Oprah Winfrey, the Queen of Daytime Search

Last week, in honor of the ubiquitous daytime talk show wrapping after 25 years of production, Yahoo released some search stats as the buzz leading up to the final show airing today (Wednesday, May 25, 2011) built up, with searches related to Oprah Winfrey rising 56% in the week prior.

The queen of daytime has long been a powerhouse when it comes to influencing consumers and purchase decisions for nearly any product. From healthy foods to favorite fashions and beauty items, anytime a product or diet recommendation was mentioned on the set of The Oprah Winfrey Show, online searches for those topics often skyrocketed.

The “Oprah Effect” (CNBC video) has been studied by several researchers over the years (including the Obama Presidential campaign in 2008), and many success stories have come out of their products or services being featured on the show.

As evidenced by the Yahoo graph below, the most popular recurring feature in recent years, “Oprah’s Ultimate Favorite Things” episode was the peak of “Oprah Winfrey” related Yahoo traffic during 2010.

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Oprah Search Spikes Over The Years

Oprah’s frequent expert guests such as Dr. Mehmet Oz (as well as financial guru Suze Orman and interior designer Nate Berkus) have also assisted in Oprah’s search influence – and perhaps represent future opportunities for products and brand marketers, as these personalities have also created mini-empires and launched popular shows of their own since first gaining attention on Oprah Winfrey’s platform.

While those disciples of Oprah may be able to reach some of the same demographic, it’s not likely they’ll have quite the same impact as a glowing endorsement from Ms. Winfrey, which has led to users frantically searching for more information on the products she’s featured on her shows.

Here are some of the biggest bumps in user queries and how they’ve impacted search behavior on Yahoo! over the years.

Gadgets & Gizmos

Nearly a year after the Amazon Kindle first launched, CEO Jeff Bezos appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show on October 24, 2008 – when Oprah declared the Kindle her favorite new gadget. The book club maven was sold on the device, and so were her loyal viewers.

• Related searches on Yahoo! that day: “amazon kindle” (+2800%), “kindle 2” (+2800%), “amazon kindle e-books” (+2300%)
• Demographics for “amazon kindle”  on the day of the episode garnered lots of interest from women 35-64

Note: Other tech items that Oprah Winfrey featured on her Favorite Things episodes over the years also spiked in Yahoo searches.

Health & Wellness

When Dr. Oz visited Oprah and showed an audience member how to use a “neti pot”, corresponding searches went up 12,325% for “neti pot” and up 42,480% for “buy neti pot” on Yahoo! that day, as some store shelves were cleared out of the product.

The wizard pulled another popular search stunt when Dr. Oz’s Green Drink, an anti-aging, healthy concoction was tasted by Oprah. Yahoo! searches on “dr oz green drink” spiked 2900% in one day.

According to Yahoo!, the popular cold prevention remedy “Airborne” spiked in popularity following its appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show even though the episode wasn’t about health or wellness. The show was chronicling success stories of inventors and entrepreneurs, and the former teacher who came up with the product idea that made millions appeared on the show; that helped increase awareness of the product itself. In more recent years, of course, there have been lawsuits about Airborne’s branding.

• Related searches on Yahoo! (September 2004) – “airborne” (+370%), “airborne cold remedy” (+5500%)

Food & Diet

Two distinct tracks of user searches appear here:

First, there are basic food and diet recommendations that would come from trusted people like Dr. Oz, Dr. Christiane Northrup, and Bob Greene.

• Searches for “steel cut oatmeal” spiked 5,400% on Yahoo! the day Oprah and Dr. Oz sang its praises.

The introduction of Dr. Perricone and his 10 “superfoods” like blueberries or pomegranates, items like chia seeds or flaxseed (Oprah showed how she’d have a snack of yogurt and berries and flaxseed). According to Yahoo, the search term “superfood” definitely got a lot of play in recent years on Oprah.

Secondly, sometimes specific brands and online stores would be mentioned (Garrett’s Popcorn, Frozen Hot Chocolate) and those brand names would then spike on Yahoo!

Other times, specific dishes would also get mentioned whenever Oprah’s BFF Gayle King would do an episode where she’d search the country for the best pizza, best cake, best burger, etc.

Fashion & Beauty

One of the most famous episodes in the last 25 years, occurred when Oprah staged a bra and jeans intervention to educate women around the world about bra fitting and how to find your true bra size.

Searches spiked on Yahoo! that day for the Oprah recommended brands:

• “freya bras” spiked 49,000%, as well as searches for “felina bras” which spiked 2,036%.

