May 1, 2008

New Updates and Publishers for Yahoo! Buzz

Yahoo! Buzz updated with new features last night. Among them are:

  • “Top Buzz” widget for any publishers interested in expanding their content offerings by displaying the top articles across Yahoo! Buzz (or within specific categories)
  • “First Buzzed By” indicators (showing who was the first to Buzz an item) and personal
  • RSS feeds for top Buzz stories overall, as well as within specific categories

Meanwhile, new publishers have been signing up to Yahoo! Buzz including:

  • AskMen.com
  • ThePanelist.com
  • Venture Beat

And it's no wonder publishers are jumping on the Yahoo! Buzz bandwagon. So far, the service has sent almost 50 million referrals to their subset of publishers from the "Buzzing Now" links that appear on the "Featured" section on the homepage. Some highlights:

  • After being featured on Yahoo.com, HowStuffWorks.com received nearly 1 million total visits for its story on “How the Aptera Hybrid Works.”
  • In part as a result of being featured on Yahoo.com, RollingStone.com reached its highest page view traffic of Q1 2008 on March 11, 2008. The highlighted “buzzing” story on the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame received over 700,000 visits from Yahoo.com, resulting in over 2.4 million page views.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:23 AM | Permalink

February 27, 2008

SEW Experts: The TV Writers -- And the Buzz -- Are Back

Learning to use the tools we have before us is an integral part of online marketing success. In today's Searching for Meaning column, "The TV Writers – And the Buzz – Are Back," Kevin Ryan shows how the end of the TV writers' strike holds some meaningful lessons for search marketers.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

February 26, 2008

Spamalot? Yahoo! Buzz Is Not Your Holy Grail

Yahoo! Buzz promises to squash spammers with a team of spam cops: the Yahoo! Buzz Editors.

Yahoo! has a team of editors who program links on Yahoo.com. These same editors will now be reviewing all top-ranked stories on Yahoo! Buzz for possible feature placement on Yahoo.com homepage.

How many? Your guess is as good as mine. Yahoo doesn't share specific numbers on the size of their teams. Or their secret identities.

During the initial beta Yahoo! tested with a limited group of publishers that represented a broad range of content types, large and small. How you can get in the game:

Yahoo will open up to more publishers over the course of the beta. Interested publishers can join the mailing list via this link for updates.

Here's how Yahoo plans to keep spammers out and their buzzworthy results from being manipulated:

Users will need to login to Yahoo to vote which should help keep spammers out. Yahoo! Buzz plans to insure the integrity of the votes by combining user voting on-and-off network with a proprietary search ranking algorithm.

From initial Buzz results, very little censorship and keyword cleansing.

PopSugar and GiggleSugar join the entertainment category eaderboard dominated by Yahoo O&O properties. Voting? Fast and furious.

So what do Yahoo! Buzzters yodel?

Warning: Adult Content including the V-C words after the jump ...

Yahoo Buzz! omg!: "Fonda, The C-Word," "V-A-G-I-N-A" on The Today Show? You bet.

GiggleSugar scored 1,000 buzz points with that one in a closed beta.

A vid of Letterman's Top 10 Jane Fonda excuses for using the four letter word didn't hurt.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 10:59 PM | Permalink

Yahoo! Buzz Launches! April Fools!

Yahoo, in desperate need of good buzz these days, today launched Yahoo! Buzz, promising to uncover and deliver the most interesting and relevant content from Web sites across the Internet to the Yahoo homepage.

Sounds like a search engine! Social search anyone?

The only problem: Y Live! redux. This was the message on Yodel Anecdotal, Yahoo's official corporate blog:

"Not Found ... Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here. How did I get here?"

I know how I got there, Yahoo. The question is, How did you get here?

We saw your new Y! buzz logo on TechCrunch but not on Yahoo!

Still in beta, the new Yahoo! Buzz allows consumers to vote (Digg) and even submit to Digg and other social media sites.Yahoo! Buzz also uses search patterns to identify stories and videos from news sources and blogs.

