Yahoo! News Sandbox Full Post View | List View
New features we are considering for Yahoo! News
- Keyword Highlighting and Passive Personalization
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Year 2006 is an exciting time for Yahoo! and Yahoo! News. We begin the year by showcasing 2 new features on Yahoo! News Sandbox: Keyword Highlighting and Passive Personalization
Keyword Highlighting
A popular feature of Yahoo! Search is the ability to look at "cached" versions of web pages or how the web page looked when Yahoo! crawled the site. An added bonus when viewing these cached pages is that it will highlight the words in your search. Here's an example searching a cached version of the Yahoo! News front page for the words "yahoo news iraq"
Our latest feature in the sandbox from Umesh Rathod takes this one step further. Whenever you click to a story on Yahoo! News from Yahoo! News Search or just Yahoo! Search, you'll get your search terms highlighted in the text of story. See how the words "stock market" and "shares", "volume" are highlighted so you can quickly find the parts of the story you're looking for. Try it. Whenever you search, these words will automatically be highlighted. Pretty nice, huh?
- Sign up to test this feature
- Search for dow+nasdaq+up+down+high+stocks
- Click on any story hosted on news.yahoo.com
A feature you may not have noticed on the Yahoo! News home page is the ability to personalize the sections and order on the home page. If this is a surprise to you, you're not alone. We've found that people either don't notice the link or are just too busy to set it up.
But what if you didn't have to set anything up? What if we just learned what you liked and reordered things automatically? That's what Umesh Rathod's latest hack is about. Just click links to stories like you normally do from the Yahoo! News home page. The page will 'learn' which topics you like most and put those at the top the next time you load the page. If you're always clicking those Odd News stories, but are not so interested in Sports, Odd News will bubble its way to the top and Sports will gradually fall to the bottom.
Of course, we'll still respect your preferences if you have them. So start clicking and try it out.
- Sign Out of Yahoo! News
- Go to Yahoo! News homepage and start clicking on headlines
- You should see the most frequently clicked category bubble up when you go back to the Yahoo! News Homepage
- The Top Stories module will always be the first module
Thursday January 5, 2006 - 01:54pm (PST) Permanent Link | 2 Comments - First 2 tests: Recently viewed stories and trackback
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Welcome to the Yahoo! News Sandbox
http://sandbox.news.yahoo.com/
Here at Yahoo! News, we have lots of ideas on how to make a better news site. Every day we ask ourselves "what if" questions and challenge how people traditionally interact with their news. The problem with running the world's #1 news site is that it's a vital part of people's daily lives. It needs to run fast and reliably. At any time an important story could break, and we want to be ready to serve it to you.
So here's the dilemna: while we want to take our coolest ideas and show them to you right away, we don't want to accidentally break something right when it's important for you to get to important news. Making sure things always work correctly and fast takes time; but we want to get feedback on ideas quickly. Our answer to that is Yahoo! News Test. It's a playground for ideas; a place for engineers to scratch an itch and see if it works. Then let's forget what WE think, YOU tell us what's good, what's bad, and what could be great with a few tweaks.
With that, today we bring you two new features exclusively on Yahoo! News:
The first is one of those Friday afternoon hacks I wrote. It's a simple box that appears on the left column of every story that shows you the last five stores you've read. It's most useful to quickly go back to check for updates to a story you've already read or find that story you meant to share with a friend. Stories that have updated since you've read it are in bold.
Look for: What you've been reading on the left hand of story pages
The second is a fully-functional "trackback" feature written by Glen Campbell (no, not that one). Trackback is an automated way for sites to know when blogs are commenting about them and link back out to the blog so the links go both ways. Underneath the text of every story you'll find the trackback URL and recently received trackbacks. RDF is available in the page for automatic discovery of these trackback URLs as well.
Look for: Trackback URL at the bottom of the news story pages. You can also look for the RDF tags in the HTML source
That's it for now. Remember, Yahoo! News is an experimental playground, so it might not always be available or functioning correctly. You can always head to Yahoo! News for the latest.
So go ahead now and explore Yahoo! News, then come back here to give feedback. Your feedback will influence when and if these features make it out to the rest of Yahoo! News.
Jeff Boulter
Yahoo! Media Group Engineering
PS: This is what the trackback looks like:
Thursday June 30, 2005 - 09:33am (PDT) Permanent Link | 24 Comments - Welcome to the Yahoo! News Blog
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Welcome to the Yahoo! News Product Blog. Here's where we plan to update you on what's new with Yahoo! News. We're going to aim to keep it informal -- no marketing speak or soap box stuff -- just a way for us to share what's new, or some cool new way we or our customers have found to get more from the product. We plan to post regularly here. Sometimes we'll have an important announcement -- bug fixes, workarounds or new features. Other times we'll just want to share whatever happens to be top of mind for the team.Tuesday May 17, 2005 - 04:27pm (PDT) Permanent Link | 7 Comments
