Yahoo Brings ‘Real Time’ Updates To News Shortcut

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.