It must suck for Jerry Yang at Yahoo desiring the fruits of Google’s labor, eternally sucking on G-exhaust, only to settle for what Kara Swisher describes as (emphasis mine):

Using its own technology, BuzzTracker creates “custom content feeds” automatically that aggregate news, blogs, reviews, discussions, video and audio. But to add a level of quality, it handpicks the 90,000 online content sources it uses.

Sound strikingly similar to Google News, only with a lot more hand-picked sources? That was my first take. Google News claims to: “search and browse 4,500 news sources updated continuously” and is it possible that a smaller number of sources when covering news could be better than a larger set?

This morning I decided to test how good BuzzTracker news results were with a music group I’ve been following lately with interest compared against Google News for the same query. Buzztracker has a beta label in their logo, so that should be taken into consideration. Perhaps some or all of the things pointed out below will be changed or improved upon in the coming days.

The band: Van Halen has been gearing up for their tour with Diamond Dave and pictures of a recent rehearsal posted to photobucket by some fan in attendance along with a setlist of possible songs they might be playing on the upcoming tour surfaced. Before the photobucket pictures were taken down, I saw a group who looked to be having a good time playing some classic tunes. I’m psyched for the tour.

Buzztracker too fat, less filling
A search for van halen on BuzzTracker (BT) this morning returned the #1 story about Prince! (In case you haven’t heard yet, Prince has called in the lawyers to sue over copyright infringement on YouTube and other places). Buzztracker’s algos picked up the story based on a single sentence in a slew of news stories about musical artists. Perhaps they should weight the title better, because all the sentence in the pointed story about Prince does is point to another post at roadrunner. Not a good, relevant result for a ‘Van Halen’ news query.

Also, there is no timestamp so we don’t know how stale the story is and the source isn’t listed. Instead we’ve got the date 9/14 and the title. We can hover over the link to figure out the source, but it would have been nice to see the source listed somewhere next to the empty white space of the date.

The second story is a first hand account from Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian who went to see a Van Halen rehearsal “last night” (9/13?) and had a good time. It’s a very brief paragraph description where he compliments David Lee Roth’s vocals, something that that has remained in question by many fans and critics.

The third BT post is a book review on Van Halen from antiMusic.com. Sounds like an interesting book. Not a bad result.

The fourth is about Tommy Lee having a legal spat and some drama over whether he is in or out of Motley Crue. Two out of the four stories for the Van Halen query aren’t even central to Van Halen. Value to reader? Not very much. Onto the BuzzTracker interface:

There are two different spots echoing back what we just searched for? Why? The keyword “van halen” being echoed back in the search form is good enough. No need to waste valuable vertical space repeating what we just searched for. Also there is too much white space on the left and the BT logo itself is a hog. And what about the white space beneath their trademarked phrase? Looks like a placeholder for a 468×60 banner. We’ll compare this design to Google News shortly.

Google News, leaner, meaner, fresher
But first let’s check out the Van Halen Google News search.

Firstly, we see the freshest update from 27 minutes ago. The top story via Billboard.com covers how Ky-Mani Marley, son of Reggae legend Bob Marley feels about opening for Van Halen on a couple dates of their upcoming tour:

“I’m not nervous because I’m not going there to play reggae,” he says.” I have music for everybody. There’s definitely going to be some people surprised, I promise you. Of course, everybody’s not going to like it, but everybody can’t hate it. So my thing is, if I can capture one fan, then I’ve done my job.”

The second story is a thorough piece from Rolling Stone covering a recent Van Halen’s rehearsal, including the entire set. Much better than a paragraph from Anthrax’s guitarist, but look at what’s third? Scott Ian’s firsthand opinion of the Van Halen rehearsal at Blabbermouth.

The fourth story from Google News is the weakest from FMQB, it’s a paragraph sandwiched in with other news. It’s too bad both Google and BuzzTracker can’t figure out (?) how to separate a full news story from a snippet mixed with other news for relevancy, but that’s what you get with machine algorithms.

As for the Google News interface? No wasted white space, some of the links shown in the screenshot (like the alternate search result links) are a from the Firefox plugin Customize Google and otherwise wouldn’t be showing. You can sort by date or image, an option BT doesn’t offer. No competition.

Picking other queries to compare
Basing the value of any search service on one search result is bound to be fallible but I’m not going to take the space here to compare more than one search result in detail. I did other searches and was equally unimpressed. Instead I’m going to suggest readers compare their own queries of news results and share their own results either at their own blogs and trackback in or in the comments below. Am I wrong about BuzzTracker? Do you think it is serious competition to Google News?

A few quick disclaimers: I own both Yahoo and Google stock and MakeYouGoHmm isn’t listed in either news service as far as I can tell. I know we’re not in Google News and I’ve never seen any traffic from BuzzTracker. From my perspective this puts me in the camp of: should be excited about both instead of underwhelmed by yet another Yahoo move.

This seems like another attempt by Yahoo to buy something cool that isn’t. The only difference is this comes under Jerry Yang’s “new” leadership and 100 day window to make positive changes. The rumors say the purchase of BuzzTracker will be for around $5 million. Based on what I’ve seen, they would have been better building something in house by hiring somebody like Gabe from TechMeme. Pay him a decent fraction of the $5 million a year and I bet he’d take his TechMeme model over to Yahoo and deliver a more worthy Google News competitor.

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