Search Engine News Wars

I always heart Poynter, particularly Jonathan Dube's Web Tips newsletter in which he bestows wise words upon the Web-using, journalistically inclined masses. Yesterday he talked about the Beta version of Yahoo! Local, a news aggregator meant to compete with Google News. Instead of searching for "Dallas" with all kinds of...

By Robert Wilonsky

April 4, 2006

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I always heart Poynter, particularly Jonathan Dube's Web Tips newsletter in which he bestows wise words upon the Web-using, journalistically inclined masses. Yesterday he talked about the Beta version of Yahoo! Local, a news aggregator meant to compete with Google News. Instead of searching for "Dallas" with all kinds of modifiers, as I frequently do on Google, the Yahoo site lets you specify what region you want to see news for and chunks everything at you on one page in a big, long, kinda-hard-to-read list a la Web sites from 1997.

Yahoo's Dallas-Fort Worth aggregator lists headlines as they come in via RSS feed from a fixed set of news sources. DFW's only got seven listed--us among them, hah!--and the only TV station listed is KXAS-Channel 5. Ouch. Luckily you can submit a source to Yahoo, and they'll get the feeds. You can thank me later, Little Elm Journal, for all the new hits. --Andrea Grimes

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