Saturday, July 9, 2005

Yahoo RSS Search?

Steve Rubel found what looks like a Yahoo blog search, potentially competing with existing services such as Technorati, Feedster and BlogPulse, and made some screenshots. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch, who said he played with the site for about two minutes, then found it had been taken down, also managed to snap a screenshot.

 

I like the wording on the front-page, showing it really wasn’t intended for public (and yet it was made available live, proving once more this is something one shouldn’t do): “This Yahoo! Search service finds lorem ipsum doler itum foo bar bla bla bla mktg spiel.” (The text continues in a more straight-forward fashion with some phrasing seemingly taken from Yahoo’s Creative Commons search.)

What will happen to others, if ...?

So will Yahoo be releasing their RSS* search shortly? If so, will Google follow? Tim Bishop of Geodog argues:

“Does today’s news about Yahoo testing an RSS feed search feature mean that Technorati and Feedster’s days are numbered (...)? I hope not, but I fear so. I remember when I was talking with Dave Sifry about working at Technorati, I told him of a conversation that I had with Eric Schmidt of Google, who after a talk told me that Google had no interest in getting into weblog search at that time. Dave said that he hoped to get a good long head start, and had no interest in waking the slumbering beast. That was a year and a half ago.

It is hard for me to see to see what competitive advantage Feedster or Technorati would have over a Yahoo or a Google, once the giants wake from their slumber, as they are appearing to do. And the giants have all the expertise in scaling, something that both startups have had a lot of trouble with.”

Founder and CEO of Technorati, Dave Sifry, replied on Geodog’s comments:

“We’ve got a lot up our sleeves, and welcome other players who want to get into the game. There’s lots of room for new innovation in this world, and we’re going to continue to run really hard and work our asses off.

In the end, this is all about being of service to our users and customers – that’s where we’re going to continue to spend out time and energy.”

*RSS, the Really Simple Syndication format, is an XML-based meta data document to accompany blogs and such. Some blogs decide to publish full content RSS feeds, while others are only showing part of their content.

Yahoo RSS Search? by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (0)

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