Yahoo TimeSense: New Trends Tool Previewed At SMX West

Today’s “Real Time Search & The Major Search Engines” session at SMX West took an interesting twist when Yahoo’s Ivan Davtchev took the stage to discuss his company’s efforts in the real-time search space.

There was some quiet chuckling when Davtchev showed screenshots of a competitor’s tool, Google Trends, as a way of determining what queries deserve to get real-time results. But he did so only to contrast a new Yahoo tool called Yahoo TimeSense that, to my knowledge, has never been seen before.

Davtchev described Yahoo TimeSense as the company’s version of Google Trends, but (as you’d expect) says it’s better because

• TimeSense uses language modeling to determine what queries are relevant to “right now”
• TimeSense is better at identifying long-tail queries, whereas Google Trends is good at identifying “head” queries

Davtchev said Yahoo TimeSense is “not public yet,” and sounded as if he was hinting that the tool will be readily available at some point in the future. A Yahoo spokesperson tells us, “The screenshot Ivan shared is from an internal tool that we currently use within Yahoo! We will let you know if/when we make it publicly available. It’s certainly something we’re looking into.”

On a related note, Davtchev also indicated that Yahoo will soon introduce real-time search results beyond their current placement in Yahoo’s news shortcut.

Postscript: You can see the TimeSense slides directly in Ivan’s slides here.