The prize? Editorial consideration for feature placement on Yahoo.com.

The audience? More than 500 million users. The final judge? Human editors.

Yahoo! Buzz ranks the most popular content using what Yahoo terms "a unique approach that combines consumer votes with search popularity" to give a story a Buzz Score. The Yahoo initiative creates a lens (Squidoo!) on what people are most interested in to enhance relevance on Yahoo.com, and help publishers deliver content to a wider Yahoo audience.

The goal? To make Yahoo the gateway to the Internet again. The world's home page.

In its beta phase, Yahoo Buzz has content from nearly 100 publishers, ranging from large online publishing brands to small, influential blogs. It will open up to all publishers interested in having their content included in Yahoo! Buzz.

Participating publishers are given an online 'badge' enabling their readers to vote and submit stories to Buzz in real-time. Stories with the highest Buzz Scores will be highlighted via direct links to the publishers' sites from http://buzz.yahoo.com and submitted to Yahoo.com's editors for possible coverage on the Yahoo! homepage.

Yahoo "allows" users to submit Buzz stories to social news sites including delicious, Digg, Facebook, Propeller, Reddit and Stumbleupon.

We'd like to see Yahoo try to stop 'em!

Yahoo Buzz promises to form the basis for an open ecosystem of publishers, advertisers and consumers.

Coming soon: new syndication and monetization tools that enable publishers to share relevant content, connect to more advertisers and reach a broader audience. For example, a Yahoo! Buzz API will enable publishers to add customized Yahoo! Buzz modules or shortcuts to their sites to showcase their own most buzzed items or other popular stories on relevant topics.

Over time, Yahoo expects this to extend into a powerful content exchange that connects owners of content with distributors of traffic.

Adsdaq anyone?

So who were the mystery beta testers? The proponents of the "Free-conomics." Find out what Yahoo and fire hoses have in common after the jump.

"Getting a link on Yahoo!'s Front Page is like connecting to a fire hose," said Evan Hansen, editor-in-chief, Wired.com. "Thanks to this program, we got more than 2 million page views in less than two hours from a single headline, helping to drive a 1400 percent increase in Yahoo! referral traffic versus the previous month and enabling us to reach a vast audience that may not otherwise see the stories we publish on Wired.com."

Another Buzz-timonial from People Digital:

"Yahoo! Buzz builds on an openness initiative Yahoo! launched last year in which editors began highlighting third-party content from across the Web in the "Featured Today" module on Yahoo.com. This effort has already provided tremendous value for consumers and publishers, representing a first step in the creation of a more open system for Web content. "When Yahoo! linked to People.com's Sexiest Man Alive coverage, referrals from Yahoo! increased by over 11 times versus the average day," said Fran Hauser, President, People Digital.

And another official press release statement:

"Yahoo Buzz is a good example of how we are continuing to innovate and open up our key starting points to third party publishers, making Yahoo! more social and personally relevant for our half a billion consumers," Jeff Weiner, executive vice president, Yahoo! Network Division said in a statement. "In addition, we recently announced that we will be opening up our user interface for Yahoo! Search, as well as creating a smarter inbox by opening up Yahoo! Mail, two other key ways that consumers start with Yahoo!."

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 12:14 AM | Permalink

February 12, 2008

You Must Be 21 to View This Site: Yahoo Searchlight Award

Warning: You must be 21 years of age to view this site.

You must be of legal purchase age to enter the corrupt world of this online video / search campaign -- winner of the Yahoo Searchlight Awards.

The third annual Yahoo Searchlight Award winner: "Partay" the whitest boys in the room hip-hop video promoting the responsible consumption of Smirnoff Raw Tea by search marketing firm Outrider.

Target demographic for search ads: Who cares? Par-tay! You don't have to type in your age to click on a "Crizazy" text ad for Russian hooch.

