Yahoo Gets Ready for the World Cup with New Shortcuts and Toolbar

Football fans know this already, the 2010 World Cup is just around the corner. The excitement around the greatest sporting event on Earth is building up, but, as usual with so many matches, it will be hard to keep up with all the action. Fortunately, the people at Yahoo have though about the ones stuck at work or at school and will be introducing all sorts of tools and features to keep them up-to-date. Yahoo Search will be brimming with additional info and even the Yahoo Toolbar is celebrating the event.

“We’ve created some handy Shortcuts so you can keep up to date with match scores and World Cup news from Yahoo! Sports and elsewhere across the web. Simply type ‘World Cup’ in Yahoo! Search and you’ll see scores, schedules, photos, and videos in the shortcut,” Joseph Bou-Younes and Yuko Kamae from Yahoo Search wrote.

Any search related to the event, things like “world cup,“ “FIFA world cup,“ “world cup 2010,“ and so on, will sport the handy World Cup Shortcut. For now, it features photos and news coverage, but, once the matches are underway, the searches will also list match results, schedules, and so on. The Shortcut will be available on 27 of the localized Yahoo Search sites.

“To give you more World Cup coverage at your fingertips, the Yahoo! Toolbar team just rolled out new features that let you show your team pride, and follow all of the latest soccer news,” the two added.

The Yahoo Toolbar is also getting the treatment. If you’re a fan of any particular team, you can customize the Toolbar with the team’s colors and national flag. It’s not just for show, though, once the matches start, it will feature all sorts of useful pieces of info and stats, things like live scores and news coverage, about the teams and groups.