Mixing news with blogs is a promising concept but that’s about the nicest thing I can say so far about Yahoo’s “You the Media:

Today we’ve begun the integration of blogs in Yahoo! News Search. Now when you search on Yahoo! News you will see blog results as well as content from thousands of trusted news sites. The experiences and opinions published on blogs make a great addition to the mainstream news people read everyday. And major world events are further fueling the growth of blogs as platforms for anyone who wants to have a public voice. At times, even everyday bloggers beat the mainstream media to a story.

In its current incarnation I’m glad they chose to keep this new Yahoo blog search remaindered to the sidebar of their news search with a bright red BETA. Yeah, you can click through and get “More Blog results…” but detailed results of … what?

Example searches
I tried a specific search for: new orleans beating which was a headline news story that ran at least a dozen times on CNN yesterday. The #1 blog post was from digita-djs.com from a day ago followed by another from blog post from 24 days ago, and then finally one from 8 hours and 54 minutes ago. In total there were 29 blog posts about it when I drilled down for more results. Only 29?

IceRocket had 4,360, Feedster 11,625, Technorati 3,550

The next test query: IBM genetic story about which I blogged. Another story which CNN ran prominently yesterday and the first result was from 1 day ago, the second result 11 hours, 50 minutes ago and third was Slashdot, 18 hours 3 minutes ago. With millions and millions of blogs out there only 4 results?

Argh, there either aren’t enough blog sources being used or this algo needs some major tweaking. Not You the media, more like Who the Media?

Other keywords had various results, some relevant and timely, but most my searches only proved more of what I outlined above. Not very useful in its current state. Promising concept though. Hopefully they add more sources.

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