Yahoo launches new social news site ‘Yahoo Buzz’ in India

Yahoo yesterday launched its Buzz social news site in India, which will bring interesting and relevant content from websites across the internet and more buzz-worthy stories to the homepage of Yahoo.

India is the first international market outside the US, where the Sunnyvale-based company has launched the Yahoo Buzz after testing and launching it successfully in the US market in February.

The company said that India was chosen for the first overseas launch of this product since over 60 per cent of the country's Internet users are below the age of 25 and there is a lot of interest in the social media in this segment of people.

Yahoo! Buzz measures consumer votes and search patterns to identify interesting and timely stories and videos from large news sources as well as niche blogs around the Web.

Top stories are then given primary editorial consideration for feature placement on Yahoo.com.

Yahoo said that Buzz could highlight anything, a major news event, an intriguing video or image, or an interesting blog post - and instead of editors, real people vote and search for their favorite stories to determine the top rated content from across the Web.

Buzz ranks the most popular content of the moment using a unique approach that combines consumer votes with search popularity to give a story a Buzz Score. This new initiative creates a lens on what people are most interested in to enhance relevance on the popular Yahoo.com, and help publishers deliver their best content to Yahoo!'s broad and diverse audience of more than 500 million users.

How it works
First, the company determines the most popular topics that people are searching for on Yahoo and the most popular stories within those topics, based on activities like voting, commenting, and emailing stories to friends, is showcased on the site.

Stories with most Buzz may be published on the Yahoo home page, which can then be read by Yahoo users.

Yahoo Buzz in India features content from more than two dozen publishers, including NDTV, India Today Group, Times of India, Zee, A2 Media and One India.

Any online publisher can place a Yahoo! Buzz button on their content pages, enabling readers to share and vote (''buzz-up'') stories.

Since its launch in the US in February, content from over 20,000 publishers worldwide has been submitted to Yahoo! Buzz the company said and in the future the it may integrate advertisements into Buzz in order to generate revenue.