Sunnyvale, California — In an attempt to improving its own search as it awaits Bing Deal, Yahoo Inc. is geared up to set in motion the pace in the race to provide the best real-time news. The Sunnyvale, Calif., company just made its first step towards making search results more fresh contents from news sources, photos, videos and most importantly Twitter, the company announced Thursday.
Starting today, when you do a search on Yahoo for the any current news stories, you can see a tab for Twitter results that contains related videos and photos published by Twitter users on top of the search results page. For example, if you search for “space shuttle atlantis,” or “obama,” you will get a section for news results, which contains tabs for news, photos, videos, and Twitter.
The Photos and Videos tabs will give you related images and videos culled from Yahoo! News.
This is possibly the unsurpassed integration of Twitter that exists in any of the three major search engines at this point. That will likely change, once Twitter’s deals with Google and Bing start to produce results, but Yahoo is providing an interesting way of incorporating tweets into search results, even if they only come up for select queries.
“We have been zoomed in on making search more personally relevant for people and getting them the content that matters most to them,” Larry Cornett, vice president of consumer products at Yahoo, said in a statement. “I think this shows how we are continuing to innovate Yahoo search.”
Following the modification, when you perform a Yahoo search on news-related such as “Obama,” four shortcut tabs appear to refine the search: The results look something like the below screen-shot:
“This enables the searcher to flip though these different types of information to see everything around that topic that is happening right now,” said Cornett.
This improvement is part of a broader effort by Yahoo to transform its search results page more personally relevant to users. “We want to help them find and explore the things that matter most to them,” he said.
Furthermore, if it is a breaking news, the Twitter tab will display two of the most relevant and timely Tweets on the subject in the top two results as well as relevant videos, if there are any, to the right side, followed by a link to more Twitter results. The rest of the page shows more traditional Yahoo results.
Cornett said Yahoo employs a special algorithm to get at the freshest and most relevant content from Twitter. This effort also represents the beginning of Yahoo’s integration of social media content into its Web search experience. “This is just the beginning. We will continue to bring more of this fresh and relevant content directly to users on the search page,” Cornett added.
The news comes on the heels of recent announcements from Microsoft’s Bing search engine and from Google, as both have recently incorporate Twitter feeds on their own search results.
Cornett also explained that this latest update is a Yahoo innovation and is independent to the company’s pending deal to outsource its search infrastructure to Microsoft. “We are still in the middle of reaching a definitive agreement [with Microsoft]. This is fully a Yahoo experience, top to bottom,” he said. “And it will continue to be offered no matter how things turn out.”
“This is our first integration of fresh social content like Twitter into Web search, and we are planning to continue further along these lines,” Ivan Davtchev and Nitzan Achsaf of Yahoo’s search team said in a blog post announcing the new features. “In the future, we will enhance this experience with more real-time and exciting content so you can find all the information you need about a news event in one place.”
Recently, Yahoo has been falling behind search usage share in the U.S. at the expense of Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, introduced in late May. Google, which dominates the market, has kept its share relatively stable. It had 65 percent in May and 65.4 percent in October, according to comScore.