Forget the buzz about Microsoft acquiring Yahoo. that week the search titan wants the world’s attention on Yahoo Buzz, an extension to Yahoo.com that promises to deliver the most interesting and relevant subject matter from Web sites. The new tool is currently in beta.

In true social-networking style, 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 thereupon given primary consideration for placement on Yahoo.com.

What’s the Buzz?

Yahoo Buzz can highlight anything — a major news event, an intriguing video or image, or an interesting blog post — and instead of editors, real humans vote and search for their favorite stories to determine the top-rated composition.

Yahoo Buzz ranks the most popular composition of the moment by combining votes with search popularity to give a story a Buzz Score. Yahoo said it is creating

a lens on what citizens are most interested in to enhance relevance on Yahoo.com and help publishers deliver their best composition to Yahoo’s 500 million-plus users.

Yahoo is aiming to build on its recent successes in improving the Yahoo.com home page. According to the company, consumer engagement with the home page has increased nearly 20 percent year by year. Yahoo sees that as evidence that continuing to open up and supply consumers with direct hyperlinks to third-party publishers keeps citizens coming back to Yahoo.

A Boon for Publishers?

Currently, Yahoo Buzz includes substance from nearly 100 publishers, each of which has a “badge” that lets readers vote and submit stories to Buzz in real-time. Stories with the highest Buzz Scores will be highlighted through direct hyperlinks to the publishers’ sites from buzz.yahoo.com and submitted to Yahoo.com’s editors for possible coverage on the Yahoo homepage. Yahoo allows users to submit Buzz…

Orginal post by Top Tech News