Yahoo today announced its $5 million acquisition of BuzzTracker, a news aggregator similar to Techmeme. From Yahoo’s Yodel Anecdotal blog:

Does this signal a radical shift for how we’ll run Yahoo! News? No. BuzzTracker technology will help improve the breadth and relevancy of our content — regardless of the source. But with Alan [Warms, co-founder and CEO of BuzzTracker and now general manager of Yahoo! News] on board, we’ll bring organization to the thousands of conversations happening across the Internet and help users better sift through the news to find what they care about most.

Kara Swisher at All Things Digital broke the news this morning, noting:

Yahoo had looked at other better-known competitors in the space, said sources, such as the San Francisco-based Sphere (which we use on this site for such content aggregation).

But those trendier (and more popular) start-ups apparently had too lofty valuations.

Jeff Jarvis today lamented Yahoo’s recent mess up with the mash-up debates. But despite that gaffe, it looks like Yahoo’s working really hard to catch up to its competitors: over at Search Engine Journal, Loren Baker reports (originally via ResourceShelf) on its current social networking trademarks. Now it’ll be interesting to see how Yahoo integrates everything it’s working on to improve its bottom-line and maybe even give big Google a run for its money.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 14th, 2007 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Investment, M&A, Yahoo!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.