Stolte
Yahoo! Search Product Management
Cameron Marlow
Yahoo! Research Berkeley
Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Technology Development
Good job. Counting on blogs as news sources, That’s radical but great. Let see how Yahoo will deal with spammers.
btw, I believe the bounding box around “Blogs Beta” is a lot like ads. I prefer a style similar to other boxes such as News Images/Audio for that.
that’s funny, blo.gs claims to have less than ten million blogs in its database since something went awry and it got reset back to its june 14 state on october 5.
the blog search results (on their own) look slick, and the integration with news search is clever.
Great to see you have added other media to your news site. It is appreciated!
Hey. How do I get blo.gs to ping TailRank.com?
I sent you guys an email about 3 weeks ago but never heard back.
http://www.feedblog.org/2005/09/please_ping_tai.html
Kevin, I’ll follow-up via email on this.
Congratulations guys!
Dave
Wow! Neat, I tried a few searches and believe me the blog results are better ;-)
btw I always thought that flickr results should be better integrated with yahoo image search to improve yahoo’s image search.
Terrific work Yahoo! Now that’s what I’m talking about :) I’ve been debating which suite of APIs to experiment/integrate with at Philly Future and your forward thinking has finally pushed me in one direction - yours.
A question - if my blog is not included, and in the case of Philadelphia related news should be, how do I make it so?
Great Job … keep up the good work
This is a wonderful addition! I’m a bit concerned about spammers, as they are a big problem with most blog searches. This is definitely more evidence of the importance of blogs! Also, as a flickr addict, I’m thrilled to see the integration of flickr images.
Kudos to Yahoo!
Competition is good…
I like the idea of integrating blog search with yahoo! news, but the way it looks is a bit odd. I’ve posted about it on my personal blog, and you guys can take that as feedback.
The general line is that the pattern you guys are following is quite close to ad columns, which eventually means not too many people will end up checking it out because they’ll confuse that space with an ad block.
I go a little more specific here (sorry about the potentially long URL):
http://webreakstuff.com/blog/2005/10/looking-at-the-yahoo-blog-search/
if you can’t even control spam in your own blog how will you be able to account for spam in your blog search?
This sounds fantastic! However will Yahoo! continue to ignore alternative news sites such as RINF.com and Infowars.com in much the same way Yahoo! news does? On the surface this seems like a great idea but I still have doubts as mainstream news outlets like Yahoo! often take a very one-sided view on issues.
One more revolution in Yahoo. Gr8!
Hi,
Great work on that guys! I’m a big fan of the YSDN and am wondering if/when this feature will be available through the web services?
Many thanks,
Wow! Great going…This is great Add on! Recently, I was talking at Webproworld that my day begins with Yahoo as my Homepage and ends with Google:-)
Now, it’s gonna be Yahoo n Y a h o o - ing with the News - My Yahoo - n the Blogs!
What about the Blogs using *abusive* and *critisicm* language in their news blogs? What about the spam and those who do not have RSS feeds? Let’s c how again Yahoo vs Google ‘Blog Search’ ends up…Great competition and thanks to both! Y & G (It’s like wife and mistress, you need to have both:-)
I’d like to know how the blogs you include are chosen and how you decide relevance. How do searchers know they’re getting the best results?
“The search index we are beta testing currently contains content from a subset of blogs, but look for this to continue growing and ultimately include the 20+ million blogs from the blo.gs ping stream.”
How can one find out if a particular blog (mine, of course) is in the current set? Simple testing seems to say no but somehow I don’t want to accept that answer ;)
Thanks,
Bill
This is a great idea.
The Oxford Internet Institute recently held a seminar titled, “Send Us Your Pictures: How the Net Makes Us All Reporters”, which dovetails nicely with your discussion of grassroots media networks.
The OII has archived a webcast of the lecture here: http://webcast.oii.ox.ac.uk/?view=Webcast&ID=20051003_98
Cheers!
db
Guys:
How do I know if my satire blog is included in your listing of blog sites that you provide for a given topic? Since I am only human how do I maximize my site’s exposure in your search engine? What are my options?
Also, how do I find out about the satire work, similar to the Daily Show, that Yahoo! is intending to do? Lloyd Braun was discussing it in several New York Times articles.
Thanks.
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How can we get Yahoo news to ping authorlink.blogspot.com and http://www.authorlink.com?