Mon 14th of December, filed under SEO
Real-time search battle rages
The battle for real-time search has taken another twist after Yahoo revealed it was expanding its Twitter content integration.
Last month, Microsoft struck a deal with the micro-blogging tool, enabling Bing to display tweets based on keyword searches. That decision was quickly followed by Google's rollout of a searchable tweet index. Earlier this month, the other major search engine followed suit by offering relevant tweets relating to the most popular topics on Yahoo News.
Yahoo Search introduces tweets
Yahoo has now upgraded its Twitter association so that tweets will also be featured on search engine results pages. These will typically appear at the bottom of the page below a clickable headline of the format '[keyword] – Twitter results. Yahoo's search algorithm selects tweets according to perceived relevancy rather than just when they were posted, so they could vary from a minute to several hours old.
Ivan Davtchev and Shiv Ramamurthi, of Yahoo Search, said: "Our goal is to feature interesting Twitter content that is relevant to your query and complements the other results you find on the search page. By presenting the latest Twitter discussions about buzzing topics, we are bringing you a wider variety of voices on the web."
In related news, Facebook has been inviting its 350 million users to update their privacy settings. It is widely believed that the social media platform wants to encourage more users to adopt public profiles, which would enable users to search for information like status updates in real time.
Posted by Richard Frost
