14 DAY TRIAL // The Sunnyvale company just bought BuzzTracker, a news technology which receives the information from numerous web sources and publishes it on a single page. Although it was not yet confirmed, it seems like Yahoo paid no less than $5 million for the service that could increase the super giant's presence into the news market. All Things Digital reports that Yahoo doesn't want to disclose the price of the deal but it will confirm the acquisition of the news service today. The most interesting fact is that BuzzTracker already designed a Digg-like technology which was never released but, under the dominance of the Sunnyvale giant, it might become a very powerful competitor for the famous Digg website.
"We want to connect our users to as much information as possible, anything from Britney Spears to the Santa Monica City Council meeting notes. We love BuzzTracker's usefulness, because if you're interested enough, you might want related content we might not be publishing and hosting," Yahoo Media Group exec Scott Moore said according to the same source.
According to the BuzzTracker description, the news service receives information from approximately 1,000 news categories and 90,000 blogs. "Our goal has been to launch a news site that leverages the power of the "head of the long tail" of the blogosphere to automatically generate news pages for a multitude of topics, both broad and narrow," it is also mentioned.
Yahoo already has a news service but it has never become too popular since the Sunnyvale company didn't promote it too often. Using this acquisition, the super giant could become more focused on a domain which attracted a huge avalanche of criticism to its rivals. For example, Google has always been a criticized company because its news product receives information from approximately 4,500 sources without paying for the content.