The Crazy Mind » search engine wars

Google’s products lack in Usability

Ravi — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 06:49:38 +0000

Google’s stuff lacks the usability of Yahoo’s services, the “intimate connection in usability” Yahoo has with its users.
Comparing usage of Yahoo’s email and instant messaging versus those from Google. Yahoo has a big edge in email users, with 249 million. Gmail has picked up 60 million users.
On the Instant desktop messenger side, Yahoo’s 77.9 million users are well ahead of Google Talk’s 3.4 million. The typical Internet user needs a good usability experience to go along with the functionality.
Also check the previous post on difference between yahoo and Google.
You can also check the other search engines like AskX.com which concentrates well on usability giving a lot of options.

Yahoo search submit basic revamp

Ravi — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 15:53:43 +0000

Search Submit Basic enables you to submit up to 5 URLs per domain for inclusion in non-sponsored search results on Yahoo!, and other portals such as AltaVista and AllTheWeb.

Your URLs are refreshed (re-crawled) every 7 business days to ensure that the most up-to-date content is available to search users.
When you initiate your Search Submit Basic subscription, a nonrefundable annual fee of $49 per URL is charged. This annual fee also includes account setup and a basic quality review of your pages. You can submit a maximum of 5 URLs per domain into the program.

Probably the biggest change to previous programs, is the depth of reporting available. They throw in the free analytics. The program is administered by PositionTech

On the other hand, After checking the Yahoo’s content guidelines, as they look to be significantly expanded from the older programs.

From the amount of background chatter this is generating even before it is officially relaunched, I’d say Yahoo is going to push this as a value add pretty hard.

In addition to above news, Check these other features that Yahoo has come up in the recent time.

Yahoo is serious in its search business

Yahoo, Google, Ask.com highlights keywords in Cache but not Live.com

Ravi — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 16:40:39 +0000

You search any keyword in Yahoo,
You get the results, now go to cache link of the result and you will find the keyword getting highlighted on the page.
I ve seen it for the first time yesterday evening. Yahoo still not showing a cache date, but the words in the search term are now highlighted in bold, bright colors.

Google highlights any search query you Google and see the cache link.

Ask.com also does that and Live.com does not highlight the searched key phrase and that is very interesting.

It is a good indication of keyphrase proximity in the eyes of search engines. I did the search on a small search engine like entireweb, altavista.

Entireweb has Archived instead of cache leading to Internet archive of the site.

I have also seen two interesting links under each result in entireweb.com i .e. More from the host and speedy view. Checking both these features for one site lead me to the same page.

World’s First ” Web 2.0 Live Ask Engine” for Users – Jyve

Ravi — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 15:28:15 +0000

Jyve, the world’s first “web 2.0 live ask engine,”(probably the first web2.0 search engine) is more targeted than Googling, and more interactive than Ask.com and more helpful than asking “guides” with no interest in a topic, Jyve creates live conversations between people with self-defined common interests for live help and technical peer support.

Jyve believes real people know lots of things that aren’t easily found on the Web. Jyve offers live access to people and what they know, a means of quickly connecting with someone who has the exact information you need or knows right where to find it.”

Any user can use Jyve to get live “how to” information, assistance with Web searches and tips and advice on everything from what type of laptop to buy (and how to configure it) to learning languages, cooking, mountain biking, etc.

How It Works

When visitors to www.jyve.com type in questions, notices are instantly sent to the desktops of logged-in members who have tagged the topic as one they are knowledgeable in. Members can then “Jyve live” by chatting on the Jyve site, or enter one-on-one conversations via IM or VoIP call. Those seeking answers can evaluate an “expert’s” Jyve profile before entering into private sessions or paid transactions.

Jyve’s Success story

Jyve was founded as an award-winning plug-in for Skype users and quickly attracted a grassroots community of 30,000 members in 50 countries worldwide. Jyve was recently included in Skype’s Extras 3.0 suite and continues to bring members of the Skype community together to share information. As the world’s first “live ask engine,” Jyve extends the use of free, Web-based communications to eclipse static search tools.

About Jyve

Jyve was founded in 2004 to bring the knowledge stored in peoples’ minds worldwide online. Based in San Francisco and privately held, Jyve offers members the opportunity to build presence, credibility and business networks online with no upfront costs, and gives manufacturers and service providers a means of extending “peer support” to customers without adding internal resources. Jyve holds two provisional patents for “productizing knowledge” & metering time using Voice-over-IP and Instant Message (IM).

We have seen that there were recent improvements, new features from other search engines too like yahoo suggestion boards and AskX.com and ofcourse the custom vertical search engines that anyone create from Google or Swicki who are already in the search engine war.

I keep using all these search engines and their services, features at different times for different topics. Your comments are most appreciated.

Yahoo launches suggestion boards

Ravi — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 01:38:10 +0000

Yahoo has come up with yet another new feature of suggestion boards to get feedback from the users and webmasters

Yahoo’s suggestion boards look similar to digg and

Spam-friendly, indeed and I can’t really see why this should be any different to the dozens of websites that are around already using similar concepts. It’s yahoo, though, and projects like that work well on some sites and not on others – given the traffic of yahoo, they might get the numbers to make self-regulation work.