Yahoo Ups Their News Search

Yahoo last week announced an upgraded news search, with more sources and more frequently-updated content. You can search Yahoo News at http://news.yahoo.com .

First, the cool stuff. Yahoo News now searches 7,000 news sources. Content is refreshed three times more often, and there are related searches on the results page. I searched Yahoo News for "Martha Stewart" and got related searches including martha stewart trial and martha stewart sentence. The right side of the search results page also showed photographs as well as audio/video.

Yahoo's advanced search allows for a variety of targeted searching, allowing you to specify where you want to find your keywords, search for specific sources, categories, or languages.

(Brief rant: back when Yahoo contained all its own news sources, you could search by author, which was really nice. You can't do that now. And is there some law that I missed that says a news archive can only have 30 days' worth of material? I mean what the heck?)

I ran a couple of searches between Google and Yahoo just to see what kind of results I got. First I searched for Dedrick Finn of the Xavier University basketball team. Google News showed "about 499" results. Yahoo News, about 187. Next I searched for "cardiac arrest" and Yahoo News got about 422 results, while Google News got about 890.

So why if Yahoo has 7,000 news sources, far more than Google's reported 4,500, are they clocking in with so many fewer results? It could be that Google is getting a lot of repeats via the AP and other wire services. Of course since it appears that neither site publishes a source list (feh) I'll have to make some guesses.

My first guess is that Yahoo News does a lot of Weblog coverage. Search both sites for blog and you'll see that Yahoo News beats Google, about 1430 to about 1310. Same for RSS -- Yahoo wins 2917 to 926. Yahoo News indexes LLRX, which Google News doesn't. Strangely, while both sites index Pocket PC Thoughts, Google News does not appear to have indexed it as completely, with the last indexed entry from March 15, while Yahoo News' latest is from March 17. (I could be wrong; I can't figure out what Pocket PC Thoughts' source: syntax is in Google News.)

Yahoo missed a big giant opportunity here. The big thing missing from Google News is the ability to output its results as RSS feeds. (Witness how many technically illegal Google-News-to-RSS generators there are.) If Yahoo had unveiled this upgraded engine and topped it with the ability to output search results as RSS feeds, that would have been loverly. As it is it's still worth a look.

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