Let’s cover the proven hit first.  On the Yahoo Search Blog, a post stated, "Click-through rates have more than doubled since we’ve improved and optimized our Trending Now lists using the content optimization technology that powers the ‘Today Module’ of the Yahoo! Homepage."

As for the upcoming changes, the smaller one involves Yahoo trying to improve the relevancy of its Trending Now lists, matching finance stories to Yahoo Finance, for example.

Then a second change is being tested in the form of new "Infinite Browse" modules.  The blog post explained, "[B]oxes like this appear below articles on Yahoo! News to give you more information on the topic you’re reading about."  Images, videos, articles, slideshows, and search suggestions are all on tap, and early results indicate that, again, engagement has doubled.

It’s hard to argue with results of that nature, even if the updates seem a little lackluster.

As a result, we’ll perhaps just stand back, congratulate Yahoo for achieving more with less, and look forward to seeing what sort of modification(s) the company implements next.

"Our new layout and useful features help people quickly find what they’re looking for and easily explore related topics that matter to them," says Stream.

For Yahoo Sports, they’ve added related search suggestions (i.e. things that are related to your search keyword, like rival teams, popular athletes, etc.), filters and enhanced results pages for images and videos, popular sports search topics, and new rich results with shortcuts that showcase the most useful information from what the company calls the "Web of Things" for key sports categories and sports-related news results.

In Yahoo News, they’ve added all kinds of new things to search results pages, including a filtering tool for specific news sources, time-based filtering, related news search suggestions, scrollable image results, and rich shortcuts for relevant, timely tweets and key news topics. These are available in 12 countries.

- Yahoo! News: 7.6 million unique users, 259,244,751 total page views

– MSNBC: 6.8 million unique users, 232,076,565 total page views

– CNN.com: 6.3 million unique users, 134,573,839 total page views

– AOL News: 2.5 million unique users, 45,122,501 total page views

– FoxNews.com:1.9 million unique users, 31,856,733 total page views

So what made so many people turn to Yahoo News on Election day over other sources? Well, Yahoo provides a list of the things they were doing, so you can get a better picture if you were not one of the visitors to the site that day.

 Richard Vega, the Senior Editor for Yahoo News has spoken a little bit about the night on the Yodel Anecdotal blog:

At Yahoo! News, our editors’ roles are to program headlines from dozens of national and international newspapers, wires, and broadcast networks. But on Election Night, we took on a more pronounced mandate as news filter. For example, if a network called a critical swing state, we would wait until at least another network called the state before announcing the news in our breaking news blog and breaking news bar. After all, we were serving what turned out to a record-breaking audience — today, comScore confirmed that we attracted 7.5 million people, the largest single day of traffic in online news history, surpassing CNN.com, MSNBC.com, AOL.com and FoxNews.com. We couldn’t afford to be wrong.

Journalists are known cynics. But when Barack Obama surpassed 270 electoral votes, we all knew it was a huge moment. The newsroom suddenly got very quiet. The sense of history was palpable. I think we all felt honored to be standing there, passing that word along to our readers.

Vega says that he had just one rule for the Yahoo News team on Election night, and that was "get it right!" He recalled a certain previous election where news sources were reporting conflicting outcomes. He did not want his team to be part of such a flub. No such flub was in the cards for anyone that night though, as Obam obviously won by a landslide.

For example, if you are reading a political story, you’ll see a "most blogged – politics" section. If you’re reading a tech story, you’ll see "most blogged – technology", and so on. Under each article in the "most blogged" sections, there is a link to see more "blogs about this story," which brings up a small box on the same page that you can navigate through independently. There are also other sections for "most viewed" and "Elsewhere on the Web."

Some are giving Yahoo! a big pat on the back for throwing blogs a bone. "Yahoo! may be struggling financially, but when it comes to supporting the rest of the web with standards and generous links – they are in the lead among the the big search and advertising companies," says Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web.

To be fair though, Google does have a similar feature on Google News in the left-hand column of its topical pages. They also once announced that they would filter out a good amount of blogs from its actual news results to provide a more "authoritative" selection of articles for any given query, but they do have the feature pictured at the left, not to mention Google Blog Search.

That said, there is definitely nothing wrong with what Yahoo! is doing. While Yahoo!’s not the force in search that it once was, Yahoo! News is still pretty popular. This is going to be a great way for readers to discover new and relevant sources to obtain information from. It is also going to give bloggers a chance to get some good promotion, which in turn will be great for their own readership.

According to Amit Agarwal, Yahoo!’s Buzz Tracker is used to come up with the content for the "Most Blogged" sections. To view the redesign, you can simply alter the URL of any Yahoo! News article page. Just change the "s" to "story" like  below:

news.yahoo.com/s/…

news.yahoo.com/story/…

There’s no word on when Yahoo! will actually launch this redesign, and it is certainly possible that it could be changed before it is launched. It’s not bad though in my opinion. What do you think?

