10 things you probably didn’t know about Yahoo! News

1. We’ve been the most popular news site in the world for about the last two years. We lead the other big sites (CNN, MSNBC, AOL) by about 10 million more unique users a month. That may be hard to put in perspective, but listen to this: our count of unique users is around 34 million. That means we lead by about 1/4 of our total audience. Google News serves less than a third of Yahoo News’ traffic by users. [Source: Comscore.]

2. We can hold our own. Sure, Yahoo! News gets lots of traffic from Yahoo.com, My Yahoo! and Yahoo! Mail, but a recent study shows we’re tops in user satisfaction as well.

3. We’re obsessed with performance. We look daily at how long our pages take to deliver to you and how consistent that delivery time is. Just last night we released a change that consolidates some of our JavaScript and CSS files to improve our YSlow score to 95 of 100.

4. We bring the news to you from all over the web. Yahoo! News has over 100 feed providers – big feeds like AP and Reuters and little ones with unique content like Space.com.

5. We love robots. We believe in automation, bringing you news faster than anyone else, and then using a small number of editors to make it even better. We update continuously, 24 hours a day and we obsess about how long it takes for new content takes to get on the site.

6. We’ve got more than just stories, photos and videos. We have a huge collection of comics (including Dilbert), funny stuff, obituaries (we know you read them), Today in History, and even lottery results. (Sorry, you didn’t win. Again.)

7. We’re a frickin’ RSS factory. We serve twice as many HTTP requests for our RSS feeds than we do for the whole rest of the site!

8. We’ll publish your news too. You Witness News is really cool integration of Flickr and Yahoo! Video that allows you to send us photos and videos of news events that you are there for, like the recent protest in Myanmar.

9. We like to have fun. Whether it’s drinking beer on a Wednesday afternoon or just hanging out at Great America, we play just as hard as we work.

10. We need your help. We’re got tons of things going on in Local News, the upcoming Elections and even cooler stuff we can’t tell you about yet. We need smart people who love PHP, Unix, MySQL, dealing with ridiculous scaling problems and getting stuff done.

Want to get your work seen by millions of people? Do these sound like fun problems? Check out our current open job descriptions and send your resume to news-resumes at yahoo-inc.com.

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