Although the blog results component for Yahoo News searches has vanished from the site, it should return after some tweaking to it has been completed.
Yahoo’s blogger Jeremy Zawodny noted in response to Om Malik’s question about the missing blog results that Yahoo did kill blog search. “I suggested we blog about it, but sadly that didn’t happen,” he wrote.
Greg Jarboe observed what was happening last week with Yahoo News. Within about 48 hours, news photos had replaced the blog search beta results in Yahoo News search results.
Jarboe did find out from a Yahoo spokesperson, by phone and by email, that the missing blog results should return in some form:
Brian Nelson, a Yahoo spokesperson, called me back to say the Blogs beta had been “temporarily taken offline to retool the offering.”
In an email sent a short while later, he added, “Maybe this goes without saying, (but) blog content remains an important part of our overall news and news search strategy. It’s worth mentioning again because I’ve read speculation in the blogosphere about what Y! might be thinking bigger picture when it comes to blog content.”
Speculation indeed. Much of that has likely been overshadowed by the recent announcement of Google’s hosted communications package, which has seen plenty of commentary for the past twenty-four hours.
That kind of coverage may be what Yahoo wants to fine-tune when it comes to presenting blog search results alongside the news. Jarboe commented that it might be a matter of traffic to noise that Yahoo wants to improve.
Perhaps Yahoo will take a page out of Technorati’s book and only present results with a great amount of “authority,” that being judged by the number of quality inbound links a blog has. That would seem like something Yahoo should be able to do with its search technology now.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
