IndustryThoughts On & Playing With Yahoo’s Blog Search

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
.

Resources

The 2023 B2B Superpowers Index
whitepaper | Analytics

The 2023 B2B Superpowers Index

8m
Data Analytics in Marketing
whitepaper | Analytics

Data Analytics in Marketing

10m
The Third-Party Data Deprecation Playbook
whitepaper | Digital Marketing

The Third-Party Data Deprecation Playbook

1y
Utilizing Email To Stop Fraud-eCommerce Client Fraud Case Study
whitepaper | Digital Marketing

Utilizing Email To Stop Fraud-eCommerce Client Fraud Case Study

1y