Oprah also put her stamp of approval on Citizens of Humanity Jeans, Joe’s Jeans, Theory Jeans, and AG Jeans, and of course, searches for those brands spiked off the charts as a result.

Bargain fashion lines also gained popularity, as Oprah showed the masses how to dress your best for less. Actress Sarah Jessica Parker and designer Vera Wang were among the celebs who appeared on Oprah to promote their low-cost fashion lines.

• Simply Vera – searches on “simply vera” spiked 300% on Yahoo! after Vera Wang appeared on the show in September 2007.
• Bitten – Sarah Jessica Parker’s clothing line, which was sold at Steve and Barry’s. In May 2007, this was super-spiky in search on Yahoo!
  • Related searches (daily spikes) on Yahoo!: “bitten by sarah Jessica parker” (+4800%), “bitten clothing line” (+3300%), “steve and barry’s store locations” (+4000%)

The “La Perla warm-up suit” got extra lucky – this one got a special mention because Oprah wore it on her “O” magazine cover after she showed off her toned figure the year she turned 50. Readers and viewers kept writing in to ask about where to get the outfit.

• Related searches on Yahoo!: “la perla” (+2200%), “la perla warm up suits” (+31,000%), “laperla.com” (+1300%)

Staples like everyday T-Shirts have had their turn to shine on Oprah, one notable example were the “Adam + Eve” shirts mentioned on an episode about people who made money with simple ideas.

• Related searches on Yahoo!: “adam + eve” (+130,000%), “adam+eve.com” (+170,000%), “adam plus eve” (+15700%)

There really is a guru for almost everything – including Eyebrow shaping – a May 2006 episode featured an expert teaching viewers how to shape their brows. Eliza Petrescu also featured.  An O Magazine article followed up on the “Eyebrow Experiment”.

• Related searches on Yahoo!: “eyebrow shaping” (+127,000%), “perfect eyebrows” (+22,000%), “eyebrow waxing” (+70,000%), “Anastasia brow kit” (+32,000%), “Anastasia soare” (+30,000%)

Other skincare and beauty items also bounced up in shopping searches:

• The “Clarisonic” cleansing appliances (retail prices $149-$390) spiked on Yahoo! after being featured on 2007 Favorite Things episode.
• “Hope in a Jar” was featured on the 2005 Favorite Things list and also in the 2010 edition. “hope in a jar” spiked 73,000% on Yahoo! the first time it was featured, then spiked 9000% on Yahoo! when it was featured again in 2010.

You can see similar effects on Google Trends from 2005 and 2010 for “Hope in a Jar“:

Informational & Educational

In November 2006,  on the Amazing Medical Breakthroughs episode, ”Dunstan Baby Language” was introduced to the audience by a woman from Australia who noticed patterns in how infants make noise to indicate discomfort, hunger, needing to be changed, needing to be burped. According to Yahoo!, searches for “dunstan baby language” spiked about 60,000% that day.

Will Oprah OWN Search In The Future?

Although much has been made of the Oprah show ending after 25 years, the reality is that the launch of the OWN network and continued publication of Oprah’s “O Magazine” will keep her firmly at the top the Forbes’ list of most influential women for some time to come.

Yet the OWN cable network still has a long way to grow, as it is currently only carried in 80 million homes, and has an average of 150,000 daytime viewers (300,000 in primetime) compared to the 48 million viewers who tuned into the talk show weekly.

According to Oprah Effect by the Numbers, the O Magazine has a circulation of approximately 2 million copies per month, so there are ample opportunities for unique products to still be featured as ‘favorite things’, and the print publication remains a hot buy among brand advertisers. By comparison, Compete.com puts the average number of unique visitors to Oprah.com at 2.9 million monthly, offering online advertising as another channel to reach the  coveted Oprah fans.

Oprah Winfrey Stock image from Shutterstock, used under license.

News is traveling fast about a leaked slide from a Yahoo “all hands” meeting earlier this week that listed several products — including Delicous and AltaVista — to be “sunsetted.” Yahoo confirms that Yahoo Buzz will be closed, as will the Traffic APIs. Delicious seems likely to go, too.

Here’s the statement we received from Yahoo:

Part of our organizational streamlining involves cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond. We continuously evaluate and prioritize our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months such as Yahoo! Buzz, our Traffic APIs, and others. We will communicate specific plans when appropriate.

I asked again if this included Delicious and was told:

We’re not commenting on Delicious specifically at this point.

