WebProNews

Tag: Blog Search

  • Google Blog Search Goes Away (Kind Of)

    Google Blog Search is no more – at least as a standalone offering from the search engine. Search Engine Land points out that if you go to its previous home – google.com/blogsearch – it simply redirects you to the Google home page.

    You can still search through blogs specifically with Google’s search tool from Google News. For example, if you search “SEO” from Google News, it will bring up a list of articles. You’d then go to the “Search Tools” box, and click the drop down where it says “All News”. From there, another option is available for blogs.

    At this point in the Internet’s evolution, I’m not sure how useful the feature is. There’s a lot of gray area when it comes to distinguishing blogs from other sources. In the end, it’s really more about who’s writing the story. Strangely enough, Google just did away with authorship in search results – the best indicator that. Go figure.

    I doubt many will miss the Blog Search destination Google previously offered. There was a time when it was helpful, but there’s really just not much need for it anymore. Still, you might say the Google News feature is even less helpful, as it is limited to news.

    Image via Google

  • Yahoo Adds Blog Search to Search BOSS

    Yahoo Adds Blog Search to Search BOSS

    Yahoo announced today that it has added Blog Search (in beta) to Yahoo Search BOSS, the company’s “Build Your Own Search Service” open search and data platform.

    “Developers looking for a blog search API often find the APIs that do exist are providing a variation of a web index,” says Rahul Hampole with the Yahoo Search BOSS team. “We decided to take a different approach. Yahoo! developed a custom blog index where the relevancy is specifically tuned for blogs. This allows us to provide you a wealth of data such as the provider, the author, date of post and in certain cases, contextually relevant terms associated with the article.”

    “By their very nature, web indices used for blog search cannot provide the complex functionality that developers demand,” explains Hampole. “For example, try finding a commercial API that will give you all the blog articles written on ‘Yahoo’ in the last week sorted by date. Yes, I know, I couldn’t find one either. Developers can now make that exact query on BOSS and build a rich powerful application. As always, BOSS developers get maximum flexibility on the display of this data.”

    Yahoo has set the pricing at ten cents per 1,000 queries. Users can apply to show advertising when they sign up, and those who have already signed up for BOSS can use Blog Search immediately.

    Yahoo says it has hundreds of developer sites using BOSS for millions of queries each day. ” We have seen fascinating applications in social, mobile and on the web that are using the service,” says Hampole. “Our goal is to nurture and grow this ecosystem by continuing to add new services and helping you monetize your offering.”

    He says the team’s next goal is to “shake things up in mobile,” adding that they’re not planning on a BOSS OS.

    Earlier this year, Yahoo launched BOSS v2, which brought a number of new things to the table (including Yahoo Search advertising).