Yesterday, I wrote about my search experience in trying to find out when the Olympics Opening Ceremonies will take place and when they’ll air in the U.S. That post was titled “When Do The Olympics Opening Ceremonies Start?” Whatever You Do, Don’t Ask Yahoo. An update is in order.
Today, I discovered that Yahoo has inserted a version of what it calls a Search Shortcut that displays not only the live start time but the TV broadcast time at the top of the search results.
Yahoo now provides more information about the ceremonies than Google’s knowledge box, which includes just the live start time.
The quality of Yahoo’s search results hasn’t changed, but the inclusion of this information improves the user experience substantially. With the 2008 Olympics, Yahoo launched aversion of Search Shortcuts that is very similar to what Bing rolled out yesterday, showing medal counts, event schedules and more. Those short cuts pulled from the Yahoo Sports site. It’s not clear what integrations Yahoo search will have with Yahoo Sports this time around, but today’s small update is hopefully a sign that more is to come.