The Sunset Slide

The news appears to have been broken first by Eric Marcoullier, who tweeted out a picture from an internal slideshow that was given to Yahoo employees:

You can see a larger version of this here. Marcoullier was previously a Yahoo employee, having come over when Yahoo acquired MyBlogLog — a service he cofounded. Several Yahoo employees seemed to confirmed the image via Twitter, as AllThingsD reports, as did Yahoo Chief Product Officer Blake Irving, when he tweeted about firing the source of the picture:

Can’t wait to find out how you got the web cast. Whoever it is, gone!

Goodbye To Yahoo Buzz

As you can see, Yahoo Buzz is on the list of “sunset” products, those that will be closed. When Yahoo Buzz launched in Feb. 2008, it took over the name from a previous trends-based product and was positioned as a type of new Digg with close links to publishers.

So Long, AltaVista & AllTheWeb

Also on the list are AltaVista and AllTheWeb. Both are search engines that Yahoo inherited from Overture, which in turn bought the services in 2003. AltaVista used to be a giant of the search world but has long since been eclipsed by Google. Neither gets much traffic, though both have links from across the web. Indeed, all those links still keep AltaVista ranking well on Google for searches on both “search engine” and “search engines.”

Closing those services makes sense to me, in that they don’t offer anything that Yahoo doesn’t already offer. These days, they’re both powered by Bing — as is Yahoo. The only reason to maintain them is for the extra “shelf space” they get from across the web. If they’re closed, and redirected to Yahoo, the traffic will be maintained in the short term. In the long term, some of that legacy traffic will finally disappear.

See You, MyBlogLog

MyBlogLog enjoyed a brief rise of fame as a social widget that could be installed on your blog. Yahoo bought it in 2007, and Yahoo Acquires MyBlogLog & More On How It Works is our article on how it worked at the time. I found it soon became pretty spammy and stopped using it, myself. These days, I think it’s fair to say that Facebook Connect and the “friend” widget it allows has left MyBlogLog behind. I won’t miss it, for one.

Coincidentally, Marcoullier has a sequel to MyBlogLog that just came out in beta testing today: OneTrueFan.

What’s Next For Delicious?

As for Delicious, I’d say it’s one of the survivors of the social bookmarking world. It continues to have a strong, loyal following. I can see Yahoo making a hard decision that it’s not feasible to maintain, for some reason. But it’s a terrible mistake to have let the news leak out this way. I think it’s just going to create doubt among those loyal users about the future of their bookmarks, what do they do next and whether it’ll be closed permanently, closed to new users or — hopefully — shepherded to a new company that will maintain it.

Postscript by Matt McGee: In that last sentence, Danny is wondering what many Delicious users are also wondering: Would or could Yahoo sell Delicious? Could it give Delicious over to the community as open source code? There was a quick conversation about that on Twitter a little while ago between Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon and Joshua Schachter, the creator of Delicious (who sold it to Yahoo in 2005). Schachter told Dixon that both scenarios are probably unlikely:

Could the loyal Delicious community step in somehow? Just a couple months ago, the community came together when news spread about the demise of Xmarks — a popular web browser bookmark syncing tool — with many volunteering to begin paying for what had been a free tool. Three days later, Xmarks announced that interested buyers had come forward and Xmarks would be saved.

There’s an obvious and huge difference between Xmarks and Delicious: One was owned by a spunky, little startup. The other isn’t.

Postscript #2: See our related article, 10 Alternatives To Delicious.com Bookmarking.

Postscript #3: See our new post indicating Delicious.com may not be closing down: Not So Fast: Delicious.com May Survive, After All.

Don’t have the time to scan them all? Here are the highlights of the most popular searches on Yahoo! in 2009:

Top 10 Overall Searches

1. Michael Jackson
2. Twilight
3. WWE
4. Megan Fox
5. Britney Spears
6. Naruto
7. American Idol
8. Kim Kardashian
9. NASCAR
10. Runescape

Top 10 Celebrity Farewell Searches

1. Michael Jackson
2. Farrah Fawcett
3. Patrick Swayze
4. Natasha Richardson
5. Jett Travolta
6. Billy Mays
7. David Caradine
8. Steve McNair
9. Jade Goody
10. Ted Kennedy

Top 10 Sudden Fame Searches

1. Jon & Kate Gosselin
2. Erin Andrews
3. Susan Boyle
4. Kris Allen & Adam Lambert
5. Nadya Suleman (aka Octomom)
6. Carrie Prejean
7. Mark Sanford
8. Portuguese Water Dog
9. Falcon Heene (aka “Balloon Boy”)
10. Sonia Sotomayor

