October 14, 2005

Pure Yahoo Blog Search Via Threadwatch

I wished earlier that Yahoo would move ahead with a standalone blog search service, rather than forcing you to go thorugh Yahoo News for blog results. Nick over at Threadwatch grants that wish with a Yahoo Blog Search box you'll find here, plus he invites you to grab the code for yourself.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:13 AM | Permalink

October 12, 2005

Yahoo Blog Search Gets RSS Feed

Yahoo dropped me a note to tell me one of my complaints about its new blog search service has been solved. You can get an RSS feed of blog matches now! In fact, it was supposed to be there from the start but just wasn't working right a launch, Yahoo says. OK, let's do the how to:

Do your search at Yahoo News for something -- say yahoo itself!
Go over to the right hand side of the page, find the Blogs box, and click on the More Blog Results link.
Look at the bottom of the page that comes up next, full of blog results. Find the Topic Tracker box. That will let you subscribe to the search in My Yahoo or you can use the orange XML box to get the RSS feed.

That's it. Thank you, Yahoo!

Postscript from Gary: On a related note, in my post about Yahoo's changes to News Search I added a bit about being able to search to only blog material from the outset. It basically involves appending your terms to a specific url. Postscript from Gary 2: Forget the messy url, see this post about a Yahoo "blog only" search box.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:10 PM | Permalink

October 11, 2005

Yahoo Should Let News Search Users Know What a Blog Is; Search Only Blogs From Yahoo News/Blog Integration

I would like to add just two words to Danny's excellent overview of the news/blog integration at Yahoo News. The words are are definitions and explanations.

Here's a search for [iraq army]

Ok, I see the news results. Fine.

But on the right side of the page I see "Blogs Beta." If you weren't aware of what a blog was (isn't Yahoo trying to reach out to new blog users with a service like this?), it would make little to no sense

Why isn't their a link or pop-over in place to explain: + Whis is a blog? + What are blog posts? + What's the difference between a blog post and a news story? + Who writes blogs? + Are you interested in blogging?

Even if I click the "More Blog Results" link I come to a page with more results but no information about what I'm seeing and how it might be differ from what I'm used to.

I've said this before and I'll say it again, some of us (aka those who know and use blogs, define them as you like) forget that the masses often don't have a clear understanding of what blogs are and why they might be useful. If blogs/RSS/etc are going to become more widely adopted, some explanation and guidance is needed. The massive readership at Yahoo News might just be the one of the places to do it.

Just Blogs Btw, if you're intererested in searching ONLY blogs in the Yahoo News/blog mashup Yahoo's RSS/Blog search tool arrives, it's easy and I'm sure within minutes of the time someone reads this post, they'll have created an interface to make it even easier.

To limit your search to blogs in the Yahoo News/Blog integration, use the search string: http://blog.news.search.yahoo.com/blog/search?p=foo and replace what comes after "foo" with your search terms.

* For example: http://blog.news.search.yahoo.com/blog/search?p=chris+pirillo will return blogs that mention Mr. Pirillo.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:13 PM | Permalink

Thoughts On & Playing With Yahoo's Blog Search

I've been playing with Yahoo's new blog search that Chris wrote about earlier and wanted to share some of my thoughts, plus link to those of others. In summary, I like blog and news content being integrated, but I hope it will evolve into something even better. I also want a dedicated blog search service in addition to the integrated approach and find the lack of RSS support for blog search matches something that should be fixed quickly.

Like The Integration, But Want It Better

First, like Dave Winer, I love that Yahoo is integrating the blog content into the news content. As I wrote about Memeorandum's launch last month, tying blogs to mainstream news is a nice blend of news and opinion to me.

If you haven't seen Memeorandum, do check it out. It's been absolutely superb in getting news stories and blog commentary blended together in a compelling fashion. The only downside is that you only get a view for politics or tech stories.

That's where Yahoo goes a step beyond. Since you can keyword search for anything, you can get a pseudo-Memeorandum for any topic. Want blogs and news about ipod nano scratches? Here you go.

News & Blog Content Not So Clear Cut

Notice in that search that things aren't always clear cut, however. Engadget's Mossberg: iPod nano scratches like crazy story was both the top news story and the top blog story, when I looked. And Engadget's a blog, right? It shouldn't be in news! Well, not really to me. Engadget may publish using blog software, but it's essentially a news outlet. It makes sense to be in news search. But then again, it can make sense to be in blog search. The lines can be blurry.

Indeed, while Dave writes today that Google excludes blogs from its news search, that's not correct. Some blogs are also considered news sources to Google. Admittedly, not very many but some are. A search for nano ipod on Google News brings me back Engadget, just like at Yahoo. Looking for nano ipod scratches, I get this page from iLounge listed first, plenty bloggy in terms of having lots and lots of comments on it.

That's another reason why I like Memorandum. It's not trying to play the "is it a blog or is it news" game. Sometimes, a blog post is the lead item with news stories and other blog posts associated with it. Sometimes, a news item is the lead item with blog posts and news items pointing at that. In the fuzzy world of blogs versus news, it's a nice solution.

