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With 205 nations, approximately 10,500 athletes and 302 events in 28 sports, it's going to be tough to keep up with all that's going on at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. That's why Yahoo! Search is launching a series of shortcuts to Olympics-related information and news coverage.

Starting with the torch-lighting at the opening ceremony on August 8th, there will be a ton of Olympics-related information out there, such as breaking news, results and medal counts. The shortcut will help you get a real-time snapshot of what's happening in Beijing each day in one search.

If you're looking for a quick update on medal counts, just search for 'Olympics medal count' and you'll see something like this (once the games actually start):

If you want a medal count for a specific country, just add the country's name to your query (e.g. 'Japan medal count'). If you're looking for info on a specific sport, like recent results and a schedule of upcoming events, do a search for 'diving + Olympics' and you'll see a shortcut like this:

And if you're looking for the latest on a specific athlete, simply add his or her name to the query (e.g. 'Jingjing Guo Olympics') and you'll see something like this:

So now you can keep better tabs on Michael Phelps' road to sweeping another eight medals or how the Russian track team will recover from their recent loss.

With the Olympics shortcut, users can also play the news cast or interview video from Yahoo! Sports without leaving the search results page. And if you want to find out more information on a given topic, we'll of course include links to the relevant content on Yahoo! Sports as part of the shortcut. Try it with 'Olympics 2008' and click on the "Videos" link.

Once you've caught the Olympics fever and want to be up-to-date and organized with your favorite teams and athletes, try it out and let us know what you think in the comments below. Please note that many of these shortcuts won't begin working until the games kick off in Beijing, but we just wanted to let you sports fans know before the mania sets in.

Yuko Kamae
Yahoo! Search