Yahoo is adding more context to news searches, bringing photos, videos, and even tweets into its search results page.
Searchers on Yahoo--who are dwindling--will find new results for newsy events Thursday, when Yahoo launches new tabs on the Yahoo News Shortcut. You've long been able to find links to news stories about a given search query through the shortcut, but you can now find other ways of telling the story with the new tabs, said Larry Cornett, vice president of consumer products for Yahoo Search.
Yahoo may be close to finalizing a deal to outsource the back end of its search business to Microsoft, but it insists that it's still a competitive search company with its decision to focus its research and development on new ways of presenting search results. The new shortcut is one such improvement, although one that's not all that different from what can be found on Google and Bing.
The main difference is that Yahoo will now provide the option of browsing images or tweets related to a given query without having to leave the search results page to click over to the Yahoo News section, Cornett said. Bing surfaces photos and video in its News section but not necessarily in its main search results page, and Google takes a similar approach.
Yahoo is using Twitter's public API to surface tweets, which are also run through a Yahoo algorithm to determine relevancy, Cornett said, declining to provide details on exactly how that works. Yahoo has not secured access to the "firehose" of tweets, whereas Microsoft and Google just signed deals for access to that data as part of their own bid to index tweets.
The new Yahoo News beta.
(Credit: Yahoo)Yahoo News has realized that there's a lot of information out there on the Web and that people just don't have time for all of it. That's why the new opt-in beta of a revamped Yahoo News, which went live on Thursday, tries to cut to the chase.
"Essentially, we've found that news consumers want only the first few paragraphs of a news story, and then they move on," an e-mail from Yahoo representatives explained. "Given the short attention span of today's audience, we modified the site to present only the first five paragraphs, and we're now offering relevant links to other stories much higher on the page."
The interface of the new Yahoo News is also wider, fitting in more without the need to start scrolling. And in anticipation of the upcoming election, Yahoo has enhanced its "political dashboard" for 2008 election news headlines and poll tracking. As with many current politics sites, the centerpiece is a red-and-blue electoral college map--and Yahoo users can create their own scenarios. The latest update allows a given candidate's poll performance to be tracked over time.
In February, Yahoo debuted its Buzz social news site, which propels the most popular headlines to the main Yahoo News page. The main Yahoo News site has more than 40 million users, the company said.
This post was updated to clarify what's new with the Political Dashboard.
Yahoo has updated its search results to include recent headlines more quickly.
"Because we're better able to detect when a query is about a breaking-news topic, we're able to deliver fresher results when it matters most," Paul Yiu of Yahoo search product management and Jean-Francois Crespo of Yahoo search research and development said in a Friday blog posting.
In addition, Yahoo can better place the news in the results page, balancing news with less time-sensitive results, Yahoo said.
Google also has made a strong effort to mix breaking news into its search results.
Google News is getting an interesting feature this week, and by interesting I mean it's downright peculiar. Users of the U.S. version of Google News will now be able to comment on a story, that is assuming they're somehow involved in it. The process is not for everyone, and in fact requires a lengthy verification process of sending off your comment and credentials to a special Google e-mail address, and later verifying your identity via domain name and an e-mail follow-up from Google staff. If you pass the test, your comment will show up alongside the article.
Philipp Lenssen over at Google Blogoscoped has spotted two examples (1, 2) of these comments in the wild. They show up underneath the story description with the person's real name and title.
Will this work? Yahoo tried out a somewhat similar feature with forums dedicated to each story, but shut it down late last year when the amount of spam and off-topic conversation became overwhelming. There were plans to bring it back earlier this year, but the feature remains defunct. Google's approach is almost entirely on the other side of the spectrum, keeping comments tied down to experts.
My only questions are who on Google's end will be doing moderation, whether or not they're capable of those editorial decisions, and if they'll be able to handle the onslaught of incoming e-mail. I also question if going to Google first instead of the story's source for things like corrections or comments is really the best way to add context to a story. While Google may be linking to the content, keeping the system too closed might keep the real story from coming out.
Story comments from reputable sources show up under stories once they've gone through a two-step verification process.
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