Yahoo turns to Twitter for search results

 

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By Reuters

Posted on 3 Aug 2009 at 10:31

Yahoo Labs is considering a new type of search engine based on Twitter, as it mulls life after the Microsoft deal.

Yahoo's Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs, claims the company could "mine" messages from Twitter to produce statistics and model information.

"I've always held that the interesting thing of Tweets is not necessarily searching them but mining them," he says. "So we could real-time mine them, then assemble what we mine into the search engine.

As an example, Raghavan says that a search on "LA Earthquake", following a hypothetical tremor in Southern California, could return a map showing the concentration of Twitter messages from a certain neighborhood.

Raghavan claims this real-time data could be incorporated into future versions of Yahoo Mail, and that making deals to get access to feeds from companies like Twitter and Facebook could be worthwhile.

While Raghavan stressed he was not "pre-announcing" any product plans, he claims his comments are intended to paint a picture of some of the things that Yahoo is considering in its new form.

Yahoo and Microsoft recently announced a 10-year partnership in which Yahoo will use Microsoft's search technology. The move will allow Yahoo to save some $425 million in operating expenses, the company claims.

Raghavan says much of the savings 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 websites.