Yahoo has enhanced its News shortcut with real-time feeds and updates. The idea is to make the News Shortcut more current and more social with Twitter content in the form of videos, photos and tweets. The new shortcut has a horizontal tabbed interface that offers access to each category of information (see screens below). According to Yahoo this is the first such integration with Twitter, although both Google and Bing are starting to integrate Twitter feeds.

The Yahoo Search Blog explains:

Starting today, you can see relevant photos, videos, and tweets about a breaking news story on the Yahoo! News Shortcut. Many of you are already familiar with the existing Yahoo! News Shortcut, which displays headlines on our Web search results page when you look for news stories. The enhanced shortcut with these new tabs will now display for many breaking or major news searches.

Images make the implementation self explanatory:

The enhanced shortcut seeks to make Yahoo Search the first place to go find the most current information on a range of news stories. Apparently there’s no comparable Yahoo News integration on the immediate horizon although it’s being considered. In terms of the “noise” that often shows up in Twitter, Yahoo is running a separate algorithm to filter the content and make sure that it’s free of irrelevant information.

When asked about whether users will take advantage of these content tabs, given that historically tabs are not widely utilized, Yahoo’s Larry Cornett told us that in user testing Yahoo was “very pleased” with the reaction to the new shortcut and its format.

News is a context in which “real-time” information makes perfect sense, unlike a range of other contexts where I may not need or want to know — right now.

Yahoo News was the web’s number one choice last week for information about the death of entertainer Michael Jackson. In a post on the Hitwise blog, Heather Dougherty shows a chart detailing how the major online News & Media sites fared:

Late last week I wrote about how each of the major search engines handled the extraordinary search activity that followed the deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett on the same day. Yahoo is in a unique situation as an actual content provider with writers and editors, and some of those staffers were called in from home to help Yahoo cover the breaking news. The chart above suggests the effort was worth it.

But perhaps the big winner on the day was TMZ, the entertainment site that first broke the news of Jackson’s death. Hitwise says TMZ traffic hit a three-year high on Thursday, with 5x more visits than the day before.

An extraordinary day of breaking news on Thursday led to record-breaking traffic spikes as people searched online for information about the deaths of Farrah Fawcett and, especially, Michael Jackson. And just like their counterparts in traditional media, the news divisions of Google, Yahoo, and Bing responded with sometimes extraordinary measures to ensure they were giving searchers the most accurate and current news available.

Below, a look not only at the extreme traffic spikes that took place, but also an insider’s look at what happened as each search engine — and Wikipedia — grappled with the demands of a nearly unprecedented surge of interest in the day’s breaking news.

Google: “An all-hands-on-deck moment”

“Thursday was a pretty out-of-the-ordinary day.” That’s how spokesperson Gabriel Stricker describes the scene at Google’s headquarters while millions of people were online trying to find out what happened to Michael Jackson. Google has written about what it calls an “outpouring of searches” about Jackson. Stricker says Google saw a wide range of queries — like “michael jackson died” and “michael jackson hoax” — that peaked at about 3:00 pm PST.

The rush of traffic was so severe that Google initially thought it was under attack.

“That was an all-hands-on-deck moment,” Stricker says, “until we were able to determine that the original assessment was wrong, that it wasn’t an attack.” The massive spike in searches “tricked” Google News into showing an interstitial error page for about 25 minutes.

Google says the mistaken attack was its only hiccup yesterday, and that they saw no need to manually adjust results so that searchers got the right information. “The spike in traffic is an indication that we accomplished what we set out to do,” Stricker says. “People came to Google looking for an answer to a specific — and in this case, rather sad — question, and they got it quickly.”

Google hasn’t said yet how Thursday’s traffic compares to other important news events. Their blog post does say that Google “saw one of the largest mobile search spikes we’ve ever seen.” And Google Trends labeled Thursday’s searches for “michael jackson died” as “volcanic.”

Yahoo: “This demanded that we take our coverage to the next level”

Thursday was a record-breaking day for Yahoo. Their story, “Michael Jackson rushed to hospital,” received 800,000 clicks in 10 minutes, making it their highest-clicking story ever.