Someone Plays Politics On Yahoo News

Does Republican Presidential hopeful Ron Paul have unusual appeal, or is he just a longshot for the nomination? You’re forgiven if you are confused, because someone at Yahoo News seems to think ‘unusual appeal’ doesn’t describe the candidate as well as ‘longshot’ does.

SEO Black Hat picked up on a little editing that took place with an article about Paul, a Texas Congressman who has captured the fancy of some voters. Here’s what they noted about a headline switch for that story:

Ron Paul Made the front page of yahoo.com about an hour ago with this story under the title

“GOP’s Ron Paul has Unusual Appeal”

Then, 11 minutes later, the headline is changed to

“Ron Paul remains longshot for GOP nom”

Other than that, the 2 articles are identical.

Isn

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/someone-plays-politics-on-yahoo-news-2007-08/feed 5 http://www.webpronews.com/yahoo-news-reads-mcclatchy-coverage-2007-03 http://www.webpronews.com/yahoo-news-reads-mcclatchy-coverage-2007-03#comments Thu, 29 Mar 2007 13:14:46 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=36571 International news items created by McClatchy foreign correspondents will be added as 'Trusted Voices' to Yahoo News.

]]> International news items created by McClatchy foreign correspondents will be added as ‘Trusted Voices’ to Yahoo News.

Global newsmaking places like the Middle East and China should be more complete in the eyes of Yahoo News readers with the expanded coverage Yahoo plans to offer.

Their deal with The McClatchy Company brings the professional knowledge of foreign correspondents to reside alongside regularly reported news. Regional blog reports from them will accompany select stories and deliver an in-person perspective to their stories.

When Trusted Voices debuts, one of their first efforts involves news coverage of stories in Iraq. An ‘Inside Iraq’ blog written by Baghdad-based McClatchy staffers from the area. They also expect contributions from other Middle East correspondents in Cairo, Jerusalem, and other places in the region.

When the new effort launches from Iraq and other places, it will represent something of a return to the past for Yahoo News. For a brief period, the site experimented with having blog content accompany stories from traditional news sources.

That project ended abruptly a year later in October 2006, without comment from Yahoo. Blogs that enjoyed some visibility on the heavily visited Yahoo News site have yet to see the company return that model to active use.

Yahoo has made use of correspondents itself, in an effort to add original content during former Yahoo executive Lloyd Braun’s tenure overseeing Yahoo’s media efforts. War correspondent Kevin Sites spent a year contributing to Yahoo’s Hot Zone, traveling the globe to various sites of conflict.

Little has been done with Hot Zone since then. The McClatchy deal looks like a way to recapture that type of commentary in a complementary format rather than as standalone reporting pieces.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/yahoo-news-reads-mcclatchy-coverage-2007-03/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/yahoo-blog-search-to-be-continued-2006-08 http://www.webpronews.com/yahoo-blog-search-to-be-continued-2006-08#comments Mon, 28 Aug 2006 15:55:28 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=31148 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.

Where Did Yahoo’s Blog Search Go?

Who left the blogs out?

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 WebProNews covering technology and business.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/yahoo-blog-search-to-be-continued-2006-08/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/yahoo-your-town-in-the-news-2006-03 http://www.webpronews.com/yahoo-your-town-in-the-news-2006-03#comments Mon, 20 Mar 2006 14:17:05 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=27771 The newest beta from Yahoo News allows its multitude of users to select their cities and see a module of local headlines appear on the main Yahoo News page.

Search Engine Journal points us to the latest bit of news from Yahoo. It’s news about Yahoo Local News, as observed by blogger and Weber Shandwick PR pro Robert Ricci.

Users can browse the selection of available states in the beta test of Yahoo News Local, and select from available cities. Yahoo’s gifted web developers have generously included the WebProNews home city of Lexington, KY, in the beta.

Once added to Yahoo News, a module titled “Lexington Area” (see a screenshot here) shows up on the main Yahoo News page. The familiar tabbed interface on the modules lets the user select headlines from local online newspapers, switching them within the module window with each click.

Also, users can suggest a news source to Yahoo’s staff, if a particular one of local interest has not yet appeared in the beta test. Now we can begin the certain-to-begin speculation on what this means to the broader business picture.

Yahoo and its search competitors greatly covet the local search advertising market. With its millions of registered users, Yahoo could approach newspaper publishers and offer them a Yahoo Publisher Network membership along with the mechanism of driving traffic from those members to the newspaper sites from Yahoo News.

That in turn could be another way to entice local businesses to advertise with Yahoo. If Yahoo’s users are finding their local news on Yahoo anyway, why not let them find that business via ads within Yahoo’s various services?

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

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