Don't agree with the winner? Don't blame the judges. All, including Kevin Ryan, were limited to "one man, one vote" while the big audience voted electronically.

That'll teach interactive agencies not to send a whole crew to an awards ceremony.

Funniest line: Ron Belanger called Kevin Ryan, "The Howard Stern of Search."

2nd Funniest line: What world-famous comedian and emcee Craig Ferguson called Kevin Ryan.

To find the answer, go to the Search Engine Strategies blog.

For more drunken rap videos in the East vs West Rap WarGames, go to TeaPartay.com. (No link love for preppie rappers.)

Outrider copywriter say, IF YA WANNA ROLL WIT DA TEA PARTAY WE NEED TO KNOW YOUR AGE PLAYA. Submit, yo.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 6:15 PM | Permalink

July 11, 2007

Yahoo Tops Asian Popularity, comScore Reports

comScore published its first comprehensive Asia-Pacific internet usage review and Yahoo was found to be the most popular. The report examined the percentage of visitors to various sites for each country's web activity.

Though China has 91.5 million people using the internet it only represents 9 percent of the country's population, according to comScore. South Korea, followed by Australia, had the highest penetration, 65 and 62 percent respectively.

Posted by Frank Watson at 3:38 PM | Permalink

March 6, 2007

The Intersection of Social Search & Pop Culture

That's what social search is really about, isn't it? The reflection of trends and conversation among related entities. Celebrity searches and following the trends in pop culture are nothing new in search of course, and the search engines have been publishing popular searches for years now. Just go to Google Zeitgeist, Yahoo Buzz, the Lycos 50, and AOL Hot Searches, and you can see what's popular in search at any given time.

File this under Tuesday's just for fun blog post, since tonight marks Week 3 of competition on American Idol , it's only appropriate to talk about how the scandal surrounding one contestant has influenced results in each search engine.

American Idol contestant Antonella Barba, of Point Pleasant, New Jersey, has earned the title of the fastest rising star of Internet controversy, as the blogoshere and popular media are focused on racy photos of her circulating around the Web.

On the Lycos 50, she's just edged out the number of searches for MySpace (YouTube, Facebook, and others are further down the list), reaching the #1 most searched for spot, and tops this week's Google Zeitgeist. On Yahoo! Buzz, she's second only to Britney Spears.

It's clear that viral factors influence the rise of these types of scandals, and in Google's search results for Antonella, Technorati tops the list with results tagged for the popstar wannabe and AI related terms. More interesting, of course, is how Google automatcially inserts the second most popular alternative query for a related search: "See results for: antonella barba pictures". Now that's relevancy for you!

Meanwhile, Yahoo's results for similar queries take advantage of the chatter on the topic over at Yahoo Answers, with the top three results integrated into the standard Y! SERPs.

Perhaps most encouraging though, is the adoption of related Pay Per Click ads for Cingular Wireless, official sponsor of American Idol. Sponsored links for the big brand pop up as well as an ad by FOX, promoting the show. That's progress. Of course, there's also several sponsored links to ringtone sellers and other sites promoting the actual pictures. That's less surprising.

Posted by Elisabeth Osmeloski at 1:42 PM | Permalink

October 18, 2006

Yahoo Buzz Publishes Top 20 Misspelled Searches

Spotted via Search Engine Journal, Yahoo Buzz released the top twenty misspelled keywords on Yahoo Search. Here are the top five:

(1) Rachel Ray (Rachael Ray) (2) Tatoos (Tattoos) (3) Scarlett Johanson (Scarlett Johansson) (4) Wierd Al Yankovic (Weird Al Yankovic) (5) Evanesence (Evanescence)

Top 20 are at Yahoo Buzz.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:03 AM | Permalink

May 1, 2006

Yahoo Tests Yahoo Buzz Box Within Search Results Page

I reported this morning that Yahoo has been testing adding the Yahoo Buzz box within the search result pages. Conduct a search at Yahoo Search on any term, and you may notice this big bright yellow box on the right hand side (above or possibly below the ads) with other popular searches from the Buzz index. To see image of this in action visit my site. This just seems way off target to me, how does this enhance the user experience for the searcher's query? The buzz index does not seem to be matched on the query, it just seems to be based on today's most popular searches.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:15 AM | Permalink

