Yahoo Uses Twitter To Filter The News
The microblogging service is already an important source of instant news, and Yahoo is taking advantage.
When US Airways 1549 went down in the Hudson River
yesterday, some
of the first pictures of the event were posted via Twitter, the online and
mobile messaging system that allows users to instantly post 140-character
missives as well as hyperlinks to pictures and web pages. Twitter has, in
effect, given anyone with a cell phone the ability to send immediate, eyewitness
news updates out over a public wire.
Now, Yahoo is using the immediacy of Twitter to make its own
news service better: the company’s researchers have launched a simple search
engine called TweetNews
that ranks Yahoo News stories by using information about the most recent,
frequently-tweeted topics on Twitter.
This is an important move because automatic aggregators such as
those used by Google News and Yahoo’s standard news site, tend to be slower
than community-driven news sites like Digg.com or Twitter. (See “The Speed of Social
News Sites.”)
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Yahoo researcher Vik Singh explains in a blog post
that normally, “recent” Yahoo News stories are ranked according to the time at which they are
published–a measure that effectively ignores the wider relevance of a story. To get
around this problem, Singh tapped BOSS, Yahoo’s open-source search
engine, to built a specialized
search engine that monitors recent tweets to determine breaking topics and select relevant stories from Yahoo News.
From Singh’s post:
Freshness (especially in the context of search) is a challenging
problem. Traditional PageRank style algorithms don’t really work here as it
takes time for a fresh URL to garner enough links to beat an older high ranking
URL…I remember when I saw breaking Twitter messages describing the California
Wildfires. When I searched Google/Yahoo/Microsoft right at that moment I barely
got anything (< 5 results spanning 3 search results pages)….Specifically,
the Twitter messages were providing incredible focus on the important subtopics
that had yet to become popular in the traditional media and news search worlds.
What I found most interesting in both of these cases
was that news articles did exist on these topics, but just weren’t valued highly
enough yet or not focusing on the right stories (as the majority of tweets
were). So why not just do that? Order these fresh news articles (which mostly
provide authority and in-depth coverage) based on the number of related fresh
tweets as well as show the tweets under each. That’s this service.
