In the last few days Yahoo! has unveiled their Blog Search Engine and lots of people have been talking about the decision to put blogs in a little box on the side of their news search results. That’s not nearly as important to me as the following:

• Indexes: Searching for “Web 2.0” in Yahoo! blog search brings 1,300+ results. Google’s new blog search engine offers 18,000 results. Additionally, many of Yahoo’s results appear to be items from peoples’ social bookmarking archives. That’s good that those are included, but it also inflates the numbers, as both blog posts and their appearance in archives appear to be included in Yahoo’s results. Compare these numbers with Technorati’s 16,000+ results and BlogPulse’s 9,000+ results.
• Inbound Link Search: Yahoo Blog Search does nothing to improve the disappointing state of inbound link search of the blogosphere.
• Supporting Multi-Media: Yahoo Blog Search results under “see more blog search results” offers Flickr image results, but Technorati brings back Flickr images as well as Buzznet photos, Del.icio.us and Furl bookmark archived items. My personal favorite, Tag Central pulls from many, truly multimedia search sources.

So I’m not too impressed with Yahoo’s blog search engine yet. I’ll probably use it allong with Google Blogsearch, Technorati, PubSub, Feedster and BlogPulse, perhaps spliced together in one RSS feed per query via FeedDigest with duplicates removed.

I also think that Yahoo’s podcast directory is a bummer, if for no reason than that it appears you have to log in to a Yahoo account in order to download anything! You can listen through some proprietary Yahoo listener, but I’d like to put my podcasts on my “pod” – towards which they were cast. Much like Flickr’s new login procedure after being bought by Yahoo, it appears that the advertising we see upon visiting Yahoo isn’t enough – we must register to see even more ads. Users may as well just search inside the Libsyn directory and find plenty of easily downloadable podcasts.

Technorati Tags: blogsearch, Yahoo, Google, search, blogs, Web2.0, nptech, net2