Yahoo Tests Yahoo Buzz Box Within Search Results Page

I reported this morning that Yahoo has been testing adding the Yahoo Buzz box within the search result pages. Conduct a search at Yahoo Search on any term, and you may notice this big bright yellow box on the right hand side (above or possibly below the ads) with other popular searches from the Buzz index. To see image of this in action visit my site. This just seems way off target to me, how does this enhance the user experience for the searcher's query? The buzz index does not seem to be matched on the query, it just seems to be based on today's most popular searches.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 9:15 AM | Permalink

Yahoo Tests Yahoo Buzz Box Within Search Results Page

I reported this morning that Yahoo has been testing adding the Yahoo Buzz box within the search result pages. Conduct a search at Yahoo Search on any term, and you may notice this big bright yellow box on the right hand side (above or possibly below the ads) with other popular searches from the Buzz index. To see image of this in action visit my site. This just seems way off target to me, how does this enhance the user experience for the searcher's query? The buzz index does not seem to be matched on the query, it just seems to be based on today's most popular searches.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 9:15 AM | Permalink

Yahoo Tests Yahoo Buzz Box Within Search Results Page

I reported this morning that Yahoo has been testing adding the Yahoo Buzz box within the search result pages. Conduct a search at Yahoo Search on any term, and you may notice this big bright yellow box on the right hand side (above or possibly below the ads) with other popular searches from the Buzz index. To see image of this in action visit my site. This just seems way off target to me, how does this enhance the user experience for the searcher's query? The buzz index does not seem to be matched on the query, it just seems to be based on today's most popular searches.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 9:15 AM | Permalink

February 2, 2006

Search as a Predictor of the Future?

Yahoo Research has created an interesting fantasy investment game that allows you to buy and sell "stocks" in companies developing new technologies, and watch how these stocks perform in part based on how popular search terms related to the technology are on Yahoo. More on this intriguing game in today's SearchDay article, Searching for the Future.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:51 AM | Permalink

Search as a Predictor of the Future?

Yahoo Research has created an interesting fantasy investment game that allows you to buy and sell "stocks" in companies developing new technologies, and watch how these stocks perform in part based on how popular search terms related to the technology are on Yahoo. More on this intriguing game in today's SearchDay article, Searching for the Future.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 10:51 AM | Permalink

Search as a Predictor of the Future?

Yahoo Research has created an interesting fantasy investment game that allows you to buy and sell "stocks" in companies developing new technologies, and watch how these stocks perform in part based on how popular search terms related to the technology are on Yahoo. More on this intriguing game in today's SearchDay article, Searching for the Future.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 10:51 AM | Permalink

Search as a Predictor of the Future?

Yahoo Research has created an interesting fantasy investment game that allows you to buy and sell "stocks" in companies developing new technologies, and watch how these stocks perform in part based on how popular search terms related to the technology are on Yahoo. More on this intriguing game in today's SearchDay article, Searching for the Future.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 10:51 AM | Permalink

September 28, 2005

Better Yahoo Tools Coming To Measure Search Buzz - And Watch Google, Too!

Yahoo! Testing New Branding Metrics for Search at ClickZ covers how Yahoo is helping more advertisers tap into tools to measure brand reach and buzz through search, a sign that tracking search buzz is finally getting some needed, renewed attention.

Many are familiar with Yahoo Buzz, the consumer-facing service that shows what's hot in search. Not so well known is another version that advertisers and others can tap into. Yahoo has had that product for years. It's not new, as the story suggests. Instead, it sounds like it's being given a revamp in preparation for wider positioning. A new "Search Share Of Voice" tool is also planned.

