Yahoo Feed Search & Web Search Feeds Update
Last September, my Yahoo, How About A Feed Search Tab? article wished for Yahoo to make it easier for
people to find its feed search service. Similarly, I recently wished that Yahoo’s new web search feeds were
easier to find. Any plans for these things to change? Nothing immediate, says Yahoo,
unfortunately.
Want to search for feeds at Yahoo? Here are the clunky instructions. Go to the Add
Content page of My Yahoo! How about a proper home for this?
"Our focus has been primarily on making sure the search is seamless for My Yahoo
users. But, we’re hearing more people asking for this [a better location]. I think that’s something we’re going to look at pretty closely," said Scott Gatz, senior director,
personalization product, at Yahoo.
And what about an enhanced feed search service, one that actually lets you search for matching posts from a feed, rather than just locate feeds generally based on their
titles and descriptions (more on this is covered in the Submitting RSS Feeds To Yahoo story
for Search Engine Watch
members).
Gatz said work right now remains building tools to help people subscribe to, manage and integrate content into the Yahoo experience, rather than building out a dedicated
feed/blog search service. But he left a at least a glimmer of hope.
"We’re always listening, and as the consumer need grows, we’ll be sure to get there."
Meanwhile, what about those web search feeds that are hard to find. The new Yahoo Publisher’s Guide To RSS says of them:
Yahoo! Search ? lets you create an RSS feed for any set of search results. Also, web search results from RSS
publishers (CNN.com for example) automatically display a link to the corresponding RSS
URL.
However, that’s only correct for those who have a newsreader enabled for auto-discovery, which Yahoo’s own My Yahoo is not. My
Yahoo Gains RSS Feeds For Web Search & Discovering Auto-Discovery article explains this more and provides a
workaround if you can’t use auto-discovery. But how about just adding a visible RSS feed link to the search results pages, in the way that MSN does and Yahoo does itself for
news search feeds?
"When it came to the rest of the search RSS feeds, we wanted to start
off simple for those folks with toolbars, Firefox and Safari. We wanted to get our feet wet with that and learn how they are using them before opening it. It way a way to soft launch and get it out there
in front of people in the know," Gatz said.
So, a visible link is likely to come. But in the meantime, the soft launch continues. FYI, if you use the Yahoo Toolbar, it has auto-discovery built in, to send a feed to
your My Yahoo page, Gatz said.