February 26, 2010 (CAP Newswire) – Hot on the heels of recent news that its merger with Microsoft’s Bing search engine has finally been approved by regulators in the U.S. and the EU, this week Yahoo also announced a new deal with Twitter that will open its sites to users of that red hot social marketing site.
“Yahoo and Twitter said the deal calls for enabling Yahoo’s search engine to access real-time Twitter tweets in its search results,” writes Sharon Gaudin at ComputerWorld. “The agreement will also let Twitter feeds be accessed on various Yahoo properties, including its home page and its Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Sports pages. And Twitter users will be able to update their status from Yahoo sites, the companies said.”
The deal seems to confirm that fact that Yahoo is working hard to once more be considered an online hotspot. A dominant website in the late 1990s, Yahoo’s cache has fallen in recent years as it finds itself continuously outperformed by Google.
“This is a company struggling for relevance,” said Rob Enderle, an analyst for Enderle Group, in the ComputerWorld article. “Social networking, rather than search, was closer to Yahoo’s initial strength, and they lost their way by going after Google. This takes them back to their roots, and typically that is a good thing. This does give Yahoo some much needed visibility.”
For its part, Twitter has signed similar deals with other search engines in recent months. The social media site has already agreed to integrate its tweets into Google and Bing search results.
Can this deal, and the Bing deal, propel Yahoo back to the ranks of Internet search superstar?