It's long overdue for greater outreach like this. As we've had more and more "word-of-mouth" tools designed to measure blog buzz, it's seemed forgotten that search engines have access to much more broad web buzz based on what wide, everyday audiences are looking for and writing about.

FYI, Google's got a similar tools it developed to help CurrentTV do Google Zeitgeist segments. I asked Google a couple of weeks ago whether these tools might be rolled out for others to use, when talking about them. It's something Google has in mind, but there were no immediate plans to do so. So we watch and see!

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:25 AM | Permalink

Better Yahoo Tools Coming To Measure Search Buzz - And Watch Google, Too!

Yahoo! Testing New Branding Metrics for Search at ClickZ covers how Yahoo is helping more advertisers tap into tools to measure brand reach and buzz through search, a sign that tracking search buzz is finally getting some needed, renewed attention.

Many are familiar with Yahoo Buzz, the consumer-facing service that shows what's hot in search. Not so well known is another version that advertisers and others can tap into. Yahoo has had that product for years. It's not new, as the story suggests. Instead, it sounds like it's being given a revamp in preparation for wider positioning. A new "Search Share Of Voice" tool is also planned.

It's long overdue for greater outreach like this. As we've had more and more "word-of-mouth" tools designed to measure blog buzz, it's seemed forgotten that search engines have access to much more broad web buzz based on what wide, everyday audiences are looking for and writing about.

FYI, Google's got a similar tools it developed to help CurrentTV do Google Zeitgeist segments. I asked Google a couple of weeks ago whether these tools might be rolled out for others to use, when talking about them. It's something Google has in mind, but there were no immediate plans to do so. So we watch and see!

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 8:25 AM | Permalink

Better Yahoo Tools Coming To Measure Search Buzz - And Watch Google, Too!

Yahoo! Testing New Branding Metrics for Search at ClickZ covers how Yahoo is helping more advertisers tap into tools to measure brand reach and buzz through search, a sign that tracking search buzz is finally getting some needed, renewed attention.

Many are familiar with Yahoo Buzz, the consumer-facing service that shows what's hot in search. Not so well known is another version that advertisers and others can tap into. Yahoo has had that product for years. It's not new, as the story suggests. Instead, it sounds like it's being given a revamp in preparation for wider positioning. A new "Search Share Of Voice" tool is also planned.

It's long overdue for greater outreach like this. As we've had more and more "word-of-mouth" tools designed to measure blog buzz, it's seemed forgotten that search engines have access to much more broad web buzz based on what wide, everyday audiences are looking for and writing about.

FYI, Google's got a similar tools it developed to help CurrentTV do Google Zeitgeist segments. I asked Google a couple of weeks ago whether these tools might be rolled out for others to use, when talking about them. It's something Google has in mind, but there were no immediate plans to do so. So we watch and see!

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 8:25 AM | Permalink

Better Yahoo Tools Coming To Measure Search Buzz - And Watch Google, Too!

Yahoo! Testing New Branding Metrics for Search at ClickZ covers how Yahoo is helping more advertisers tap into tools to measure brand reach and buzz through search, a sign that tracking search buzz is finally getting some needed, renewed attention.

Many are familiar with Yahoo Buzz, the consumer-facing service that shows what's hot in search. Not so well known is another version that advertisers and others can tap into. Yahoo has had that product for years. It's not new, as the story suggests. Instead, it sounds like it's being given a revamp in preparation for wider positioning. A new "Search Share Of Voice" tool is also planned.

It's long overdue for greater outreach like this. As we've had more and more "word-of-mouth" tools designed to measure blog buzz, it's seemed forgotten that search engines have access to much more broad web buzz based on what wide, everyday audiences are looking for and writing about.

FYI, Google's got a similar tools it developed to help CurrentTV do Google Zeitgeist segments. I asked Google a couple of weeks ago whether these tools might be rolled out for others to use, when talking about them. It's something Google has in mind, but there were no immediate plans to do so. So we watch and see!

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 8:25 AM | Permalink