Yahoo Twitter Content Sharing Deal, Real Time Search Integration already Implemented

Yahoo has finally managed to win the deal with Twitter. In an effort to jump on to the social media bandwagon, Yahoo has join hands with microblogging giant, Twitter, to integrate social media feeds. Emphasizing on the importance of this deal, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says, “The information in one single tweet can travel light-years farther with this Yahoo! integration.”

What Does It Mean For Yahoo Users?

The official Yahoo-Twitter deal press release announces that the partnership will be formed on three levels:

  • Users will have access to Twitter feeds from Yahoo.
  • They can update their Twitter status from Yahoo.
  • They can get social media results through Yahoo search.

The Twitter partnership is valid across all Yahoo platforms (Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Entertainment and others). Yahoo already has a similar partnership with Facebook.

High Focus on Real Time Search Integration

The main focus of the Yahoo-Twitter deal is on integrating Twitter social data in Yahoo search results. To ensure deep user engagement, Yahoo wants real-time updates that will offer comprehensive, fresh and relevant social media search results. While you are reading this blog, Yahoo Search has already started real time search results. Users will have to wait for some time to access the other two services.

Yahoo has taken an entirely different approach to integrate Twitter feed results in web search. It shows only the two most recent tweets and YouTube videos extracted from Twitter updates. While this helps in preventing an information overload, it minimizes the benefits of real-time search results as well.

Google was the first to cash in on real-time social media data in search results. Bing followed Google to remain competitive in the world where status messages are more volatile than share prices.

According to Yahoo, while the website indexing process still remains the fundamental system for searching the web, real-time social media updates are crucial in providing latest information. This adds the element of ‘newsness’ in the web results.

Yahoo is no longer in the web indexing business. Bing does that for Yahoo. So, Bing is both partner and rival to Yahoo Search. While Yahoo has been able to strike a bigger deal with Twitter, we have to wait and watch whether this changes the search market scenario, where Google is the uncrowned king.

 

The author, Mayank Saxena, is a member of the web content writers’ team with Veda Informatics.