A significant step is the launch of Yahoo! Buzz in India, and the simultaneous release of upgrades to the service.

Yahoo! has probably chosen India as its launch pad for the improved Buzz service in the international market because it is fairly similar to Digg, which is quite popular there. In India the focus of Yahoo! Buzz will obviously be stories related to India. They have initially tied up to work with a few select Indian publishers and may open doors to others later.

The new Yahoo! Buzz feature is called Buzz Updates. Buzz Updates will show its signed in users, the comments and votes which have been posted by their friends. Another feature of Buzz Updates is to suggest a headline and a description when a user submits a URL.

While Yahoo! Buzz is similar to Digg, the latter is certainly more lively and entertaining, but Yahoo! Buzz is also quite popular on the social media circuit.

According to Business Insider news, Yahoo! is also trying to make it big on the social networking scene.

CTO Ari Balogh said a few days ago, that “Yahoo! is looking to buy companies that will allow it to become a big player in social networking and revamp its family of products”. It is also an appropriate time to buy according to him, as values have fallen from what they were 6-9 months ago.

Yahoo! also intends to put in some new products by this fall, which will provide users with a unified experience across all Yahoo! sites and thus help it to grow.

In the meantime, Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz and Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft are in talks to partner with each other on search, while Yahoo! is also trying to improve its own search capabilities.

Bartz and Ballmer are also encouraging their engineering and product development staff to create better mobile products. They plant to introduce features to unite a user’s personal settings for all Yahoo! products on mobile phone and PCs.

Yahoo! Open Search will allow third party website owners to present more useful information about their site on the search results page. Webmasters will be able to substitute the regular title link and description snippet with all sorts of additional information including images, deeper site links, reviews, ratings, prices, contact details and more.

If the Open Search platform is implemented well, and abuse kept under control, it could take the concept of universal search to an all new level. Webmasters will have more control over their site listings and users will now be able to control what they see in their search results by turning off anything they dislike in Open Search.

As shown in the sample Open Search result above, which was provided by Yahoo!, a publisher like the New York Times, Yelp, or even a small local website can supply Yahoo! with additional data. The Yahoo! Search algorithm will then present that data to users at the right time.

TechCrunch reports that while the Open Search program will provide third parties the incentive to add images and more links with the aim of driving more traffic to their site, it will not allow them to affect the search rankings in any way.

Yahoo! Open Search Site

Vish Makhijani, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Yahoo! Search says “We believe that combining a free, open platform with structured, semantic content from across the Web is a clear win for all parties involved – site owners, Yahoo! and most importantly, our users.”

Yahoo! Open Search is the best piece of news and the most groundbreaking innovation to come out of the beleaguered Internet giant in recent times.