Yahoo's Blog Searching: A Couple Hints

I don't use Feedster as much as I used to. It's a variety of little things that you may not care about (including the noise in the results, the lack of a cache, the fact that they seem to enjoy designing their pages in 2pt Ack My Eyeballs Arial) but it's slowly pushed me away. Where before I used to consult them at least once a day, now I wander over there once a week, maybe.

But the whole reason I went there was to do some blog searching, and I was looking for an alternative place to do that. Google's blog search is okay. Technorati I like somewhat better. But the one I really like, that I discovered accidentally, was Yahoo's blog search. Unfortunately they make it a pain in the toe to search just the blogs they have in their index. You can do it, though. Here are some hints.

Start at Yahoo's News Site. look at the search box in the upper middle part of the page. Note that you have the option to search news and blogs, just news, news photos, or video/audio. Do a search with the default setting, say for Fred.

Note on the results page that the news results are directly below your query box. The blog results, however, are to the right of the page. To just get blog results, click on the "More Blog results..." link at the bottom of those results. You'll be taken to a page with an URL like this:

http://blog.news.search.yahoo.com/blog/search?&p=fred&fr=moreblog

The first thing you'll notice (if you're me anyway) is that the results are sorted by relevance, but there's a date option at the right side of the results. But the results themselves are pretty good -- an interesting range of sources, very little spam in the tests I ran, and easy access to the RSS feeds of results pages. In fact, you might be so impressed that you want to run another query. So you change the query in the box to Fred Ethel and hit enter.

... and you find you get kicked back to regular news search results, with again the blog search results on the right side of the page. To go straight to just the blog search results you must once again go to the "More Blog results..." link, etc.

This is annoying.

But you can go straight to the blog search result by hacking an URL. Start with this URL:

http://blog.news.search.yahoo.com/blog/search?&p=keyword

Where keyword is the word for which you want to search. (Denote a phrase with %22 at the start and end of the phrase, and replace spaces with + .)

I go back to searching for Fred and Ethel:

http://blog.news.search.yahoo.com/blog/search?&p=fred+ethel

And voila, I have the Yahoo blog search results without having to wind through the news search results first.

Of course, getting search results from a Web-based results page is SOOOOO 2002. Instead we want to get them from an RSS feed. Here's a basic structure for Yahoo Blog Search's RSS feed URL:

http://api.search.yahoo.com/NewsSearchService/rss/blogSearch.xml?appid=YahooRSSSearch&query=keyword&sort=date

Again, replace keyword with the query terms in which you're interested. Yahoo's blog search does offer a generated URL for RSS feeds, but it's a redirected URL and includes a lot of gunk, cruft, or what a friend of mine calls "URL barnacles". So you might want to make your own.

I have updated Kebberfegg with the ability to generate RSS for Yahoo's blog search. (You can also find Kebberfegg now at Kebberfegg.com, so all you have to remember is a silly name, and NOT a silly name and an extensive URL.) Ya'll have fun.

Posted to Search Engines-Yahoo