14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo Search isn't dead and buried just because Microsoft pretty much bought it outright. No, Yahoo can be an innovator even if it's running Bing and putting a big purple Yahoo sticker on it, or, at least, that's the official version. And just to show everyone that it's not out of the picture, it has added tweets to the search results because real-time search is “where it's at.” But not only is it last to add this functionality, it also looks very much stitched together for the sake of it. What's more, people are starting to wonder if this entire real-time craze isn't going a little overboard in the first place.
It's interesting to point out that Yahoo has been adding tweets to its searches for about a month now but they were confined to the News Shortcut search integrated in the main search engine and relegated to their own “Twitter” tab. Now, tweets will make it into the main search results page but only for select searches, the ones Yahoo deems as trending yet not trending enough to make it to the news section. It should be nice to know how exactly Yahoo determines that, where it draws the line.
“When we launched a Yahoo! News shortcut with Twitter content integration earlier this month, we said more was coming. Starting today, you will see recent tweets directly integrated on the Web search result page when you search for buzzy topics,” Ivan Davtchev and Shiv Ramamurthi, Yahoo Search, wrote.
“You can still see relevant tweets about the most popular topics in the news in the expanded Yahoo! News shortcut with Twitter which combines news articles, images, videos, and tweets. Now you can see tweets about some of the less popular buzzing topics directly in the search results, usually at the bottom of the page, and you may see those tweets less frequently,” they added.
Of course, Bing has had a somewhat similar functionality for more than a month and Google has just unveiled its real-time search, a much more ambitious and well put together product, so maybe it's understandable that Yahoo wants to keep up with the big boys that right now are Google and Bing, even though Yahoo has a market share roughly double that of Bing.
However, unlike Google and Bing, Yahoo hasn't singed a deal Twitter to get full access to the stream so, for now, the results are not “real” real-time and are sometimes tens of minutes old. Also, Yahoo doesn't index all tweets, for the very same reason, it uses the standard Twitter APIs to access the data. This may change as soon as Twitter starts allowing all developers to access the “firehose”, which it says will be available in early 2010 but for now, the Twitter integration on Yahoo looks more like a “me too” feature rather than something that needed to be built.
