MediaFile

If you’re an Internet search engine, having Twitter content adorning your results has become as fashionable as claiming a Tiger Woods liaison seems to be for a certain group of people.

Google and Microsoft both raced to announce deals to incorporate Twitter in their search results within hours of each other in October.

And Yahoo – despite its plan to cease investing in back-end search technology and to outsource the job to Microsoft – does not want to be left out of the action.

Yahoo announced that it will display Tweets – the pithy 140-character messages continuously churned out and broadcast over the Internet by Twitter users – in a larger portion of its search results.

Yahoo had already added a tab to let web surfers view Tweets for searches that involved news topics, like climate change, last month. The company now says it will add a Twitter section at the bottom of its search results page for a broader array of queries. (Yahoo provides an example of someone looking for shopping information about Cuisinart kitchen blenders, for instance).

Microsoft may be the only company with the wherewithal to challenge Google’s Internet search dominance head on, but a number of firms are trying to outflank Google with services that handle aspects of search not covered by Google’s index of Web pages.

Aardvark – a firm whose cofounders include two ex-Googlers – is pushing something it calls “social search.”

Instead of looking at Web pages to find answers to search queries, Aardvark’s service taps a person’s network of social contacts. Ask Aardvark for anything from restaurant recommendations to home improvement tips, and the service will relay the question to Facebook and Twitter friends who have identified themselves as “experts” on various topics.

Google has yet to outline a gameplan to respond to the search world’s latest phenomenon: real time search.

But the Internet company clearly recognizes the importance of fresh search results.

On Thursday Google announced a new feature that lets Web surfers view only search results that have been indexed by its Web crawlers within the past hour.

The Musk name is famous among techies thanks to high-profile companies like PayPal and Tesla Motors, the electric car maker, which were founded or funded by entrepreneur Elon Musk.

Now another Musk-backed start-up is looking to make a splash. Only this time it’s younger brother Kimball at the helm, as CEO for OneRiot.

OneRiot is launching a real time search engine on Tuesday that combs through the flood of messages and Web links that are shared through services Twitter and Digg, as well as in OneRiot’s existing browser toolbar product, to determine the hottest topics on the Internet.