Yahoo Buzz Launches: Votes, Searches, & Emails Used To Rank News

As
expected, Yahoo Buzz has now launched
— a site where "buzz-worthy" news articles are highlighted based on user votes,
searching activity, and email sharing. Hot stories on Buzz may also get featured
on the Yahoo home page, an added incentive to get publishers considering the
program.

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.)