It doesn’t seem like Microsoft is too worried about not getting the Yahoo! advertising as was clearly displayed by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at a news conference concerning the media mogul.

Speaking to a group of nearly 2,000 Microsoft enthusiasts at a technology conference in Seattle, Ballmer asked how many people use Yahoo as their primary Internet search engine.

Only a handful of arms went up, with the majority raising their hands for Google Inc.

After the tepid response for Yahoo’s search, Ballmer said jokingly: “Wow, we offered 31 bucks a share.”

Yahoo! News has a local news search feature in beta. I don’t like it.

The beta version of Yahoo! Local News asks you to input a city and state or a Zip Code. But what if you want to search for county news? That isn’t possible.

I live in a rural area of Pennsylvania. I could type in my Zip Code, but the Zip Code doesn’t cover the entire county. The two county area that I live in - York and Adams counties - are the two fastest growing counties in Pennsylvania, so I like to keep up with what is going on in the area in terms of growth, new businesses, etc.

Plus, Yahoo! Local News only includes news from a few sources. The local news sources Yahoo! News uses for this area include two newspapers from York, one from Lancaster County, which I’m not interested in, and news from a local television station. Yahoo! doesn’t even pull in RSS feeds from these sources. Instead, when I click a link on a news story I am transported to that news source’s website, and if I want to go back to Yahoo! to read more news then I have to click on the drop down box and select the local area again to bring up the news for the area. This is a huge time waster.

Another thing: My Zip Code is for a small town in Adams County, but all the news I get from searching for that Zip Code is in York County. I am equidistant from York, Pa. (York County), Hanover, Pa. (York County), Gettysburg, Pa. (Adams County), Carlisle, Pa. (Cumberland County), and Harrisburg, Pa. (Dauphin County), yet I get only news from York and not any of the other towns. If I want news from these town then I have to perform individual searches for each town or Zip Code. A county search would help me tremendously.

My Local Search Experience With Yahoo! News

When I did search for Gettysburg, Pa., I got all of the same search results as I did for York. In other words, the news sources were from the York, Pa. and Lancaster newspapers even though Gettysburg has its own daily paper, which also has its own website.

Yahoo! Local News needs to work on its delivery. I think the best approach would be to allow users to select a radius from a specific geo-targeted location that would tell the search engine to search for news that fits into that particular radius. For instance, if I type in a GPS location that is pinpointed to within 100 meters and select a radius of 10 miles then the Yahoo! would know that I want news for the area that is within 10 miles of my GPS position. That is news that is published about that geo area, not news that is published from within that area. That is a big difference.

As an alternative, a user could be allowed to enter their Zip Code and select a radius for their news search. Later, as more people learn to use Yahoo! Local News search, Yahoo! could expand the search feature to allow for searches for news of a specific type - for instance, sports, entertainment, politics, etc.

I’m interested in your feedback on this suggestion. How do you think Yahoo! could improve its local news search feature?

News and Media Blog