Yahoo Integrates Blog Results With News Search

Recently Google launched a blog search. But Yahoo didn't. Instead they decided to integrate blog search results with their news. You can read their announcement about this at http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000198.html and of course try it for yourself at http://news.yahoo.com.

Integrated means "we shoved the results over to the side of the page." If you do a news search with blogs included you'll get the blog results on the right in a box. Click on More Blog Results at the bottom of the box and you'll get the results in a full page along with a link to an RSS feed.

The results at the moment are awful -- limited and old. Yahoo does note that they're just beginning the integration of blog results. If this is the beginning, I'll wait a few weeks before I seriously use this resource to try to find keywords. Note also that while you can search blogs/news, or just news, you can't search just blogs from the front page. You could however easily make a search form that passes a query to http://blog.news.search.yahoo.com/blog/search?p=query .

If you go back to the announcement you see that they're going to integrate Flickr photos into news results as well; you'll see those when you look at full-page results for blog searches (they're on the right.) "By bringing mainstream and personal media together we can offer a greater variety of sources and viewpoints to the millions of people who want to find out what’s going on in the world." Because what I really needed to add complete surrealism to my day is blogger cat pictures showing up side by side with pix of political press conferences. (Not that there's anything wrong with blogger cat pictures.)

Needs a few weeks (at least) to shake out.

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