Yahoo also revealed that Yahoo News set an all-time record with 16.4 million visitors, beating the old record of 15.1 million set last election day. The four million visitors between 3-4 pm PDT set an hourly record.

Things were no less busy inside Yahoo headquarters. Richard Vega, Editor of Yahoo News, also described it as an all-hands-on-deck situation, going so far as to bring in staff on their days off. “After we saw initial reports that Michael Jackson had died, we immediately devoted all resources to the story and called staffers at home to help,” Vega says.

As a content destination and a news organization with writers and editorial staff, Yahoo took a more hands-on approach to packaging information for its users — even sending staff out to report live from Los Angeles. Says Vega: “We made sure to include the main stories and sidebars from AP and Time magazine. We had video clips from ABC News. We created slideshows. Since Michael Jackson had died in L.A., we sent out two editors to the UCLA Medical Center to interview and take photos of the fans who were gathering outside the hospital. In addition, one editor sent Twitter updates from the scene. This was a unique moment in history, which demanded that we take our coverage to the next level.”

Yahoo News recorded 175 million page views on Thursday, its fourth-highest total (after Inauguration Day, the day after the Inauguration, and Hurricane Ike). A blog post in Yahoo Music has received more than 21,500 comments as I write this. And Yahoo says Flickr has seen more than 4,000 Michael Jackson-related photo uploads in the past day. One poignant Flickr photo shows Times Square at a standstill as the offline world reacted the same way we did online.

Bing: “We rolled out a ‘news go big’ experience”

Like its competitors, the Bing search team was paying close attention to Thursday’s news as it unfolded, and doing its best to make sure searchers got the information they wanted. Jamil Valliani, a senior program manager for Bing, and Todd Schwartz, group product manager for Bing, said their effort included “the extended search team, including engineering, product management and marketing.”

They say Bing “definitely saw a spike” in traffic on Thursday, but they don’t have any data to share at the moment. “We get more feedback and see more engagement from consumers for bigger news stories, so we do have to spend more time than average reviewing this feedback and taking it into consideration.”

Some of the feedback for Bing’s Jackson-related search results wasn’t good. On Search Engine Journal, for example, Loren Baker pointed out that Bing’s search results led off with Michael Jackson photos, while news links were at the bottom of the search results page:

Valliani and Schwartz describe what happened: “In general, our rule is not to interfere with the normal algorithmic operation and to note any interesting or unexpected behaviors to be addressed in future upgrades of the product. The only exception to this is for major news events where we see unusual volume, and the results are clearly not being ranked in a relevant way. In these cases we can respond more quickly to how we perform the ranking. This was the case yesterday with Michael Jackson in particular, where we quickly rolled out what we call a ‘news go big’ experience to make sure we were providing appropriate coverage for this significant and sad event.”

Search experiences on other sites

The extraordinary online search for information about Thursday’s news wasn’t limited just to the major search engines. The Wikipedia page about Michael Jackson saw an enormous jump in pageviews on Thursday, and even more on Friday according to Grok.se, an unofficial Wikipedia traffic stats site.

Since Wikipedia pages are open to community editing, Wikipedia took unusual steps to deal with the situation as rumors spread Thursday afternoon.

“The Jackson page was temporarily ‘protected’ to prevent any editing as soon as the rumors started,’ according to Wikipedia administrator Jonathan Hochman. “There was a community discussion about how to handle that. The idea was to prevent the article from going back and forth, or being the subject of a hoax, until the story was verified.”

Twitter was a hotbed of Jackson-related searching and conversation. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told the Los Angeles Times that there were nearly 5,000 Jackson-related tweets per minute on Thursday afternoon. “We saw an instant doubling of tweets per second the moment the story broke. This particular news about the passing of such a global icon is the biggest jump in tweets per second since the U.S. presidential election.”

Likewise, Facebook reported a tripling of the number of status updates in the aftermath of Jackson’s death.

The final word about this extraordinary day belongs to AOL, whose AIM messaging service was knocked offline for 40 minutes Thursday. Their statement begins like this: “Today was a seminal moment in Internet history. We’ve never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth.”

Postscript: See Google Thinks Michael Jackson Died At Age 65 In 2007 for how Google’s currently listing the “wrong” Michael Jackson in response to searches for “michael jackson died.”

