Yahoo has acquired the news aggregator BuzzTracker from Alan Warms a site that is combining editorial judgment and algorithms taking into account how many times and how recently a certain story was blogged.

Yahoo is proud. On their blog they say about the deal:

"Did you know that Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995 gave life to what we now know as Yahoo! News? On that grim day for Deadheads everywhere, co-founder David Filo compiled a webpage with links and outsourced information on Garcia’s life and death. That was the first example of Yahoo! gathering the most relevant content around a news topic, regardless of where it came from. Today Yahoo! News is excited to continue in David’s footsteps — in Web 2.0 fashion."

Alan Warms, the founder of BuzzTracker.com becomes the Vice President and General Manager of Yahoo! News at. Search Engine Watch found out that

"He is tasked with using the BuzzTracker technology to help improve the breadth and relevancy of Yahoo News content,regardless of the source."

Warms himself released the following explanation on his Participate Media blog:

"The decision to sell the business and move to Yahoo! was relatively simple. 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."