Well today I was looking for some Rammstein videos on Yahoo! search, when I saw the new video shortcut they provide.
Keeping the model from the images queries, they present an enhanced area that contains:
Generic image with the band in the query
3 videos below the picture
Link to band’s official homepage
Links to albums, videos and lyrics (all point to Yahoo! Music)
Small playlist of music samples
All in one a pretty nice widget that gives you a lot of information about a band and in the same time keeps you on the Yahoo domain.
The nice trick is the part where you click to see a video. Initially I have expected to open a new page or best case scenario an inline player like Google does. What happened was that a new layer was opened and the player was above the natural results.
Conclusions:
At least in this area, Yahoo’s approach is far more useful than Google’s (they provide all the info that you’d might need in a small area)
Yahoo is promoting their own domain and services without screwing with the natiral results. Is obvious for everybody that afterYouTube aquisition andthe universal search approach, Google’s alghoritm has been “optimized” to promote YouTube as natural relevant results
After the somehow succesfull integration of the Yahoo! Messenger in the email client, Yahoo! goes a step forward and launches a standalone web based messenger. More details and a demo video can be seen here.
Google has also done similar steps in this direction, and their simple approach is more appealing to the geek crowd, while the Yahoo!’s colorful version seems to be more targeted to younger people
Yahoo! Go Desktop is a suite of applications that will make it easy for consumers to keep up-to-date on and interact with their world of information. Consumers will be able to use the individual Yahoo! Go Desktop services to connect to the information that matters to them online, but without having to open a browser window on their personal computer.
The initial services available as part of Yahoo! Go Desktop will be the Yahoo! Widgets Engine and a Yahoo! Go Desktop dashboard.The Yahoo! Go Desktop dashboard will connect consumers’ personal content to their services and their Internet community. For example, consumers will be able to link their personal contacts to Yahoo! Local, which will make it easy for them to update their address book with their favorite local businesses.
The whole Yahoo! Go concept has been reduced only to mobile (link)
Yahoo! Go Desktop is now officialy just the old, plain, boring and pointless Konfabulator (link)
Well…after I stoped believing in fairy tales, I need to stop believing all the fake demos made at CES using probably some flash movies and not real applications.
Yahoo’s brand-centric sites, announced in November 2006 and dubbed “Brand Universe”, have started to go live. These sites each revolve around a single popular brand - like this one on the Nintendo Wii - and have almost no original content. Instead, Yahoo is taking content from Flickr, Del.icio.us, Yahoo Answers and other Yahoo properties, along with some slick graphics, and hoping for page views.
[...]
Yahoo doesn’t seem too concerned with monetization of these pages yet, and they aren’t working directly with the brands themselves.
Ok, someone please explain me what’s the freakin difference between what Yahoo does and search engine spamming. Those are black hat websites by the book with a Yahoo logo on them:
no original content
aggregated content based on RSS feeds around a central keyword
subdomain hosted on a core authority domain
lots of ads (soon)
When Wordpress did that a few years ago they were called spammers and blacklisted for a while from Search Engines. When regular black haters do it are called splogs and flushed from SERPs. When Yahoo does it is brilliant.
Well is the first time I am not able to give a title to a post (is early in the morning anyway).
Now check this out:
We have had phenomenal response to the new version of Yahoo! Site Explorer we launched two months ago. Thanks to the many of you who have come by and used the new interface, authenticated your site, and asked us questions on the forum. We have been answering many questions on the board, and there are a few common themes that we want to respond to in more detail.
…. For those who are unable to upload our authentication key as a text file, we have updated our key file to be HTML with a .html extension.
Now…how dumb do you have to be to do something like that?
Yahoo! Site Explorer is a tool for webmasters and its similar to Google Sitemaps. When Google Sitemaps launched they had a similar problem with webmasters of sites hoted on free providers (as blogger for example).Those couldn’t authentificate the site through a file because they had no upload possibilities. Now Yahoo! has this problem but they want to be original and instead of adding a freaking special meta tag, they make me the great service of letting me upload an HTML file.
HELOOOOOOOOO GENIUSES…..NO FTP RINGS A BELL?
P.S. While writing this I figured that the only users that are going to be happy by the new release are the geocities users. If this service is only for them well, hello and bye bye.
Yahoo! Travel and Trip Planner are 2 pretty decent services that in time will get a good market share in their field. Unfortunatelly for me one of their ways to add user created content is simply broken. Both services, allow you to add to your reviews or trip plans, pictures from your Flickr account. At least that’s what they say. In reality, you cannot use pictures that you have already uploaded and only uploading to Flickr starting from the travel websites will allow you to do that.
Come on, I have 2-3 years old pictures already uploaded. I am too lazy to delete them and reupload them. And 99% of the users are as lazy as me. In an era where user created content makes the difference between services, not allowing users to use already uploaded photos is just a dumb mistake.
And since we are there why just Flickr and not also Yahoo! Photos that is larger in size?
A friend of mine sent me this screen showing Yahoo’s intention to offer global free wifi through partners (limited to Yahoo! IM) and full wifi for a decent fee.
More than one year after Yahoo launched Y!Q Search, Google launches version 2.0 (like in web 2.0) and calls it Google Related Links. Of course a beta product and worse than the original ideea. Probably another brilliant project from the 20% series.
Most likely is based on the same set of Common Words that are shown in Google Sitemaps in site analysis section or on the Adsense indexing engine. Probably in the near future one of the killer features that will be added will be to allow webmasters to target through html tags only partial content of a page (feature that was from the beginning in Y!Q search).
This would have been a good April Fools joke but unfortunately is real.
I’ll dedicate this South Park episode to the guys at Google and Yahoo.
Google because of the Analytics, Measuremap,Page creator and the never ending closed betas and Yahoo because of the Yahoo! Go Desktop.
Yahoo just made public a set of Ajax Libraries and Design Patterns under very friendly licenses. From the first look I had they worth having a look at them.
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