Yahoo is officially joining Google and Bing in the race to provide the most relevant real-time search results a.k.a. Twitter-integrated search results. This was earlier hinted at when Yahoo started integrating relevant tweets to Yahoo News Shortcut. This time around relevant tweets will be integrated to search results using Yahoo’s algorithms for determining which tweets are relevant to the query.
While this may seem similar to what Google and Bing may be currently doing, the difference is Yahoo’s integration is done using Twitter APIs. Yahoo’s algorithm monitors spikes in search queries and selects relevant tweets as so as the search query spikes become significant.
So, tweets may not really be fresh and those included in the search results may be tweets posted for as early as minutes old or as old as few hours. Since Yahoo’s has no way of making its Twitter integration as fresh as possible by displaying the latest, by-the-minute tweets, it is focusing on the relevance of tweets to search query instead.
And that perhaps could work to Yahoo’s advantage. Still maintaing search results’ integrity and relevancy instead of just giving the latest tweets with lesser relevancy to search query.
