Yahoo!'s Blog Search Directs Traffic to Marketing Tom

Just checked my stats and found that Yahoo! news had pointed some people in to my website. It turns out that over the past few days Yahoo! has rolled out and is beta testing a new version of its Yahoo! News Search. This includes blogs, Flickr photos and My Web links. For bloggers this is certainly good news - fusing general news stories with 'grassroots' journalism. This is what Joff Redfern, director of product at Yahoo! Search, had to say:

"The addition of grassroots news sources into Yahoo! News Search is another example of Yahoo! using world-class technology to deliver relevant content to our audiences. Yahoo! News has become the leading online news destination by continually providing the most comprehensive service to our users, and news search technology is a critical piece of our overall news offering."

Here's what Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! had to say:

"While it was widely anticipated that we'd be launching a dedicated blog search engine, we didn't.  Instead, we've incorporated blog results in Yahoo! News Search.

Why?

... 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.

Which would you choose?

We decided that blogs had been captives of specialty search engines long enough."

I must say that I agree with a colleague of Danny Sullivan's over at Search Engine Watch, who says that though he can see the blog results, he believes that Yahoo! should offer users some more information on what a blog exactly is. Given the the general public's lack of knowledge about what a blog actually is, it would certainly be a welcome addition to add a link to a "what is a blog?" page.

to reach out to new blog users with a service like this?), it would make little to no sense

Why isn't their a link or pop-over in place to explain:
+ Whis is a blog?
+ What are blog posts?
+ What's the difference between a blog post and a news story?
+ Who writes blogs?
+ Are you interested in blogging?"