Jeremy notes today that Yahoo! News now has RSS feeds available. A good thing for finding news — but not for linking to news. For once, I’m in complete agreement with Dave Winer:
There’s another concern, linkrot. Links into Yahoo News rot relatively quickly, as compared to News.Com, for example, which is near perfect. So, until I hear something has changed, I’m going to use Yahoo to read news but try hard not to point to stories on Yahoo from my weblog.
I noticed this quite a while ago. Anytime I find or am sent a link to a Yahoo! News story that I want to link to, my first step is to copy the title of the story, head over to Google News and search for that story. Usually I can find a link to another news source that doesn’t delete its pages after a time. Yahoo! News and the corresponding RSS feeds will be quite handy for finding stories — but until they start keeping their archives online, they’re essentially worthless for linking stories.
Thanks for educating me on this. I’ll take your advice when posting links to Yahoo! News stories on Yahoogle. Maybe Google will win after all.