Top Finance Searches

1. Coupons
2. Unemployment
3. Stimulus Plan
4. Cash For Clunkers
5. Student Loans
6. IRS Refund
7. Foreclosures
8. Government Jobs
9. Bernard Madoff
10. Health Care Bill

“Market Darlings” Related Searches

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. Hulu
4. Bing
5. iPhone
6. LinkedIn
7. Dollar Stores
8. Palm Pre
9. Rosetta Stone
10. Kindle

Top Yahoo! Mobile Searches

1. Megan Fox
2. Mobile Games
3. Michael Jackson
4. Movies
5. Rihanna
6. Mail
7. Lady Gaga
8. NFL
9. Ringtones
10. iPhone

Top Obama Searches

1. Obama Inauguration
2. Obama Biography
3. Obama Speech
4. Obama Stimulus Plan
5. Obama Family
6. Obama Health Care Reform
7. Obama Approval Ratings
8. Obama Facebook
9. Obama Overseas
10. Obama Dramas

Among the other must-read lists: Top Travel Destination Searches 2009, Top Viral Videos of 2009, and the Best Bloggers of 2009.

*Michael Jackson highlighted for effect, as he crossed over several categories.

Back to: This Is It: The Most Popular Searches of 2009 >>

In addition, there’s more Top 10 lists spotlighting different content around the network aimed at different usergroups including Yahoo! Food, Shine (women’s channel), Tech, Green, Shopping, Travel, Games, Movies, Music, Local and Hot Jobs.

Top 10 overall searches on Yahoo.com

1. Britney Spears
2. WWE
3. Barack Obama
4. Miley Cyrus
5. RuneScape
6. Jessica Alba
7. Naruto
8. Lindsay Lohan
9. Angelina Jolie
10. American Idol

Clearly, Britney Spears was not satisfied with missing the top of the list in 2007, so she had to beat out president-elect Barack Obama. Spears’ well publicized mental health problems kept Yahoo buzzing early in the year, and bouncing back with appearances on “How I Met Your Mother”, a new album and three MTV awards kept her in contention for top honors.

Barack Obama, however, surged ahead as the headlines pronouncing him the winner of the election became the most clicked stories on Yahoo of the year.

Entertainment juggernauts like World Wrestling Entertainment, video games (RuneScape) and anime (Naruto) snuck in slots between live action lookers like Alba, Jolie, Lohan and Miley Cyrus. The battle of the Davids on American Idol brought the reality show back to its former glory in the eyes of Yahoo surfers, and broke records on iTunes at the same time.

Yahoo’s Top 10 news stories in 2008

A mix of human interest stories that captivated attention, from the disappearance of young Caylee Anthony, to the shocking story of the ‘Pregnant Man’ and Swayze’s public battle with pancreatic cancer. Natural disasters and the toll taken on human lives in the middle east keep world affairs at the top of searchers’ minds.

1. Hurricanes
2. Caylee and Casey Anthony
3. Election 2008
4. Pakistan
5. Pregnant Man
6. China
7. Iraq
8. Shelley Malil
9. Patrick Swayze
10. Afganistan

Political power struggles

Looking back at the wild and crazy election year, nothing should come as a surprise at this point. People searched for Sarah Palin at first because she was an unknown, and just wanted more background on her, but then the twists and turns of the campaign (including the Fey funnies) catapulted her to fame, drawing more interest than her running mate. Clinton was the first serious run at president by a female candidate, so she secured herself a decent slot in the top political searches.

Ron Paul’s grassroots efforts gave his name a ligitimate chance to be heard, and moved him up in the power play. While politicos may have been interested in John Edwards endorsement of Obama, it’s more likely that Edwards’ affair with a former campaign staffer and rumored love child.

California Governator may have bumped out VP-elect Joe Biden, despite the fact that Schwarzenegger never took an active role in this year’s campaign. Rudy Guiliani’s run for the Republican nomination is surprisingly absent, while Romney’s more serious play for the ticket most likely put in him on this list.

