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October 26, 2004

Search Tricks #2: News Search

To celebrate the public launch of RSS on Yahoo! News Search I thought I'd write a quick blog entry and expose some of the more useful (and lesser known) features of the service.

We have over 7,000 sources and searching them is monkey easy; just go to search.yahoo.com/news (or news.yahoo.com) and type into the search box.�But if you want to get a bit more advanced and make very focused queries, you can do some really cool stuff.

Here are a few things to try.

Advanced Searches

By Location

Curious what the Canadian press thinks about the Iraq war? A search for iraq location:canada queries only news sources in Canada.

By Source

Interested in the BBC's coverage of the British Prime Minister? Just search for source:bbc blair.

By Category

Want to keep an eye on your home team? Try cat:sports houston if you live in Houston.

By Language

How about news in German? (Notice the "vl&=lang_de" parameter in that URL?)

By News Type

For all press releases involving IBM, use the newstype option: newstype:pr ibm.

More Advanced Options

You can compose your own advanced search by using the above search commands or use our advanced news search page.

RSS Support

Two other cool features of Y! News Search are RSS support and the ability to add any search to My Yahoo!:

  • Use the 'Add to My Yahoo!' button on the search result page to add any news results you want to your My Yahoo! page.
  • RSS: using the new xml button on the News Search result page, you can now turn any search into a fresh RSS feed. For example hurricane location:florida gets you your own ongoing feed of hurricane news from Florida. The only restriction is that the source parameter doesn't work in RSS mode, and some providers may choose to opt out of RSS results.

Finally, it's worth noting that the feeds are now full-blown RSS 2.0 rather than the old RSS 1.0 RDF format that we first used.

Enjoy the new Y! News Search, and let us know what we can do to make it better.

Jacob Rosenberg
Technical Yahoo!

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Comments

Hello,

I have a sports news site and am wondering how I can get my content included in the Yahoo News results?

I can't seem to find any information about this.

Thanks,

Tim Williams
tim@i-mercadeo.com

PS. A response via e-mail (as well as post) would be appreciated.

Posted by: Tim Williams | October 26, 2004 09:51 AM

See...I still think you guys should list all those shortcuts on the search page...because those are other functions that people just don't know about...I still have in mind some buttons that would automatically add the shortcuts in front of the search entry.Like a button name "souce" would automatically add source: in the query box...I think the user really "needs" to have all those shortcuts right here on the page...you cannot ask them to come to this precise website and learn them by heart...

Posted by: Guillaume | October 26, 2004 10:35 AM

This is fabulous. Thank you for staying so far ahead of everyone else on RSS. This is just what a PR professional like myself needs!

Posted by: Steve Rubel | October 26, 2004 12:02 PM

Hi, very neat. Thankyou.

I posted about this, it'll be great for adding very relevent feeds to pages. nice stuff..

Posted by: Nick W | October 26, 2004 12:05 PM

Jacob, can you post a list somewhere of all the search parameters? For example, what other options are there for newstype?

Posted by: Steve Rubel | October 26, 2004 12:23 PM

Ditto to Tim's question in the first comment. I oversee a content site, and our original news is already picked up by Google News and Moreover, but I've never had any luck figuring out how to invite Yahoo News to grab our content, too.

Posted by: Matt | October 26, 2004 01:55 PM

All the search shortcuts listed in this post could be better presented by doing these two things:
1. formatted like the Y! Search Shortcuts: http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/
2. made available on the News Search frontpage, at the _bottom_ (footer area) of the page - this increases access to these shortcuts without compromising the simplicity of the page. Flickr is one good example: http://blackbeltjones.typepad.com/work/2004/10/fruit_at_the_bo.html

(in fact, these would be useful additions to the various search frontpages)

Posted by: ct | October 26, 2004 03:17 PM

Could you please outline the criteria common to the "7,000 sources" ...

Posted by: JH | October 26, 2004 10:33 PM

I love the new "Add to My Yahoo!" link in the search results. I'm always browsing for news related to Yahoo...now I can just head to My Yahoo! and instantly see the latest headlines about the company. Great work! Thanks!

One little correction: In your line about the German language search, the parameter should be "&vl=lang_de" rather than having the & before the = sign.

Posted by: Alex Porter | October 26, 2004 10:36 PM

Don't you mean &vl=lang_de

Posted by: Philip | October 27, 2004 12:21 AM

Every so slightly off topic - but RSS.
I found the Yahoo "Word of the Day" RSS the other day and immediately set up an LJ community around it. It was immediately popular.

Today's word of the day is: condescending
There's an irony there!

I have a terrible suspicion that Yahoo's Word of the Day is targetted at the young/college level. Oh poo.

I'd much rather have interesting words of the day. The sort of word of the day that could be a new addition to someone's vocabulary. Or, in a lame attempt to be on topic, let's have a Word of the Day which is good enough to be News of the Day. :)

Posted by: Andrew | October 27, 2004 01:55 AM

Hi everyone! I've been away from our Sunnyvale campus for the past couple days so forgive the delay in responding to all your comments.

You can find a lot of helpful information at http://help.yahoo.com/help/news/ under the section 'Searching Yahoo! News'. This has information on how to add your content to Yahoo! News Search as well as the list of Y! News Search supported syntax (some of the keywords I discussed in the blog post are not listed there, as they are experimental). There is also a 'suggest a site' link on every news search result page that has information on how to recommend sources for our crawler.

Steve: Currently the newstype argument supports only 'news' and 'pr', however we plan to use this keyword for some other classifications in the future.

Guillaume and ct: we are looking into putting some more refinement options on our front page at http://search.yahoo.com/news . Thanks for the suggestions!

JH: Not quite sure what you mean by common criteria. The YNS index has over 7,000 editorially selected and reviewed sites, in over 40 languages, from countries all over the world and about all possible news subjects.

Alex and Philip: yup, I did mean &vl=lang_de, sorry for the typo.

Andrew: yup, the word of the day is supplied by petersons.com and is targeted at students taking the SAT/ACT. I'll pass the suggestion on to the education.yahoo.com folks who own our reference stuff (dictionary, thesaurus, etc).

Posted by: Jacob Rosenberg | October 28, 2004 02:48 PM

Hi, it would be nice for a link on that page to provide feedback or look at existing suggestions. I didn't initially see it. Am I missing something? If not, who is the product manager or the best way to provide feedback?

Posted by: Dave Golden | November 2, 2004 05:31 PM

Hi Dave-

There is a 'Got Feedback?' link in the upper right corner of each one of our news search result pages. That links to a survey which you can fill out and include any comments or suggestions that you have for us.

Please be sure to let us know what you think!

Posted by: Jacob Rosenberg | November 3, 2004 05:57 PM