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Yahoo Jumps on Twitter Bandwagon To Improve Search
By Michael Liedtke

November 23, 2009 7:02AM

Yahoo is relying on Twitter to highlight the latest news about specific subjects. When a user enters a search request tied to breaking news, Yahoo will top the results page with four tabs -- one for direct links to news sites, one for photos, one for video and one for Twitter. Clicking on a Twitter tab will show news links posted by Twitter users.

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Yahoo Inc. is jumping on the Twitter bandwagon in its latest attempt to get people to use its Internet search engine more frequently.

Beginning Thursday, Yahoo will mine the short messages posted on Twitter to find fresher information about hot topics.

Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. had earlier announced plans to incorporate Twitter messages into search results, but Yahoo said it will be the first among them to include such "tweets" on its main search results.

The addition comes at a pivotal time for Yahoo. The company, based in Sunnyvale, California, is bogged down in a three-year financial slump partly because it has losing ground in the lucrative Internet search market to Google and, to a lesser extent, Microsoft.

The Twitter twist is the latest sign of Yahoo's resolve to spice up its search results even as it prepares to lean on Microsoft for most of the technology powering its search engine. That transition is scheduled to begin next year.

Microsoft so far is listing Twitter results in a special section of its search engine, Bing.

Google, the Internet's search leader, also plans to include Twitter's chatter in its search results, but has yet to say when that change will occur or how it will do it.

Clicking on a Twitter tab will show news links posted by Twitter users. Some of the links will be drawn from Twitter accounts set up by the news media, such as CNN and The Associated Press, while others will be pulled from people pointing out a story they find interesting.

Yahoo is relying on its own algorithms to identify the tweets containing the most relevant information. Twitter's own search engine, by contrast, shows results in chronological order and doesn't focus exclusively on posts containing news links.

This probably won't be Yahoo's only foray into "real-time" search -- a term used for indexes consisting of the freshest information posted on the Web. Yahoo also is experimenting with data from several other real-time search services, such as OneRiot.

Twitter isn't being paid any money for access to its posts because Yahoo is relying on free tools to get them, said Larry Cornett, Yahoo's vice president of consumer products. (continued...)

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