The older version from Yahoo Cache - this page shows Yahoo News and Blog Search in the title of the Yahoo! news search homepage.
The latest version from Google Cache - this page shows Yahoo News search homepage with no references to Blog Search as noted by Joe Beaulaurier.
Why would Yahoo! want to do this ?
This comes at a time when the blogosphere continues to swell, ask.com is investing heavily in blog search and Technorati just revamped.
Why would Yahoo! take a step back ? My guess is that Yahoo! may be preparing to launch a separate blog search engine like Google blogsearch. Am sure they won't like to be left out in these blogging times.
Update: Some forums are saying that they are still able to see blogs like Lifehacker, Search Engine Watch, etc in the Yahoo! News Search Results page. This story is about removing the blog results which appeared as a right sidebar on the Yahoo! News Search homepage. Also, there was an option to search "News & Blogs" on the Yahoo! News homepage and it's gone missing now.
Update: Yahoo! has not permanently removed the blog search engine tool but are preparing to launch a revamped version 2.0 of their blog search engine tool. According to an email from Yahoo, the blog search tool has been "temporarily taken offline to retool the offering".
Find this article at: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/08/yahoo-removes-blog-search-from-yahoo.html
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
Excellent observation, Amit. There's no way that Yahoo! is going to just walk away from this, though I don't understand why they might not have run things in parallel or just linked over.
Yes, it does bear watching.
Written on 26/8/06 10:18 PM
I really like your blog and have had an rss feed to it several times, but the sheer number of ads has caused me to cancel my feed more then once. I'm all for bloggers being paid for writing good articles like this, but your site would look so much better if you would just stick to good looking banner ads and tastefully done ads like the Verizon one and get rid of the ad sense. If you'd cut it down to just one google ad at the minimum you would find that more people would subscribe to your site.
Written on 27/8/06 3:04 PM
This makes sense to me. News Search is for news. There are lots of specialized search indexes for things like job search, people search, product search, mobile search, video search, etc. Why put blog results in News Search?
The funny thing is that Yahoo still has some blog results in its News index. For example, Search Engine Roundtable, a blog, shows up in a Yahoo News Search query for "Yahoo Search". Results from Gawker blogs also show up in queries. So, maybe the more accurate statement is that Yahoo has removed most blog results from it's News Search index. Google does the same thing, including a result from blog.searchenginewatch.com, ...clearly a blog. MSN Search returned pure news results as far as I could tell.
Don Dodge
Written on 27/8/06 8:26 PM
Don,
Other than Gawker and few other search blogs, Yahoo! did not integrate blog search results with the main news search results. Instead it showed the blog search results separately in a side bar though there was an option to search either News Stories or News and Blogs.
We see a similar thing on Google Finance where they bring in relevant results from blogs.
Thanks for the comment.
Written on 27/8/06 8:29 PM
Amit, I see your point. You are right. It would be intereting to hear from Yahoo why they decided to drop the blog news side bar.
Written on 28/8/06 1:03 AM
Unfortunately, a lot of bloggers and some search engine forums are still confusing the issue - they believe that Yahoo! dropped blogs from their news search while the story is about removing the blog search sidebar.
Written on 28/8/06 1:06 AM
Yahoo is for sissies and fags!
Written on 11/5/07 3:15 PM