by Admin
by Rob Sullivan
by Rob Sullivan
http://www.enquiro.com
If you do any searching on Yahoo! regularly as I do daily, you may have noticed that there has been a slight change to the search results.
Of course, if you are looking at the page you won't likely see it, unless you can read the HTML as it is executing, but if you were to look at the HTML you would see that there is a new link on the page - one that is for all intents and purposes invisible, but one that could change the search landscape quite substantially.
We've seen these "new" links on other engines, most notably the new and improved MSN, but not anywhere else. I'm talking about RSS feeds for search results.
That's right, an astute observer in our office found the RSS link while working. That means that now you can monitor (via an RSS reader) the current search rankings of any Yahoo! search.
But why would Yahoo! do such a thing? What benefit could there be to this?
Well, there are many. In their pursuit of the ultimately personalized portal, this gives users one more way to view their content.
If their users perform the same searches on a regular basis they can now see the results on their My Yahoo! page without launching a search.
One would presume this will also be tightly integrated into their new 360 community - perhaps a way to share searches with other like minded individuals. But there could be many more users. And of course, Yahoo! would own ll that information as well as what you are sharing and with whom. All in an effort to build a profile of you and your contacts, to better serve you targetted information.
As more and more users harness the abilities of RSS they can perform many more tasks with much less effort.
Say I wanted to monitor search results on Yahoo! but am away from my computer. With an SMS enabled phone, I could download the RSS to my phone and view the listings as I see fit. Then as changes happen I could be notified immediately.
This ties in quite nicely with the sharing which one will be able to do with Yahoo 360 as well.
You will be able to share any content with anyone you want. Want others to listen to your favorite LAUCHCast music station? No problem, just share it with them. Share your favorite book reviews, photos, blog and more.
Simply syndicating search results now allows more Yahoo content to be shared, keeping users from defecting to rival services such as MyMSN.
And if you didn't already know, you can also get Yahoo! news via RSS as well. The query works the same - perform a search and then grab the RSS URL and export it to your favorite news reader (or easily add it to your my Yahoo! page, of course).
Based on this latest news, I don't think we've seen or heard the end of RSS. In fact, I expect to see more sources of content syndicated via RSS. My question is this: Since MSN and now Yahoo! are syndicating search results via RSS when is Google going to do the same?
Rob Sullivan
Head Organic Search Strategist
Enquiro.com
Copyright 2004 - Searchengineposition Inc.
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