Maybe we'll see this type of Google News-like clustering happen to Yahoo News to better integrate blog content -- and perhaps the same will happen at Google News. That would be welcomed.

Bring On The Standalone Service

Another thing that would be welcomed would be a standalone blog search service. Want just blog search results? Right now, as Chris noted, after you do a news search, you can use the "More Blog results" link at the bottom of the Blogs pane to see all blog matches for your query. It shouldn't be that hard.

I agree with what Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny wrote about the integration making blogs more visible to more people. But it's not an either/or situation. Yahoo Audio integrates podcasts, but the new Yahoo Podcasts service also stands alone. News content is in Yahoo Web Search already, but having Yahoo News allows for better, fresher presentation of that content. Blog content can be in Yahoo News and is welcomed there, but there's no reason it can't standalone in a dedicated service -- which in turn can offer things that Yahoo News cannot.

What's The Deal On Backlinks?

Backlinks are one of those things. Over at Google, not to mention Technorati and other places, getting backlinks to a particular post is easy. Yahoo's implementation is uncertain.

Here's Robert Scoble coming away trying to count links to a Channel 9 video of Bill Gates. Yahoo found nothing. But how did he look? Not using a link: command. He just entered the actual page URL, like this:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=111598

So how do you find backlinks on Yahoo's blog search? The first thought is to do this on Yahoo News:

link:http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=111598

Oops! That doesn't work. Over 2 million links come back, and you can see that they clearly aren't linking to that video. In fact, do a backlink search for anything, and it pretty much seems to bring back matches similar to as if you searched for link:http://.

But wait, let's try something else. Back to that link:http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=111598 search, and this time, click on the More Blog results link. That brings back this, showing one match to the video.

Only one link isn't going to impress Robert, but at least we can see how link: does sort of work in blog search. Sort of. Overall, with some other queries I tried, it seems poorly supported and incomplete. But since many bloggers are seeking that type of data, it's something hopefully Yahoo will improve.

Then again, Yahoo has an entire Site Explorer service to generate this type of information, launched only about two weeks ago and that I cover more here, Yahoo Site Explorer Live: New Way To See All Your Pages, Links.

Want backlink data? It gives you plenty, finding nearly 900 links from blogs and other pages across the web to the page Robert is interested in. But unlike with, say, Google's blog search, you can't get the most recent links coming up. Again, that's a key bit of data bloggers are interested in.

Heck, a rundown on new links to anything is something anyone is interested in, as I've written before. Site Explorer would be better than Yahoo coming up with backlinks just from blogs, since it would give you a better picture of the entire web universe discussing you content. It just needs to be able to sort by date.

Again With The Better Integration!

Another comment on Robert's write-up. He was disappointed that Yahoo's blog search only brought up 2 matches about Chris Pirillo's new meta search service Gada.be. But in reality, he was counting only NEWS search results.

When I do the search he did, I get three matches in the main "News Stories" section. But over to the right-hand side, the Blog listings area shows me four matches and clicking through to see further, I get 15 matches in all.

From what I can tell, Robert just missed the results, just as Om Malik notes in his write-up on the integration searchers are "very likely" to miss the blog integration. Well, here's a major blogger -- Robert Scoble -- apparently doing just that. It underscores that integrating blog content into news search is fine, but if people like Robert are missing it, many more are likely to, as well.

Back to those 15 matches, none are Robert's own post on the service, which I know was widely cited. So while Yahoo's better than he thinks, it clearly has much more work to do. But Yahoo also acknowledges this in its own post on the launch, which will including going beyond just RSS feeds known to My Yahoo users (and indexing more than just feed content, as Technorati's Niall Kennedy seems to find).

Where's The RSS/Feed Support?

Let's hope part of that work is adding RSS support for queries. I know it's a beta, but with Yahoo's love of all things RSS, I was dumbfounded to find no way to get blog search matches sent to me via a feed.

To be clear, you can do a news search and get a feed for any query sent to you. In other words, if I want to monitor news about Yahoo, I just search for yahoo, then subscribe using the orange RSS/XML box at the bottom right-hand side of the page.

There's a page that explains more here and a big list of more Yahoo feeds here. Yahoo Gains RSS Feeds For Web Search & Discovering Auto-Discovery from me also covers how to get feeds for Yahoo web search and other types of searches.

How about a feed of blog search results? Nowhere to be found, as far as I can tell. Even if you click through to view only blog search results, there's no RSS icon nor any autodiscovery of a feed enabled. And from what I can see, subscribing to a news search result only brings back news matches despite the new blog integration. Overall, it's an omission that needs to be fixed quickly.

Want to comment or discuss? Visit our forum thread, Yahoo Mixes Blog Search With News Search.

Postscript: Yahoo's added RSS feeds for blog search. More here: Yahoo Blog Search Gets RSS Feed.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:23 AM | Permalink

See More Posts From:

This Week | This Month

Legal Notices, Licensing, Reprints & Permissions

Privacy Policy
Affiliates

var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-564586-7"); pageTracker._setDomainName(".searchenginewatch.com"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); window.collarity_appid = "incmedia"; //> //>

Top Jobs

more Jobs