This week’s battle royale has pitted newspapers and traditional media against Google and online news. If you somehow missed it, the CliffsNotes version is that traditional media (Associated Press, newspapers, etc.) are accusing Internet sites (search engines, news aggregators, etc.) of diverting traffic that should be going to news web sites, profiting off news content in violation of copyright law, and essentially sending newspapers into the financial crisis that many are in today.

Amidst all the claims and accusations, Danny took the AP and newspapers out to the woodshed and pointed out what you’d think should be obvious: Newspapers ought to appreciate search engines for sending them so much traffic.

But how much do they send?

Hitwise takes a stab at answering that question with new data that shows search engine traffic (Google, Yahoo, etc.) and other News & Media sites (including Yahoo News and Google News) are easily the top two traffic sources for news and media web sites.

Hitwise indicates that Google News and Yahoo News are Nos. 2 and 4, respectively, in the list of referring sites inside the News & Media category (blue line above). That, combined with Search Engine traffic at an essentially equal level (orange line above), indicates that newspapers are biting the hands that feed them.

In fact, the Hitwise report makes an interesting point:

“Branded searches for news properties represent a large share of the top search terms driving traffic to the category.”

This flies in the face of the AP/newspaper contention that Google and other search engines and news aggregators (like Yahoo News and Google News) are diverting traffic away from news web sites. Not the case. As Hitwise’s Heather Dougherty writes, “Although several of the online aggregators are at the heart of the content distribution argument, they do successfully send visits to news properties rather than keeping them upon their own websites.”

There’s more discussion on Techmeme.

A couple weeks ago, Yahoo announced they will be going forward with rich ads in Yahoo search. Back then, we only saw a few examples in the raw Yahoo Search results, and they were for mostly video ads.

I received a heads up from Gary Price that Yahoo is now showing image ads on Yahoo News. For example, try a search on ipod at Yahoo News and you should see these ads:

These image ads come up for many searches at Yahoo News now. Gary tells me he uses Yahoo News daily and he has not seen this before.

This looks very similar to how Yahoo displayed image ads on the Yahoo Directory, which started over a year ago.

TweetNews is a new search engine that uses hot Twitter topics to bring more relevance and freshness to news search. It’s a pet project developed by Vik Singh, a member of Yahoo’s BOSS team.

As Vik describes it on his personal blog, fresh news often doesn’t have enough links to rank well in a traditional algorithm. But TweetNews replaces links with Twitter conversations as a signal; news stories that are being talked about the most on Twitter will rise to the top of a TweetNews search.

It’s an interesting mashup because it plays to the real strength of Twitter — its ability to report and spread news before traditional news sources, and its ability to serve as a barometer for what’s “hot” or important at any given moment. A great example happened just today, where one of the earliest and most remarkable photos of the US Airways crash in New York City was first published via Twitter.

Vik says his inspiration for TweetNews came from doing news searches during the recent California wildfires and the terrorist attacks in Mumbai:

What I found most interesting in both of these cases was that news articles did exist on these topics, but just weren’t valued highly enough yet or not focusing on the right stories (as the majority of tweets were). So why not just do that? Order these fresh news articles (which mostly provide authority and in-depth coverage) based on the number of related fresh tweets as well as show the tweets under each. That’s this service.

As he mentions above, TweetNews not only uses Twitter to determine relevance, but it also shows the social commentary about each story that’s happening on Twitter. It’s a good advertisement for Yahoo’s BOSS, although, in a bit of irony, it runs on Google’s App Engine.

The code is open source. It’s available, along with more background and screenshots, on Vik’s blog.

Today, the United States is electing a new president, voting on one-third of the seats in the U.S. Senate, and voting on all 435 seats in the House of Representatives. An important election? To say the least! And interest in the election results is higher than many of us “experienced” voters can ever remember.

Tonight, while most of us will be glued to the television to watch election results come in across the U.S., millions of people won’t have access to a TV, or will be away from home and unable to get local election results on TVs where they are. Not to worry, though. The internet, and the major search engines, in particular, will have you covered. Here’s a look at how the search engines are planning to help you get the real-time election results you’re looking for tonight.

