Date: Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Yahoo! will let users choose the news
In an attempt to lure back visitors, stricken search engine site Yahoo! will allow people to choose which stories appear on the website. Yahoo’s new move, which will be called Yahoo! Buzz, echoes ‘social news’ websites such as Digg and Reddit, which also allow users to choose which news articles appear on their site.
Yahoo! Buzz works as users will be able to send messages to the site as they browse the rest of the web. This means that they can notify Yahoo! when they find content they like, which Yahoo! can then add to their site to ensure it is constantly meeting the interests of its readers. Users will be able to send messages to Yahoo! by simply clicking a ‘Buzz button’ under a story, which registers their vote for that particular item. Around a hundred titles have agreed to display these buttons on their news articles so far, including Newsweek, the New York Times and USA Today.
Basically, the more votes a story receives, the more clearly Yahoo! will display it on the Buzz homepage. However, it is thought that, despite the interactive element of Buzz, the Yahoo! editorial team will still have the final say over stories. Ensuring editorial approval is essential for Yahoo! to stop violent, aggressive or illegal articles being displayed on the site.
The arrival of Buzz is an important one for Yahoo! as it represents one of the ways chairperson Jerry Yang is attempting to get the search engine giant back on track. Another way Yang hopes to change Yahoo!’s ailing fortunes is to provide a more sophisticated search engine facility, which is similar to Google’s. The company has already updated their search engine to give the user more detail in their results and these improvements look set to continue.
Source:
The Times
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