Back in 2003, I remember I started a blog-news-type site and submitted it to Google News (without knowing Google News doesn’t/didn’t do blog) and surprisingly it got accepted. Traffic was hitting me. But then two weeks later they found out my site was a half-blog. They removed it. But now with Yahoo! News if you do what I did, I have news for you: you’ll get accepted.
Why, how, what? Yahoo has recently made the decision to integrate blogs into its news search. Why? Jeremy Zawodny comments:
Seriously, aside from all the stuff you might read, look at it from an insider’s point of view. Tasked with figuring out how to expose the growing mass of blog content in our index, we figured there were two options.
Option one is to build Yet Another Blog Search Vertical (Technorati, Feedster, Google Blog Search, etc.) that most people would never see.
Option two is to integrate the results somewhere that millions of people could see them in context.
We decided that blogs had been captives of specialty search engines long enough.
How? Um, they know. Anyway, Jeremy has asked a question in his post. Given the two options, which would you chose? I’ll tell you mine. See, they really had to choices:
1) Be like the rest.
2) Be different.
Given the choice, I think it was wise for Yahoo! to go with this decision. At least someone had to. Of course, I wouldn’t recommended Google and others doing this — please don’t — there is a divided view on this, so I would think people want both: give the “I want news only” people Google News and the “I want news which includes blogs” people Yahoo! News. Of course, the “I want news and blogs are the only real news source” people can go with Blogdigger, Feedster, Technorati etc. but personally, I’m the second kind. I want news which includes blogs. No, I don’t want random blogs in the results, such as Joe talking about how his day at the office went which includes the keyword “hurricane” (we all talked about the hurricane). No, I don’t want an extreme news site or report because I already get it in my news paper (New Orleans, LA — Several lifes have been…)
So, I have to conclude: good going Yahoo!. But Google’s better (joke).
