Japan’s largest web service Yahoo! Japan announced [J] that its PC version top page, the most accessed page in Japan, starts offering the top three trending keywords from Twitter, named with “Wadai Nau”(nau=now, current topics)
As you see, the place the keywords showed is just under the top news box (from Yahoo! News), the prime spot where visitors see without any scroll.
Yahoo! Japan boasts over 14 billion page views per day with PC version. This change must be giving a huge impact on Twitter’s traffic in Japan.
Yahoo! Japan is using Google as a backend for regular search, however, it also provides Yahoo! Realtime Kensaku(=search) with Japanese Tweets in cooperation with Twitter, which is not available on Google search.
On the right side of Yahoo! Realtime Search results shows top 20 trending keywords from Twitter. It seems Yahoo! Japan does not just show the top 3 from it, but picked by some unknown criteria. For example, when I took the top page screenshot, the 3 hot keywords were ranked at #3, #2 and #13.
During March, the Wadai Now slot is shown only during daytime on weekdays. Yahoo! Japan is planning to expand the displayed time.