Google

Starting later today, when there’s something to report, Google will show a special “one box” with electoral college results sourced from the Associated Press. The one box will be triggered by search queries related to “election,” as well as searches on the presidential candidates’ names.

For more detail on the presidential race, as well as results of U.S. House and Senate races, Google’s Elections 2008 site will offer a results map also sourced from the AP. It looks like this:

The results map shows state-by-state results for the McCain-Obama contest, and clicking on a state lets you see county-by-county results (which are also available for the House and Senate races, too). Notice, too, that this elections results map is an embeddable widget that you can use on your own web site.

A similar version of this map, showing electoral college vote counts for the presidential race, has already been embedded onto the Google News home page, and will be updated as results begin to come in.

Google is also offering a mobile site for election results at m.google.com/elections.

Yahoo

Yahoo has big plans for covering the election results. Beginning at 7:00 p.m. ET (when some states’ polls close), Yahoo search results will show a “shortcut” with current election results related to the presidential race. The shortcut will be triggered by terms such as “McCain,” “Obama,” “elections,” and “electoral college,” and will show electoral college and popular vote counts.

But that’s just the beginning of Yahoo’s plans. Election results will dominate the Yahoo.com home page: In addition to news stories about election results, Yahoo will show the ongoing popular vote and electoral college votes for each presidential candidate, and will offer a link to watch live election results coverage via ABC News NOW. Yahoo provided a screenshot of what to expect on Yahoo.com after the polls close on the East Coast and the results begin to come in:

Beyond the home page, Yahoo’s election results coverage centers on its Political Dashboard. The Dashboard’s map, which has been showing polling predictions during the campaign, will go gray at 7:00 p.m. ET and begin to report state-by-state results for the presidential election, as well as all House and Senate races. Here’s a preview of what to expect from Yahoo’s Political Dashboard:

Yahoo Mobile will also have presidential election results. You can get that by going to m.yahoo.com, or by using Yahoo’s oneSearch on any appropriate mobile device.

Live Search

Live Search will also provide election results, but its plans seem less ambitious than Google and Yahoo. Later today, Live Search will offer an “Instant Answer” that will be triggered by terms such as “election results,” “presidential election results,” “(state) election results,” and so forth. The data will be provided by MSNBC, and should be updated every 2-3 minutes.

No doubt that MSN and MSNBC.com will have plenty of election result coverage, but it’s unclear how that content will tie in with Live.com’s Instant Answer, or if it will at all.

Looking For Other Election Results?

As always, there’s a lot more going on than the federal government races that the major search engines are focusing on. Up here in Washington, we have an extremely volatile and close race for governor. California has the controversial Proposition 8, which has prompted some Silicon Valley companies to speak out against it. If you’re looking for local election results like these, you’ll probably get the information you want by searching for the right elections offices.

• State-level elections: A state’s Department/Secretary of State office usually handles elections. Using your favorite search engine with queries such as “washington election results” or “california election results” won’t bring up immediate numbers, but should quickly point you toward special state web sites such as vote.wa.gov and vote.sos.ca.gov.
• City, County, and smaller elections: Smaller elections are typically handled at the county level, often by an Elections Board/Commission, an Auditor’s Department, or some similar office. Again, searching for terms like “king county election results” on your favorite search engine should lead to the county web site where results are being posted.

Election Results Via Social Media

Today’s election seems to be the primary topic of conversation on social media sites. Twitter’s election channel has been scrolling dozens of posts per minute about the election, and that will no doubt include discussion of results later today.

It’s also a safe bet that Wikipedia editors will be updating the 2008 Presidential Election page with results tonight as they happen. You can also check the most popular articles page to see how much interest there is today in this election.

Social news sites such as digg, reddit, Mixx, Propeller, and Newsvine are also sure to have plenty of popular articles about election results as we head into the evening. (A discerning eye might be in order, as some sites may report voting trends that don’t seem to reflect the entire country.)

No matter where you are, or what political races you’re following, there are plenty of opportunities online — on the search engines and beyond — to get the election results you want to know.

(More coverage on Techmeme.)

UPDATE #1: The Associated Press will stream continuous, live, election video online beginning at 7:00 p.m. ET. Go to www.ap.org/elections2008/.

