Yahoo! and Twitter embark on a new venture

Yahoo! has signed a deal with the popular micro-blogging site Twitter which will see Yahoo! users able to access Twitter via a whole host of Yahoo! products.

It’s not unusual for search engines to partner up with social networking sites such as Twitter. Only last year Google and Microsoft’s Bing signed a deal with Twitter to start indexing their updates on their search pages.

However the Yahoo! deal will go beyond simply indexing Twitter updates. Users of Yahoo! will be able to access their Twitter accounts from the company’s homepage, and from their Yahoo! email account, bridging the gap between social networking and other technology packages more than ever before.

Bosses at Yahoo! say the new venture will enable their customers to access their social networking pages more quickly and effectively by integrating Twitter services into several areas of the Yahoo! brand. Bryan Lamkin, senior vice president, consumer products group, Yahoo! described the new partnership as “simplifying people’s lives by bringing their social worlds — and the world —- together for easy access.”

How the service will work has not yet been revealed, neither is it known how much the deal between Yahoo! and Twitter has cost.

The natural results are the ones which have ranked highly because their sites are seen by the search engine to be the most useful, while the sponsored results have paid to be at the top. The studies of user habits would suggest that people realise that sponsored results have paid for their position but do the results transfer to real life?

Do you really choose the natural results which a search engine presents or do you go with the first site you see? Or maybe you try to choose the natural results but sometimes you just see a listing in the sponsored links which seems more relevant to what you were looking for, because let’s face it, there are times when Google can let you down too.

BING is designed to take over from Microsoft’s current search engine Live Search, and its already being tipped as a dangerous contender for the mighty Google. Early reviews of the site have been extremely encouraging. Bing differs from other search engines in as much it aims to give you less choice as opposed to more. It offers a more targeted results list, with the option of displaying further results. Instead of bombarding the user with a blanket response to questions BING provides a narrower but more select response to questions.

Another key feature of Bing is that instead of directing the user to an external site to view, for example, videos, listen to music, read articles, or shop online, it allows you to do all this without ever leaving Bing. It also offers an exclusive video search service as part of the package. In theory this should lead to greater ease of use and accessibility.

Whether or not Bing can rival the other major search engines such as Google and Yahoo remains to be seen. What is certain however is that the search engine as we know it is evolving, and that can only be good news for internet users the world over.

Now the yes doesn’t come so easily does it? No, I don’t use Google for everything either, not for every single thing because sometimes I feel like I would be better results if I looked somewhere else, in a different way. Depending on the product or service I’m looking for, before turning to Google, I’ll look in the Yellow Pages, or the local directory under the industry I am looking for.

Doing this kind of search I feel as though I get better results because rather than typing ‘graphic designer’ into Google and coming up with results for companies in Australia, companies which are either too big or too small for what I need, or just results which happen to have ‘graphic designer’ as the keywords, in the Yellow Pages I can judge the size of the companies by the size of the ads, and choose one in my area.

So does my search technique have a fatal flaw or do other people have this problem?

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Well yes, by their nature you can trust them. The very fact that they exist and that you have found them means you can trust them because if they were crap, you wouldn’t have found them because the search engine wouldn’t have directed you to them because the search engine is there to protect you from crap.

During the late 1990s search engines were severely manipulated by crap which people thought would help their sites rank better. Well the search engines have learnt their lessons from those ‘dark ages’ and makes a point to ignore crap, ensuring that the sites, the SEO articles and the information which ranks where you can find it, is useful, correct and pertinent to your search.