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Yahoo takes a page from Google

The Web portal unveils new technology to find news articles and rank a Web page's popularity.

Stefanie Olsen Staff writer, CNET News
Stefanie Olsen covers technology and science.
Stefanie Olsen
Yahoo continued its momentum in Internet search last week, unveiling new technology to find news articles and rank a Web page's popularity. In direct competition with Google, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo introduced its own software to navigate online news from more than 7,000 sources, replacing its year-long partner Moreover Technologies. Yahoo now claims it has the most comprehensive news search service on the Web, a marker long posited by Google.

In addition, Yahoo has started testing "Web Rank," an algorithm that measures the popularity of a Web page, from 1 to 10, based on how many other sites link to it. People can view the Web Rank measurement bar by downloading a new version of the Yahoo Companion toolbar, which lets them search Yahoo anywhere from the browser. Yahoo's Web Rank closely mimics Google's PageRank, the No. 1 search company's star algorithm for calculating search results. PageRank appears as a little green bar line in Google's own toolbar.