A Reuters article reports Yahoo is still going to invest in search, at least until the Microsoft deal is done. Specifically, in real-time search by “mining” Twitter data. Let me quote a piece of this article:

Yahoo’s Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs, said that the company could potentially “mine” messages from Twitter, the popular microblogging service, to offer Web surfers search results beyond those offered by Microsoft’s Bing.”I’ve always held that the interesting thing of Tweets is not necessarily searching them but mining them. So we could real-time mine them, then assemble what we mine into the search engine,” said Raghavan in an interview with Reuters on Friday.

I find this very interesting, specifically because of the Yahoo & Microsoft deal that happened last week and the fact that Microsoft’s Bing does a lot with Twitter on several fronts.

A WebmasterWorld thread has some strong feedback from members of the thread. One even took the time to list eight reasons why Yahoo should not do this:

1. Bing already offers live related twitter messages on some serps.
2. Don’t base your companies future on the success of another, as twitter goes so will Yahoo!
3. Using Twitter as a source of quality information?!? Run for the hills!
4. Google already does it better, I’ve had articles fully indexed in under 30 seconds (might have been faster, that’s the time it took me to check when I got immediate traffic while making an edit)
5. Did I mention Twitter is 99% spam? Seriously, no.
6. It didn’t work when RSS was all the rage either. The immediacy is not the message and neither is the medium in this case.
7. Any system that allows everyone to dump comments into one local area can match the speed of twitter, build that instead and add a little QC… now that I would back in a heartbeat. I searched for a keyword on Twitter tonight and you don’t want to know how low the quality of the results were.
8. People like Twitter because it gets their message out there fast and that quality doesn’t carry over to search. Honestly I prefer quality in my search results, not speed. Speed is pointless if I don’t perform a search at the moment it’s indexed anyway. Quality, please!

I agree that this is a space that Yahoo shouldn’t get into when they are out of the search business.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.