It would be pretty hard to build a news search that keeps you up to date these days without Twitter. As news organizations pile into the microblogging service and as shared links and retweets become a decent metric of what’s interesting, the web’s biggest search destinations are incorporating Twitter. (Microsoft and Google both signed data-sharing deals with Twitter last month.)

Yahoo is now the latest.

The company is starting to use Twitter data today to surface timely and relevant news stories, images and videos. What’s interesting is that they haven’t built a separate real-time search engine that stands apart from their primary search as Bing has done. They’ve actually brought that content into their main search results.

“‘This is the first time we’ve actually integrated Twitter directly into the search experience,” said Larry Cornett, the vice president of consumer products for Yahoo! Search. “This is an algorithm we’ve developed internally that uses the topic, studies how it’s being shared and who is tweeting it. We want to have the most relevant tweets.”

When you search for a timely topic, it will show news, photo and video results in a tabbed format at the top of the page. There’s a fourth tab too, and that’s for content that has been shared on Twitter’s network. Yahoo’s team is working with Twitter’s public application programming interface.

Cornett couldn’t say whether they’ll also get special access to the data stream Microsoft secured in its deal with Twitter last month. (Microsoft and Yahoo also have their own deal, allowing the Bing search engine to power Yahoo’s web search.)

The second point that’s interesting is that this effort has nothing to do with Yahoo’s recent partnership with real-time search startup OneRiot. Yahoo has built this all in-house. So it appears they’re not outsourcing real-time search entirely to other smaller startups as has been previously reported elsewhere. The OneRiot partnership is a test-run where OneRiot results will show in certain Yahoo search queries if the company deems them potentially relevant to the user. (OneRiot also surfaces widely shared content on Twitter’s network.)

It would be pretty hard to build a news search that keeps you up to date these days without Twitter. As news organizations pile into the microblogging service and as shared links and retweets become a decent metric of what’s interesting, the web’s biggest search destinations are incorporating Twitter. (Microsoft and Google both signed data-sharing deals with Twitter last month.)

Yahoo is now the latest.

The company is starting to use Twitter data today to surface timely and relevant news stories, images and videos. What’s interesting is that they haven’t built a separate real-time search engine that stands apart from their primary search as Bing has done. They’ve actually brought that content into their main search results.

“‘This is the first time we’ve actually integrated Twitter directly into the search experience,” said Larry Cornett, the vice president of consumer products for Yahoo! Search. “This is an algorithm we’ve developed internally that uses the topic, studies how it’s being shared and who is tweeting it. We want to have the most relevant tweets.”

When you search for a timely topic, it will show news, photo and video results in a tabbed format at the top of the page. There’s a fourth tab too, and that’s for content that has been shared on Twitter’s network. Yahoo’s team is working with Twitter’s public application programming interface.

Cornett couldn’t say whether they’ll also get special access to the data stream Microsoft secured in its deal with Twitter last month. (Microsoft and Yahoo also have their own deal, allowing the Bing search engine to power Yahoo’s web search.)

The second point that’s interesting is that this effort has nothing to do with Yahoo’s recent partnership with real-time search startup OneRiot. Yahoo has built this all in-house. So it appears they’re not outsourcing real-time search entirely to other smaller startups as has been previously reported elsewhere. The OneRiot partnership is a test-run where OneRiot results will show in certain Yahoo search queries if the company deems them potentially relevant to the user. (OneRiot also surfaces widely shared content on Twitter’s network.)