Yahoo blog search gone?

Some people have noticed that Yahoo!’s news search no longer shows blogsearch results alongside it. Normally I’d assume that if the blog search in News results disappeared, it meant one of two things: 1) Blog search was about to roll out as a separate product, or 2) maybe Yahoo! acquired their own blogsearch company? But downloadsquad has a different theory:

I received information that this move was the result of the rampant splog problem and only a trickle of click-through traffic. Thus the overhead to operate it wasn’t justified.

Does anyone know the skinny on Yahoo! blogsearch? Is it gone for good, rolling out into a separate product, or maybe making way for some acquired company?

23 Responses to Yahoo blog search gone? (Leave a comment)

  1. I don’t know about the blog search going for ever, but I’d like to comment on your new self portrait o nthe top r/h side .

    Fantastic, but don’t sell it the Simpson’s program. Maybe you should animate it and do your videos through here. 🙂

  2. Greg Jarboe says he called into Yahoo News and received this response:

    “Brian Nelson, a Yahoo spokesperson, called me back to say the Blogs beta had been “temporarily taken offline to retool the offering.”

    Details: http://newsblog.seo-pr.com/public/item/140017

  3. Dave (Original)

    Yawho?

  4. I read about this first on Steve Rubel’s blog – Micro Persuasion earlier on Saturday night, he’s speculating that Yahoo’s about to roll out an integrated feed reader/search engine. He’s also noting that bigger blogs like Huffington post (just for example) are still showing up in the News Search.

    Thanks Lee for picking up that info from Greg!

  5. The speculation creates a little buzz for Yahoo so they got some time to do what ever they are doing. If they are “rolling out” something really cool this is smart marketing because people are waiting.

  6. Let’s just hope they don’t wait too long so ppl forget what they were waiting for.

  7. I am surprised google has not bought yahoo yet. With their share prices declining like the have, they are ripe for a takeover either by google or microsoft.

  8. Lee, nice find–thanks! Looks like Zawodny commented over on Om’s article too: http://software.gigaom.com/2006/08/26/yahoo-kills-blog-search/

  9. this gives an insight into yahoo’s future strategy:

    Q&A with Raghu Ramakrishnan
    http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000349.html
    Earlier this summer, Dr. Raghu Ramakrishnan joined Yahoo! as Vice President and Yahoo! Research Fellow.

    He is working on social search.

    “The key insight behind social search is therefore to amplify the human element of information sharing by using it to enhance algorithmic search, and vice-versa.”

    My guess is a combined social search tool for blogs, del.icio.us bookmarks, Flickr and ultimately other user generated content: yahoo groups, yahoo answers etc. They could be selected by search options.

    del.icio.us bookmarks for example could be searched by freshness in terms of when a webpage was first bookmarked [last hour, last 12 hours, last 24 hours, last week, last month etc similar to the options for google blog search] and sorted by popularity.

    Also search could be ranked on all time popularity, either by a single word [tag] or by keywords.

  10. Always Behind Dave

    What’s Yahoo!

  11. Just wanted to drop by and comment to say that I’m not going to comment on this. 🙂

  12. I am also very dissapointed with the search results of many of my searches, since the top search results are blogs or forums, most of which do not have the relevant info concerning the keywords I searched for. Google rules in this blog search, but it would be really nice to continue to have the competition from Yahoo. Sometimes the products yahoo has are more… “graphically nice”, so… it’s like playing.
    Yet I recently saw the yahoo news search up and running!

  13. I am surprised how Jeff wonders why google has not bought yahoo yet! I google for 70% of my online activities (so I’m an actual fan, even if I decline!!) but there are different issues in financial plans. and still Y!’s share volume is 2.5 time more than Google’s (10.4bUSD vs. 4.1bUSD)

  14. Speaking about YAHOO things being gone, how about the RSS links no longer being displayed? For a while, when one did a search, the search results showed the RSS feeds for the sites (if the sites had RSS feeds).

    This facility was really nice. Not only could one quickly see which sites had RSS feeds, but also pull them off. It was one of the items that I liked about the YAHOO search that wasn’t in other search engines.

    However, my experience was that there were technical glitches in the system. My site had two RSS feeds, I cancelled one and deleted all the files, but Yahoo refused to reset to the other feed. I contacted Yahoo numerous times and got the answer that it would sort itself out (which after a very long time it did). Not sure how many other sites also had problems.

    However, the feature seems to have disappeared. Any idea if there are plans to readd it (or for another search engine, such as Google, to add this facility)?

    Regards,
    Douig

  15. Not sure about BlogSearch but what I’m trying to figure out is how Yahoo is listing a Google Adword URL in their search result? Anyone?

  16. It is not gone. They are just retooling it

    http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/005995.html

  17. Well, i didnt even know that yahoo had that. But if i did, i’ll sure be using it…

  18. Whether they’re retooling it or not, it’s still gobbling up feeds. I got a couple hits from something calling itself “Yahoo Blog Search” on my feedburner RSS today.

  19. I just realize that Yahoo blog search has gone..

  20. I have seen a number of these the last couple days and I welcome the warning. They are even on some of the computer forums that I post to almost everyday….wow…very scary.

  21. Is the yahoo blog search still absent or am I wrong?

  22. Whether they’re retooling it or not, it’s still gobbling up feeds. I got a couple hits from something calling itself “Yahoo Blog Search” on my feedburner RSS today.

  23. Well, i didnt even know that yahoo had that. But if i did, i’ll sure be using it…

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