In preparation for the start of the summer Olympics on August 8, Yahoo has added Olympic-themed Shortcuts to its search results. Yahoo Shortcuts serve up contextually relevant content from various Yahoo properties inline within the search results. Now, whenever somebody searches for Olympic results, news, or athletes, different Shortcut widgets will pop up.
A search for “Olympics medal count,” for instance, will generate the table above, which comes from Yahoo Sports. A search for “Olympics medal China” will bring up only that country’s medal count.
Searching for an athlete’s name, like swimmer “Michael Phelps,” will bring up a picture, news stories about him from Yahoo News, and stats as well.
With Shortcuts like these, Yahoo is blurring the line between search results and content by offering up key pieces of data right on the main search page. And if you click off for a deeper dive, you end up going to other Yahoo properties. Exposing Yahoo content within search results is designed to help drive more traffic back to Yahoo—which is all right, as long as it’s useful. Sometimes Yahoo’s Shortcuts can serve up inappropriate results as well (but it is probably being extra careful with these to avoid any embarrassment).
Update: Google is doing the same thing with OneBox results for Olympic-related searches.
Update 2: The Michael Phelps Shortcut image above is what you currently get if you search for his name. Once the Olympics start, athlete names will turn up a shortcut that looks like this:
this is an area that without question Yahoo beats up on Google. One click results!!!
Definitely agree, Yahoo is stepping up maybe even beyond Google!
http://blabtech.blogspot.com
Yahoo has done a great job.
This is the only time you’ll see those countries at the top of the medal list!~
This is nice.
The news short cut in yahoo search is also very good.
I search for nadal and yahoo shows the news on top and also most recent ones along with the time.
Google shows the news result in between the search results and does also shows news which is old.
the thing should have united states in there by default, doesn’t matter if its #30 or #120…have the top 5 countries and show USA by comparison if its not there
yahoo sucks
biased techcrunch!
If google has done so then tech crunch would have written a full page article full of praise.
But for yahoo it has always negative mind.
This is great! A guy my son does track cycling with is going to the Olympics this year. This will make it so much easier to find out what he’s doing while he’s out there.
Holy smokes! This is so swell! Now I can find the medal counts whenever I need it, all in a jiffy!!
Wow, this is such a great day.
As long as content is appropriate, makes sense that Yahoo drives traffic back to its own properties. For topics like the Beijing Olympics, users ultimately want information, not a results page.
Very sweet!!!
The Winter Olympic medal count and the World Cup results were on the SERP in the past. This is not news.
This is awesome. I’ll totally check this out. Now only if they had this in tandem with improved their search results, that’d be fantastic… http://www.goth...te.blogspot.com
This is a great time saver and very useful.
Waaayyy off topic, I have a shell hosting account for a personal IRCd over at http://www.amdwebhost.com, does anyone know any TCL (spelling right?) scripts to plug BOSS into a channel with some sort of a program (eggdrop or maybe irssi) ?
viva olympics!
viva beijing!
Awesome stuff by Yahoo yet again! Well done to the development team.
Live Search has this as well.