Yahoo Adds Twitter To Search Results

Dec 10, 2009 at 12:00pm ET by Matt McGee

Just a few weeks after adding Twitter to its news shortcuts, Yahoo has announced that it’s adding Twitter to its main search results, too.

That’s a search for “climate gate” with tweets showing at the bottom of the search results page. Yahoo says this isn’t a replacement for the news shortcut tweets, and that this integration may appear less often than Twitter results in the news shortcut. Here’s what else you need to know:

The inclusion of Twitter results won’t depend on what’s hot on Twitter, but what the hot topics are on Yahoo search. Yahoo’s blog post gives the example of a search for “Cuisinart” that may not be a hot Twitter trend, but Twitter results may still show up if it’s a hot Yahoo search term.
Yahoo says the age of the tweets that appear may vary from a minute to hours old, depending on what the algorithm considers the most relevant tweets.
The Twitter results will “usually” show up at the bottom of Yahoo’s search results, but Yahoo tells us that “they could be at the top, too, depending on relevance.”
For now, only Twitter results are included. Yahoo says it may add additional real-time sources in the future.

With Google and Bing already integrating Twitter in different ways, it may be tempting to paint Yahoo as last to the party where Twitter and search is concerned. But as I pointed out earlier this year in my Yahoo’s Social Plan: Twitter, Twitter, & More Twitter? article, Yahoo’s been making its real-time/Twitter intentions pretty clear for some time now.

Unlike Google and Bing, Yahoo does not have a deal to take in Twitter information. Instead, it’s using the public API to provided some — but not a complete “firehose” of Twitter information.

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Matt McGee is the Search Engine Land Assignment Editor, and offers search marketing consulting and training to businesses of all sizes. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and HyperlocalBlogger.com.

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