When we launched a Yahoo! News shortcut with Twitter content integration earlier this month, we said more was coming. Starting today, you will see recent tweets directly integrated on the Web search result page when you search for buzzy topics. How is this different from what we launched earlier? You can still see relevant tweets about the most popular topics in the news in the expanded Yahoo! News shortcut with Twitter which combines news articles, images, videos, and tweets. Now you can see tweets about some of the less popular buzzing topics directly in the search results, usually at the bottom of the page, and you may see those tweets less frequently.
What’s popular in search changes all day every day. Sometimes it is current events in the news, like “Norway lights,” the strange spiral lights seen over Norway earlier this week:
Other times, a buzzy topic in search might not be in news headlines. For example, you might search for a popular products or shopping deals, such as searches for “Dell”:
So how does this work? We continuously keep track of queries searched on Yahoo!, and when there is a spike in interest in a topic, our search algorithm selects relevant tweets to show on the search results page, either as a part of the Yahoo! News shortcut or in a Twitter section, like in the examples above. The age of the tweets will vary – some will be a minute old, while others may be hours old. 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. We are constantly trying to improve search to bring you better results. We hope you like this new experience, so please go to Yahoo! Search to try it out.
Ivan Davtchev and Shiv Ramamurthi
Yahoo! Search
http://www.ysearchblog.com
