Yahoo: We got Tweets too!
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).
Yahoo’s Twitter enhancement is not exactly a real-time search engine, which would allow users to get up-to-the-second information on any topic. For one thing, only search queries deemed “buzzworthy” by Yahoo will yield Tweets within the results. Yahoo says it looks for a spike in interest in certain search terms to determine if they merit Tweets.
And the Tweets need not be fresh. According to Yahoo, the Tweets it presents in its search might be minutes old or aged as much as several hours – what matters isn’t the timeliness so much as the relevance, Yahoo says.
Aardvark’s Internet search: No web pages required
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.
The service, which has earned praise from the New York Times’ David Pogue and other tech bloggers, was launched as a beta version earlier this year but accessing Aardvark required using instant messaging software or an iPhone app.
On Wednesday, the company put the search box directly on a website – vark.com – making its social search service more accessible to a larger pool of people.
Like the so-called real time search engines popularized by Twitter, Collecta and OneRiot, Aardvark represents a still small, but potentially dangerous trend for Google: Much of the content that flows through these new types of search services is not necessarily accessible by Google’s search engine.
Google Search: Fresh, not real time
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 update was one of several new features that Google has unveiled over the past week as it seeks to refine the tool used by two out of every three people searching the Web.
Google also introduced a feature that lets users specify whether they want results that are heavier on shopping-oriented Web pages, such as retail sites with products and pricing information, or results that are less commercial in nature.
The shopping option comes as Microsoft tries to lure people to its revamped Bing search engine by highlighting Bing’s strength in shopping and travel searches.
Meanwhile, Twitter’s real time search engine is becoming the Internet’s go-to place for finding the most current information on world events, from earthquakes to political protests.
A familiar name in real time search
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.
Real Time search, of course, is all the rage right now, thanks in large part to the success of microblogging service Twitter, which allows users to search the “Tweets” generated on its service and to zoom into what people are saying about a particular topic that very moment.
Musk says that Twitter searches the conversations people are having, while OneRiot cuts through the “noise” and focuses on the content at the center of those conversations.
OneRiot analyzes the links people share to determine which news article or video is getting a lot of buzz; the company’s algorithm ranks the importance of the content according to criteria like the influence of the person sharing the link and the momentum the link has gained through re-Tweets.
Twitter recently said it was developing new features for its search engine that sound somewhat similar, and there’s plenty of other rivals in the nascent field of real time search.
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