Yahoo looks to mine Twitter for search
Yahoo still plans to invest in developing search, despite last week’s deal with Microsoft.
Yahoo looks to mine Twitter for search
Yahoo still plans to invest in developing search, despite last week’s deal with Microsoft.
By Alexei Oreskovic, Reuters, 3 Aug 2009 at 09:32
It may have signed away its search for a decade to Microsoft, but Yahoo is still looking to develop real-time search to look at sources like Twitter.
Prabhakar Raghavan, the head of Yahoo Labs, said that the company could potentially “mine” messages from Twitter, the popular microblogging service, to offer web surfers search results beyond those already offered by Microsoft’s Bing.
Bing is the Microsoft’s new search engine, that will provide Yahoo’s standard search results under the terms of a long-awaited partnership announced last week.
“I’ve always held that the interesting thing of Tweets is not necessarily searching them but mining them. So we could real-time mine them, then assemble what we mine into the search engine,” said Raghavan in an interview with Reuters.
By “mining” the data, Yahoo could offer search results far beyond a simple list of comments on websites, for instance, but instead could analyse data and group results by criteria ranging from topic to geography.
While Raghavan stressed that he was not “pre-announcing” any product plans, he said his comments were intended to paint a picture of some of the things that Yahoo is considering in its new form.
Investing despite Microsoft
Raghavan said much of the $200 million in annual savings from the Microsoft deal will come from back-end infrastructure technology, now that Yahoo no longer invests in the resources to crawl and index the world’s vast number of web sites.
But he said that Yahoo will continue to develop innovative search and communications products.
“In terms of satisfying user intent, the hard work and in some sense the bigger growth opportunities for differentiation are not the back-end of crawling and indexing, but really surfacing and assembling content the right way to satisfy user intent,” he said.
Raghavan also said that real-time data could increasingly be incorporated into future versions of Yahoo communications products, like Yahoo Mail, and that making deals to get access to feeds from companies like Twitter and Facebook could be worthwhile.
“Does it make sense to consider such deals? Absolutely. When you say do you need to, it depends on the business reality and the current market,” said Raghavan.
“It absolutely makes sense to think creatively on everything from getting the right feeds to crafting a different communications interface that combines the best elements of mail and some of these newer, emerging genres,” he
https://www.itpro.co.uk/613450/yahoo-looks-to-mine-twitter-for-search Article from Reuters.