All Things Digital

On the great list of words no tech executive ever wants to hear, “Google has entered your market” ranks right up there with “Microsoft’s made a hostile bid for the company” and “Hello, I’m Chris Hansen with ‘Dateline NBC: To Catch a Predator’.” So local news aggregators like Topix and EveryBlock can be forgiven for blanching a bit when Google announced the addition of geo-local search to Google News this morning.

“Today we’re releasing a new feature to find your local news by simply typing in a city name or zip code,” Google software engineers Andre Rohe and Rohit Ananthakrishna wrote in a post to the official company blog. “While we’re not the first news site to aggregate local news, we’re doing it a bit differently–we’re able to create a local section for any city, state or country in the world and include thousands of sources. We’re not simply looking at the byline or the source, but instead we analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located.”

Location-based news targeting. Pretty slick. Or it will be, once they get the 90210 bug worked out. Still, as Topix co-founder Rich Skrenta notes, Google’s a little late to this particular game. “This was pretty neat stuff when Topix launched in January 2004,” Skrenta quips. “Now if Google just added 50,000 vetted local blogs to the mix, and a community with 100K posts/day, they’ll have something.”

Yahoo’s scooped up another small software company to poorly integrate into its product and service offerings. The Internet company has acquired content aggregator BuzzTracker and named its founder, Alan Warms, general manager and vice president of Yahoo News. Purchase price: a reported $5 million. “The decision to sell the business and move to Yahoo! was relatively simple,” Warms wrote in a post to the company blog. “As anyone playing in the online space understands, online media is all about scale. The ability to garner real CPMs, the ability to sell ads directly, the ability to provide innovative solutions to advertisers, all depend on having tens of millions of unique visitors. As the Publisher of BuzzTracker.com and before that RealClearPolitics.com, that point has been drilled into my consciousness over the past two years.”

OK. That explains BuzzTracker’s decision to sell. Now how do we explain Yahoo’s decision to buy? After all, BuzzTracker isn’t exactly leading the market for blog aggregators. In fact, it’s essentially a poor man’s TechMeme and an even poorer man’s Megite. Why buy an also-ran? Apparently, the price was right. “Yahoo had looked at other better-known competitors in the space,” sources tell AllThingsD.com’s Kara Swisher. “But those trendier (and more popular) start-ups apparently had too lofty valuations.”