Yahoo! News is now delivering blogs as a component of a news search result. This has major implications for PR practitioners. Suddenly those searching for news on your product get a feel for what users, the community, and the pundits are saying – unfiltered. It has equally major implications for blogging. It enables anyone with the energy and enthusiasm for a particular topic to potentially sit on the front page right alongside traditional news sources. If PR people hadn’t woken up to the voice of bloggers, they now need to wake up to their reach as well.
Here is an example. Yesterday I blogged on NetNewsWire’s acquisition by NewsGator. I searched for NetNewsWire using Yahoo! News. To the left you can see traditional news media covering the story. To the right you can see my post from yesterday.
The other question this poses is that is this the beginning of the end for blog search engines? While I’m still keen on many of the blog search engines, most remain incredibly frustrating for users. While some are giving up on them due to search quality, most of the calls I get are related to usability and sheer frustration.
I wonder why Google can’t provide a version of Google News that incorporates blog content. Or, a version that triangulates the major blog content from across the web. Google Blog for instance. Yahoo might beat them to the punch.
I’ve long maintained that having blog results next to traditional media results is the best way to monitor a story. The fact the Yahoo is the first one to impliment blog search in this fashion says to me they’re the only ones who see the value in that approach as well. Having them side by side allows searchers to assign whatever weight they want to those results.
I imagine at some point there will be no difference between a blogger and a reporter, and it will all be based on ranking as to how legitimate a certain news report is. But currently there is more to blogging than just reporting. For instance, blogging is used extensively for reviews (which I find almost more useful than news) as a consumer.