December 11, 2009
Real Time at Yahoo
Yahoo joins the real-time search parade, by Tom Krazit, Webware (Dec 10)
One more into the pool for delivering real-time entries.
"Yahoo will join Google witih integrated results as of Thursday, said Larry Cornett, vice president of product management and design at the company. But in a crucial difference between the two approaches, Yahoo has not cut a deal with Twitter for access to the "firehose," an automated feed of data from Twitter. Instead, it's using Twitter's public API and adding its own algorithms to figure out which tweets are most relevant to the query."
Tom Krazit remarks - "The thorniest problem with real-time search is relevancy. " I'd say.
For news items, Yahoo will show a Twitter tab in its news shortcut - if it finds something
On this search on copenhagen climate conference Yahoo had no tweets though Google had several. Of course, there was a tab for Tiger Woods.
My thoughts - if you know you want real-time comments on a current event, an issue, a person, a place - it makes more sense to use one of the social media metasearch engines, to go to twitter and facebook directly, or research the topic to find out who to follow. If there is any value to having this in web search results at Yahoo or Google it is just as a reminder to consider those sources.
Posted by Gwen at December 11, 2009 04:10 PM