UPDATE #2: The New York Times is offering text alerts of the presidential, House, Senate, and all governor’s races. Look for sign-up details in the right column.

UPDATE #3: CNN’s yourRaces is a tool that lets you follow the statewide races and ballot measures that interest you.

UPDATE #4: You can find links to live online TV/video coverage at NewTeeVee and Silicon Alley Insider.

Yahoo News is inviting its throngs of readers to try its next version, which has new design and content features. Readers will immediately notice a wider footprint on the new Yahoo News, as well as larger text and other new design elements. Content has also been rearranged, with easier access to the most popular stories of the day and top news videos from around the country.

TechCrunch reports another interesting change: Readers coming to Yahoo News from social media sites will see shorter versions of news stories at first, with links to similar stories featured more prominently. As TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid writes, “Yahoo figures that these readers are more likely to click through to new stories, and are less concerned with reading the full article.”

To see the new look, go to Yahoo News and click the “Try the new Yahoo! News” link at the top of the page.

The Yahoo Search Blog announced they have made “significant enhancements” to how they show news results in the web search results. Yahoo is now showing news results in different positions throughout the web search results, based on their new “News Direct Display (DD)” algorithm. In addition, Yahoo improved how they detect news queries and will show more news boxes in the search results due to that improvement.

For example, a search on spears returns a news box in the middle of Yahoo Search:

I decided to see how Yahoo handled a search for Cuil (for more on Cuil, see Cuil Launches — Can This Search Start-Up Really Best Google?) and yes, they do show a news result at the top of the listings, just like Google:

vs:

Yes, Google ranks cuil.com as the number one result in the web search results, while Yahoo currently does not – but that is for a different blog post.

Google has also had news results within the different positions of the web search results since they launched Universal Search in May 2007.

A curious thing is happening: Yahoo seems to be executing in the midst of the chaos of uncertainty surrounding its future. Speaking at an IAB event yesterday, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang said the Microsoft takeover bid has been “a galvanizing event for everyone at Yahoo.”

Indeed, in the past three or so weeks since the initial Microsoft bid, Yahoo has:

• Launched Yahoo Buzz

• Introduced Yahoo Search Monkey
• Acquired Maven Networks
• Introduced Yahoo Live
• Previewed an impressive new unified advertising platform (Apex)
• Upgraded and expanded Yahoo Video (video is also coming to Flickr)
• Introduced an open-source infrastructure (Hadoop) for its search index

The company also laid off 1,000 employees.

Yahoo President Sue Decker said at the same IAB event that the Microsoft bid “accelerated conversations that were out there,” in reference to News Corp., AOL, and Google partnership/merger conversations.

Meanwhile, last Friday Microsoft’s Kevin Johnson again made the case for a Micro-Hoo combination and sought to allay concerns about layoffs and duplication at the combined company. But some shareholders and others are starting to question whether Microsoft should continue to pursue Yahoo. Microsoft’s shares have lost close to 15 percent since the bid was announced.

On the other side, Yahoo now faces multiple suits from shareholders for not accepting the Microsoft bid and for proposing a plan to offer “golden parachutes” for Yahoo employees, a kind of “poison pill” for Microsoft in the event of a takeover.

Pundits and others have argued that Yang has not had sufficient resolve and took too long to execute on the professed strategy of making Yahoo the internet’s “consumer starting point” as well as an open platform. However, the company seems to have found resolve and focus amid the crisis. Indeed, it often takes crisis to motivate action.

Before the crisis eases and things calm down, however, the intensity of the drama will only increase. Microsoft’s now hostile takeover effort and proxy fight requires it to install a new board, which is sympathetic to the bid. It will accordingly nominate a new slate of potential directors on March 13. It needs the backing of a majority of shareholders to elect the board.

I’m guessing that a range of institutional shareholders has informally told Microsoft they will support the proxy fight or Microsoft wouldn’t have gone down that path. I’m speculating, however.

It’s terribly ironic that it took Microsoft’s bid to, in effect, wake Yahoo up. And while nobody can predict the outcome with certainty, which has grown more hazy in recent weeks, Yahoo for the time being seems to be back on course.