1. Barack Obama
2. Sarah Palin
3. John McCain
4. Hillary Clinton
5. George Bush
6. Ron Paul
7. John Edwards
8. Mike Huckabee
9. Arnold Schwarzenegger
10. Mitt Romney

Shining bright in Beijing

1. Michael Phelps
2. Leryn Franco
3. Serena Willams
4. Kobe Bryant
5. Shawn Johnson
6. Jennie Finch
7. Misty May Treanor
8. Ronaldinho
9. Alicia Sacramone
10. Nastia Liukin

Whomever said ‘to the victors go the spoils’ didn’t have Olympian Leryn Franco in mind. While the javelin thrower and beauty pageant winner could only muster a 51st place finish, she had the last laugh with more searches than the beach volleyball duo of Kerri Walsh and Misty-May Treanor. Treanor had a slightly unfair advantage in the race for most searched Olympians, since she appeared on ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars” immediately following Beijing, the reality competition’s stable of fans likely kept her moving forward.

Fond Farewells

Saying goodbye in spades of online searches, several personalities passed on this year, and shocked the world with the sudden deaths of Oscar winner Heath Ledger and “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert,  as well as comedian Bernie Mac’s death due to complications of an autoimmune disease, which also fueled searches to learn more about sarcoidosis, Yahoo readers also noted the passing of a golden girl, Estelle Getty, as well as several of Hollywood’s golden gentlemen, including Paul Newman and Charlton Heston, among the list:

1. Heath Ledger
2. Bernie Mac
3. Paul Newman
4. Randy Pausch
5. George Carlin
6. Estelle Getty
7. Tim Russert
8. Brad Renfro
9. Isaac Hayes
10. Boyd Coddington

Look through the entire 2008 Year in Review on Yahoo!

• During the past week, Barack Obama has been the subject of more than twice as many queries as John McCain.
• A week ago, there were six times as many searches about Cindy McCain compared to Michelle Obama.
• Geographically, on a queries per capita basis, John McCain is getting most of his search interest from Washington, DC, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, and others. Barack Obama, on the other hand, is a hot search topic in Washington, DC, Georgia, Florida, Virginia, and others.

Yahoo also compared the search volume of the two presidential candidates head-to-head in five key states:

Perhaps best of all, Yahoo says it’s seeing a “surge in look-ups for information pertaining to voter registration.”

This was largely due to the fact that if your content got the most “buzz” it had a chance to be featured on Yahoo.com, which can send millions of visitors to your site over a short period of time.

Of course it didn’t take long for people to find themselves at Yahoo’s first major Buzz-kill.

The program allowed only a small handful of around 300 sites into the program, so the motivation was not there for most users to participate in the site when they could not even submit their own content.

Users that were in the beta program quickly found that getting votes and making it to the Buzz popular page had nothing to do with being featured on Yahoo.com, and they probably had a better chance at winning the lottery than getting featured.

That’s because “Human editors pick the best of the stories with the most buzz and can place them on the “Top Buzz” page or, more importantly, the Yahoo homepage.” However, this meant that it was their decision, and not the buzz users voting, that determined what buzz was and what deserved to be on the Yahoo.com front page.

When Buzz finally opened the site up to all users on August 18, 2008, there was a lot of excitement for users to install the new buttons and start try to get their own content popular in Buzz — with the hopes of being featured on Yahoo.com.

Again, it did not take users long to realize that they had an even smaller chance of having their content featured on Yahoo.com than before the program opened its doors to all users and sites.

Not only was it hard to find a single example of a non-Yahoo property being featured on the front page, there was no clarity to the algorithm and system within Buzz. Some stories would receive hundreds of votes in upcoming and never show on the popular section of Buzz, while other stories were prominent on the popular page with no votes at all.

This only added to users confusion and resulted in many people losing interest with the site.

As of October 28th, 2008, if you visit the front page of Yahoo.com you will notice that the bottom right content in the “Featured” box contains a story from a non-Yahoo property.

So, finally, Yahoo Buzz has lived up to their promotional pitches to feature any content that gets enough “buzz” on the front page of Yahoo.com.

Or at least that’s what it seemed.

Typically when you visit the “Seen on Yahoo.com” link from the Buzz site, you are shown the recent stories that were featured on Yahoo.com, thus the title “Seen on Yahoo.com.”

However, when you visit the “Seen on Yahoo.com” page now, you are shown a list of sites that are indeed popular, but not necessarily featured on the Yahoo.com home page. Of the hundreds of non-Yahoo stories listed in the “Seen on Yahoo.com” section on the 28th alone, only 4 or 5 were actually featured on the front page.

Additionally, the only sites that have been actually featured on the Yahoo.com front page are high level authority domains such as Consumerist, SFGate, and Wall Street Journal.

