Sunnyvale, California — Not to be scooped out by its rivals, just days after Google announced its plan for integrating content from sources such as Twitter and blogs in to real-time search, taking advantage of its newly gained access to Twitter’s cosmic collection of data, as well as feeds from Facebook, MySpace and others. And now, according to a Yahoo Search blog entry, which was posted later Thursday by team members Ivan Davtchev and Shiv Ramamurthi, Yahoo plans to launch its own feature to integrate relevant tweets of popular, “buzzing” topics into the search results page. The feature will go live later today, as well.
According to reports from Reuters, Yahoo already experimenting with Twitter results in its News search for breaking news and veering topics. Today, it is adding Twitter results to its main search page, which can be viewed in real-time results for every search you do by selecting the Updates option, Bing is also in the real-time race.
Yahoo is ready to integrate real-time results from Twitter directly onto its search pages. (Credit: Yahoo)
“Tweets” will now be displayed in a Twitter-labeled area within Web search results for queries associated with what Yahoo algorithmically attributed are hot topics at any given time, said Larry Cornett, vice president of consumer experience at Yahoo Search.
“This is exhibits that we are continuing to bring this real-time information to the search experience, but also directly integrated into the Web search page itself,” Cornett said.
The most difficult task with real-time search is relevancy. So much information is flowing every second on the Internet — from tweets to status updates to new blogs to new news stories such as the one displayed above — that it has become a challenge to simply capture that data, let alone decide which sources of data are more relevant and authoritative than others.
All major search engines have been struggling to integrate feeds from social media sites like Twitter, which enables people and organizations post public text messages online.
Microsoft’s Bing already displays Twitter results for queries placed for real-time search since October with its BingTweets feature, although they are displayed on a separate page that is not directly integrated into the main search results.
Although Yahoo plans to outsource Web crawling and indexing to Microsoft’s Bing when the companies’ search deal gets finalized, the company’s efforts to stay in the forefront of search technology are impressive–and surprising.
Yahoo will continue developing front-end enhancements, such as this Twitter integration, for its search engine. Hopefully, this is just a small step towards a bigger goal for Yahoo, with a more robust real-time search offering coming soon and it is a sign that there will continue to be more choice in search going forward.