Yahoo joins the real-time search parade

From CNET News.com: Not to be outdone by its rivals, Yahoo is getting into the real-time search business as well.

Days after Google announced its plan for integrating content from sources such as Twitter and blogs, Yahoo on Thursday plans to launch its own feature to integrate tweets into search results. Microsoft already displays Twitter results for queries placed on its Bing search engine, although they displayed on a separate page that is not directly integrated into the main search results.

Yahoo will join Google witih integrated results as of Thursday, said Larry Cornett, vice president of product management and design at the company. But in a crucial difference between the two approaches, Yahoo has not cut a deal with Twitter for access to the "firehose," an automated feed of data from Twitter. Instead, it's using Twitter's public API and adding its own algorithms to figure out which tweets are most relevant to the query.

The thorniest problem with real-time search is relevancy. So much content is created every second on the Internet--from tweets to status updates to new blogs to new news stories such as this one--that it's a challenge to simply capture that data, let alone decide which sources of data are more relevant and authoritative than others.

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