So the question still remains… Is Yahoo’s Buzz really just a Buzz-kill?

Brent Csutoras is an internet marketing consultant, who specializes in social media, viral and search engine marketing.

Yahoo Buzz launched in February of this year as a Digg competitor. It was locked down to about 100 publishers and grew to over 400 since then. Yahoo said they have over 5 million users that have participated in the site. But now, any user can submit any web page on the web.

Publishers can get their Yahoo Buzz buttons at http://buzz.yahoo.com/buttons and any user can submit content to Yahoo Buzz over at http://buzz.yahoo.com/submit.

Search Engine Land has been part of Yahoo Buzz almost since it launched, so feel free to Buzz this up.

Indeed, in the past three or so weeks since the initial Microsoft bid, Yahoo has:

• Launched Yahoo Buzz

• Introduced Yahoo Search Monkey
• Acquired Maven Networks
• Introduced Yahoo Live
• Previewed an impressive new unified advertising platform (Apex)
• Upgraded and expanded Yahoo Video (video is also coming to Flickr)
• Introduced an open-source infrastructure (Hadoop) for its search index

The company also laid off 1,000 employees.

Yahoo President Sue Decker said at the same IAB event that the Microsoft bid “accelerated conversations that were out there,” in reference to News Corp., AOL, and Google partnership/merger conversations.

Meanwhile, last Friday Microsoft’s Kevin Johnson again made the case for a Micro-Hoo combination and sought to allay concerns about layoffs and duplication at the combined company. But some shareholders and others are starting to question whether Microsoft should continue to pursue Yahoo. Microsoft’s shares have lost close to 15 percent since the bid was announced.

On the other side, Yahoo now faces multiple suits from shareholders for not accepting the Microsoft bid and for proposing a plan to offer “golden parachutes” for Yahoo employees, a kind of “poison pill” for Microsoft in the event of a takeover.

Pundits and others have argued that Yang has not had sufficient resolve and took too long to execute on the professed strategy of making Yahoo the internet’s “consumer starting point” as well as an open platform. However, the company seems to have found resolve and focus amid the crisis. Indeed, it often takes crisis to motivate action.

Before the crisis eases and things calm down, however, the intensity of the drama will only increase. Microsoft’s now hostile takeover effort and proxy fight requires it to install a new board, which is sympathetic to the bid. It will accordingly nominate a new slate of potential directors on March 13. It needs the backing of a majority of shareholders to elect the board.

I’m guessing that a range of institutional shareholders has informally told Microsoft they will support the proxy fight or Microsoft wouldn’t have gone down that path. I’m speculating, however.

It’s terribly ironic that it took Microsoft’s bid to, in effect, wake Yahoo up. And while nobody can predict the outcome with certainty, which has grown more hazy in recent weeks, Yahoo for the time being seems to be back on course.

At launch, Buzz is said to have stories included from nearly 100 publishers. A future program will allow other publishers to participate.

It’s not clear if content is automatically submitted or if this happens only when a Buzz Badge is added to a story and used by readers at a site to submit to Buzz. How searches are used to weight particular content also isn’t clear.

My assumption is that Buzz looks for popular searches in key news categories, then runs an actual search against stuff submitted to Buzz to generate an initial list. Users can then review the list and vote items up or down. The number of times an item is emailed from Yahoo to someone is also a key factor.

We’ll likely take a closer look at the service in the near future. You can learn more about it via its help pages here; you’ll find related discussion here on Techmeme, and there was a post (now gone, at the moment) from Yahoo here.

Note that the "old" Yahoo Buzz — a long-standing feature that shows the most popular searches on Yahoo — remains. It has a new name, "Buzz Log," and moved to a new location. (Two, actually. The first uses the new Yahoo Buzz look. The second maintains the old-style look-and-feel.)

Yahoo Buzz will be similar to Digg, but will start only with 100 sites allowed into the system. After the initial beta period, all sites that are accepted into the Yahoo Publisher Network will be allowed to be added to Yahoo Buzz.

By looking at the screen captures, it appears that each article is given a “buzz score.” The buzz score seems to be generated by users clicking a “buzz it” icon. In addition, on the right side of Yahoo Buzz stories are recent “Top Searches,” which are updated hourly.

Yahoo Buzz is currently a blog with data on top keyword searches from Yahoo Search. Here is the current Buzz FAQ, but reportedly, this new site will replace the current Yahoo Buzz section.

Let’s not forget that AOL’s Netscape tried to go the Digg route with Netscape.com but ultimately failed.