Yahoo Aims to Gain Ground with Twitter and Bing Partnerships
Yahoo recently partnered with Twitter. According to an article at Mashable, “Yahoo will have full access to the Twitter data firehose, so you can expect real-time updates in Yahoo Search, among other integrations. It will use tweets to improve relevancy, freshness and search results, as well as ‘drive deeper user engagement.’” The deal will focus on three main areas:
- Access to your Twitter feed on Yahoo: On Yahoo Mail, Sports, the homepage and other Yahoo properties, you will be able to check the most recent tweets of your friends.
- Ability to update status from Yahoo: Yahoo will become a Twitter client, allowing you to update your status from multiple locations on Yahoo. We’re not sure if this is going to be through widgets or another method.
- Yahoo Search and media integration: Public Twitter updates will be integrated throughout Yahoo Search, News, Finance and Entertainment, among other properties.
Why would Yahoo partner with Twitter?
In my opinion, Yahoo wants to be more of a player in the social space, especially with content results in search. I think the most important aspect to this partnership is the search and media integration.
If Twitter updates are integrated throughout the search, news, finance, and entertainment areas, real-time updates from Twitter could allow people access to more up-to-date information about their search interest.
As Yahoo has so adamantly stated in the past, Yahoo is much more than a search company. Yahoo wants people to know that their services offer far more than search results. This may be somewhat of a rebuttal to the fact that they are losing the search engine wars, but nonetheless, Yahoo does offer more services than just search results (but so do other search engines).
Yahoo just recently partnered with Bing, too.
This partnership comes only weeks after Yahoo announced that they would partner with Bing in order to deliver search results on the Yahoo site. As I understand it, the search results on Yahoo will now be powered by the Bing search engine.
Could this be detrimental to the Yahoo brand? Their own services are diminishing. They now seem to be depending on other services (that are their competition) for their own. Yes, they are icing the cake with additional innovations on top of Bing services. Yahoo has stated in recent years that they are not just a “search” company. Maybe they will use this move to highlight their other services.
The positive side to this is that this move seems to be more end-user-centric. “…search marketers may indeed get more traffic for those conversions that they love in small portions.” This could increase their credibility in the industry.
Why would Yahoo partner with Bing? Another reason could be that Bing has access to more real-time data that is able to be fed to their site than other search engines. As you may or may not know, social web sites throttle the amount of information that third-party sites are able to pull.
Real-time search will be a big player in the field of online search. It’s beginning to gain traction and will only become more important as time progresses and new functionality and applications are innovated. So, if Yahoo did not have permission from a social site (Twitter, for example) to pull as much information from Twitter’s servers as Bing did, it would be beneficial for Yahoo to partner with a service that does have the ability to pull and display more real-time information (Bing, for example).
Yahoo Search = Bing + Twitter
Could this combination be the magic beans that Yahoo has been searching for that will bring their brand back to the top of the industry?
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