Yahoo Turns On The Twitter Firehose

From CNET:

Yahoo has agreed to purchase access to the Twitter firehose, adding real-time Twitter content to both search results and Yahoo profiles. The company has been featuring Twitter content in search results for some time but plans to augment those results now that it will receive content directly from Twitter rather than having to pull it from the service through public APIs, said Jim Stoneham, vice president of communities at Yahoo.

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Yahoo, Microsoft Make Search Pact Official (FAQ)

Yahoo is ready to turn over the indexing and ranking of search results (on the left) to Microsoft, emphasizing its work on presenting those results (on the right). (Credit: Yahoo)

From CNET:

It took eight months, but the search strategy that Microsoft and Yahoo settled on after years of flirting is about to get started.

The U.S. Department of Justice and European Union gave their blessing to the deal early on Thursday, paving the way for Microsoft to take over the business of providing search results to Yahoo while Yahoo will get to sell search ads on both Yahoo and Bing. Yahoo is busy reminding anyone who will listen that it will still control the way search results are presented on its pages, while Microsoft thinks it can improve its search algorithms with access to Yahoo's massive audience.

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Yahoo Says, Don’t Count Us Out On Search

From Epicenter:

Yahoo is fighting to retain its reputation as a tech leader, after years of being adrift halfway between being a media company and a tech company, and having recently laid off engineers, sold off products and decided to outsource its search backend to Microsoft.

But Yahoo called a roomful of tech reporters to its headquarters in Sunnyvale to say that it’s still fighting.

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Yahoo Adds Photos, Tweets To News Search

From CNET News:

Yahoo is adding more context to news searches, bringing photos, videos, and even tweets into its search results page.

Searchers on Yahoo--who are dwindling--will find new results for newsy events Thursday, when Yahoo launches new tabs on the Yahoo News Shortcut. You've long been able to find links to news stories about a given search query through the shortcut, but you can now find other ways of telling the story with the new tabs, said Larry Cornett, vice president of consumer products for Yahoo Search.

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Yahoo Mail Outages Plague Some Users

From CNET:

Yahoo Mail users reported some problems Monday morning, with the service inaccessible for some and spotty for others.

Techcrunch noticed a Twitter spike in reports of problems with Yahoo Mail, and another company called Downrightnow also reported problems accessing the service over the last several hours. Several CNET employees reported that they were able to access their in-boxes, but mine is unavailable. Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo's home page appeared to be working fine.

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Yahoo's New Web Portal Goes Live

From BBC:

Internet giant Yahoo has relaunched its web portal, supported by a $100m global advertising campaign.

The company hopes the website refresh will boost both traffic and revenues.

Yahoo will also open its home page to rivals, allowing users to integrate third-party web services like Facebook or Hotmail into its portal.

Yahoo has been struggling to turn its position as the world's most popular website into profits. The portal is the first move of new boss Carol Bartz.

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