Yahoo Re-Coded Search With Handy Olympic Shortcuts
Beijing – As the groundwork for the take off of the summer Olympics on August 8, with about 205 nations, and approximately 4 billion athletes contending in 302 events in 28 sports, it is pretty tough to keep track of all the events with all that is going on at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.
But fortunately, Yahoo! Search is launching a series of handy shortcuts to Olympics-related information and news coverage that will get you basic info promptly.
The Olympics is a media maniac, as each one attempts to capitalize on the huge audience for the global sporting event, and now Yahoo is trying to get in the action.
The Internet pioneer said on its Search blog on Tuesday that it has launched a number of Yahoo Shortcuts that bundle-up contextually pertinent content from various Yahoo properties inline within the search results such as the overall medal count, a country’s specific medal count, and information for individual athletes.
Beginning with the opening ceremony of torch-lighting on August 8th, there will be tons of Olympics-related information out there, such as breaking news, results, athletes and medal counts. So, whenever somebody searches for a real-time Olympic snapshot of what is happening in Beijing, different Shortcut widgets will pop up for every search.
Say you are searching for an instant update on which countries have won the most medals, simply entering “Olympics medal count,” will generate a screen like this (after the games actually begins):
Right now if you search for “Olympics medal count,” you will only see that Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, and a few other countries are tied with zero. And a search for specific country such as “Olympics medal China” will bring up only that country’s medal count.
Now say if you are searching for info on a particular sport, like recent results and a schedule of upcoming events, just type in the event name, for example: “diving + Olympics” and you will see a screen similar to this:
Additionally you will see who has won what and what competitions are coming up.
Or maybe you are interested for the latest buzz on a specific athlete, simply add his or her name to the query (e.g. “Jingjing Guo Olympics”) and your screen will look something like this:
In some instances, it may appear that typing a person’s name will net you things like their vital statistics, competition schedule, and quick links to related news and results.
So now you better equipped to keep tabs on “Michael Phelps” road to sweeping another eight medals or how the “Russian track team” will recover from their recent loss.
With the Olympics shortcut, users can also view news cast or interview video from Yahoo! Sports without leaving the search results page. And, furthermore, if are looking for more information on a given topic, you will of course find links included to the relevant content on Yahoo! Sports as part of the shortcut. Try it with “Olympics 2008” and click on the “Videos” link.
With Shortcuts like these, Yahoo is making the lines vague between search results and content by offering up key pieces of data right on the main search page. And if you are digging for deeper statistics, then a link can take you to various related Yahoo Sports Olympics coverage pages.
On the Yahoo Search Blog, Yuko Kamae writes, “Please note that many of these shortcuts would not begin working until the games kick off in Beijing, but we just wanted to let you sports fans know before the mania sets in.”
“Once you catch the Olympics fever and want to be up-to-date and organized with your favorite teams and athletes, try it out and enjoy the fun.”