Yahoo Yanks RSS Feeds, Northern Light Docs

CNET is reporting ( http://news.com.com/210 0-1023-959912.html ) that Yahoo has stopped their Premium Document Search, mentioned here last January ( http://www.researchbuzz.com/news/2002/jan10jan1602.html#yahooteams ).

I have to admit I was always really disappointed with the quality of the results provided by the Premium Document Search. It just felt like the premium documents were stacked in there. When I tested it in January I could find no way to narrow down my search by date, or sort results by date. Since this was a service that charged for articles, I thought everybody involved would make it as easy to find the exact articles desired as possible. There just wasn't enough search infrastructure there, in my opinion.

Meanwhile, while I was busy doing a Snoopy happy dance over the fact that Yahoo had started using RSS feeds for Yahoo Finance information, Yahoo yanked 'em. You can get some"behind the scenes" comments about 'em from Jeremy Zawodny's weblog, at http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/ . His Yahoo category -- where you can get just his posts about Yahoo -- is at http://jer emy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/cat_yahoo.html .

Despite the fact that the feeds are gone, I'm thrilled that Yahoo even tried 'em publicly. Here's hoping that other search engines step up and see what they can do with RSS.

Posted to Search Engines-Yahoo