Yahoo considers real-time search

Yahoo has not completely abandoned its search plans

Yahoo has expressed an interest in developing new real-time search capabilities, just days after announcing a deal with Microsoft that will see the Bing engine power its web search offering.

Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs, said in an interview with Reuters that the company could mine and analyse real-time search results from Twitter to offer users something more than the simple internet search results they will get with Bing.

"I've always held that the interesting thing [about] 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," he is reported as saying.

"It absolutely makes sense to think creatively on everything from getting the right feeds to crafting a different communications interface that combines the best elements of mail and some of these newer emerging genres."

Raghavan stressed that his comments were not an indication of any firm product plans, but they will surprise many given the 10-year partnership deal struck last week with Microsoft in which Yahoo will effectively outsource its search and search advertising to Microsoft.

Yahoo could not be reached for further comment.