Yahoo Buzz Mimics Digg with a Twist

Yahoo's newest service gives users a chance to vote for their favorite content, but also looks at search results to determine popularity.

Further refining the homepage formula that has helped bring it reign in millions of eyes daily, Yahoo announced a new service on Tuesday that will allow users to vote for the most popular third-party content, helping dictate the site’s front-page features. Yahoo Buzz closely follows the style of sites like Digg by allowing voting, but also draws on Yahoo’s search by capabilities by factoring search requests into the sorting process.

The company’s press release did not detail exactly how the two measurements were rolled together into a site’s final “Buzz Score.” Early glimpses at the Buzz page showed heavy coverage of politics, especially the United States presidential race, which seemed to reflect Barack Obama’s current status as number one most popular search, according to a separate bar on the page. “Yahoo Buzz is a good example of how we are continuing to innovate and open up our key starting points to third party publishers, making Yahoo! more social and personally relevant for our half a billion consumers,” said Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo’s network division, in a statement.

Although Buzz links will eventually be able to point to anything, right now the beta version of the site offers content from just under 100 publishers. Eventually, Yahoo sees publishers adding Buzz Modules to their own sites, allowing users to “Buzz Up” their articles and view other relevant articles through Buzz. The most popular Buzz items will also be sifted through by Yahoo editors to make the “Featured Today” module on Yahoo’s home page, where Yahoo already showcases content from third-party publishers.

While the beta version of Buzz is currently operational, Yahoo has not revealed a timeline for moving the service out of beta and on to its final stage.