Okay I've spent some time with Yahoo's
news search and sent a note to Scott Gatz requesting a bit of advance notice next time, so we can review these things before they roll out.
There's a lot to like about their approach, but it is still not good enough to take the place of Google for news-oriented searches, even though Google explicitly excludes blogs from their search. And that's the game, you have to be so much more current and so much more useful than Google that there are times you click on their icon and not Google's (and they don't even have an icon in my toolbar yet).
Therefore, some comments...
1. Blogs don't belong in the margin, they belong in the main results. There's so much confusion about what is and isn't a blog, why bother even trying to make a distinction. BusinessWeek has a blog, but it's not the same thing as Scripting News, right? Or is it? Where should BW's blog be? Why should it be in a different place from their editorial stuff? Don't expect the line to get more solid in the future, it's going the other way, getting more blurry all the time.
2. It's not totally clear if the Advanced Search options apply to blogs, or just the MSM sites.
3. Are they using RSS for the blog search or is it done by scraping HTML?
4. It's great that they allow results to be sorted by date. This is a feature I've wanted in Google for ages. Maybe they've always had it in Yahoo? Not sure, I never use it.
5. And they have to stop being so particular about who they talk to, if they want to gain ground on Google which totally has a commanding lead in search. We want Yahoo and other search competitors to be in the game, because competitive situations are good for users, but you have to work with us if you want our help.
PS: That last bit of advice goes in spades to MSN.
# Posted by Dave Winer on 10/11/05; 10:28:45 AM - --
