Archive for the ‘Yahoo’ Category
Thursday, January 12th, 2006 |
Today I noticed the first sign of Yahoo’s aquisition of del.icio.us. When using the del.icio.us bookmarklet to bookmark a site a new pre filled pop-up opens for My Web 2.0. I like this feature because allows me to share good content within my Yahoo network BUT I bet that the negative response to this will be overwhelming because:
- not all del.icio.us users have Yahoo accounts
- users might feel forced to do this
- there is no way to disable this
So…how much till a new del.icio.us suicide group will appear? A week? Put on your bets
After this kind of behaviour, it’s getting more and more clear, that after the aquisition of an independent leader of a certain niche by a major company the second place will see a wave of new users
Posted in General, Yahoo | No Comments »
Saturday, January 7th, 2006 |
Spotted via Guillaume and Search Engine Watch the new Yahoo! product line: Yahoo! Go
The product line continues to target the desktop (after the good start made with the aquisition of Konfabulator - now Yahoo! Widget Engine) but also goes to new areas like TV and mobile.
What Guillaume missed from the screenshot is that beside a Vista like sidebar (or Google Sidebar), Yahoo! Go Desktop features a nice browser window with Yahoo shortcuts. This might be the work of the XUL hackers wanted on the Jeremy Zawodny blog last year (It has tabs and I bet a one month payment that is not IE based).
The time I am writing this post the apps are not available for download but Search Engine Watch says:
The suite will be formally announced by Yahoo CEO Terry Semel at CES keynote today
Additional Resources:
Friday, December 30th, 2005 |
Pimp Your Search
Originally uploaded by Antonescu Razvan.
Almost every user and especially peoples from the SEO field, make at least one daily visit to Google. In time all the power searchers feel the need to enhance their experience with useful addons. Fortunately Firefox users have the chance to tune their favourite search engine. Using an ego search, here is my personal list of Google steroids:
This will give you acess to Google Personalized Search. Using this you will get:
- View and manage your past searches.Browse and search over your past searches, including the web pages, images, and news headlines you’ve clicked on. You can remove items from your Search History at any time.
- Create bookmarks you can access anywhere.Bookmark your favorite websites and add labels and notes to them. Your labels and notes are searchable later, and you can access your bookmarks from any computer by signing in.
After you log in start tagging your search history, and the labels you use will show up on page results helping you to quick locate the results you have used before.
More details about this on:
2. Install BetterSearch extension for Firefox.
This will enhance not only Google but also a few other search engines:
According to the official homepage, BetterSearch is :
An extension for Firefox which enhances Google (all international flavours, too), MSN Search, Yahoo Search, A9, Answers.com (web results), AllTheWeb, del.icio.us and Simpy.com by adding previews (thumbnails) and Amazon product images and info (type, price, rating for US/DE/UK/CA/FR products), a quick preview feature as well as “Open in New Window”, “Site Info” and “Wayback Machine” links to the search results.
This extension will allow you to open search results in the same page for a quick overview using an iframe. See screenshot.
3. Install Bumble Search extension for Firefox.
This extension has just been released and it offers a lot of useful features like:
- Customise Google. Google is extended to include a diverse range of specialised search engines, optionally remove commercial results, and enable new methods for digging deeper into promising results.
- Sidebar: Notes & Searching. A discreet Firefox sidebar grants you rapid access to Google or MSN, and gives you space to make quick notes on interesting pages you’ve found. Notably, it also introduces two highly unique search techniques for finding additional worthwhile webpages - related to a group of pages you’ve already discovered. Thus letting you search confidently at your own pace, whilst locating pages you would not normally uncover.
This short description shows only a small part of the full functionalities it brings to the user. Check the screenshot for more in depth details.
I also liked a particular line from the extension’s homepage:
Respecting Websites
Bumble Search is in the relatively unchartered area of modifying websites (such as Google).
We recognise that utmost care must be taken to respect the needs and intentions of the original authors.
In the case of Google:
- The modifications benefit everyone.
- Google does not lose visitors to competing search engines; and people can see Google’s benefits in comparison.
This ethic side is something that another popular firefox extension should learn. You cannot base your business on screwing those that feed you. Especially by giving users a broken condom (blocking Google Analytics will not protect web users privacy).
4. Get the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox.
Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML (”user scripts”) to any web page to change its behavior. In much the same way that user CSS lets you take control of a web page’s style, user scripts let you easily control any aspect of a web page’s design or interaction.
After you have installed it, go get some scripts to enhance your browsing from UserScripts.org. You can find all the Google Scripts here. One of the most useful scripts and which is used in th the screenshot is Google Counter. This script will put a number near all the results allowing you to quickly determine a website position in SERPs. To get the full use of this you can tweak Google to show more than 10 results per page.
After 4 simple steps you can consider yourself now a power searcher.
Enjoy your searching!
Note:
All the Firefox Extensions mentioned above fully work on Firefox 1.5 but haven’t been tested on previous versions.
Posted in General, Google, Yahoo | 3 Comments »
Friday, December 23rd, 2005 |
I spotted via Search Engine Watch Blog that Webmaster World has open its doors gain for the search engine spiders. Brett Tabke has started an quite original Web 1.0 alpha blog 
in the robots.txt file. And he seems quite pissed off at Google:
Lets be crystal clear - the G Toolbar is spyware at it’s finest. The cool thing is they actually get people to download it, install it, and agree to use it. I have no doubt, that the majority of people that use the toolbar in advanced mode, do NOT know that their urls are being tracked. I also belive that the majority of people that turn on “Advanced” mode, do NOT know what it is about and turn it on to be one of the cool advanced people.
Yeah….I have the slight ideea that for some people that is NEWS
Also he has a plan (most of the steps are very logic) on how Yahoo and MSN could win the search game. Number one tip is the most important but unfortuantely very unlikely to be put in practice
1 Grab a quality, short domain name. (say http://www.av.com)
All in one that’s a very nice TXT file worth reading
Posted in Google, Yahoo | No Comments »
Thursday, December 22nd, 2005 |
Yahoo "forcing" default on Firefox
Originally uploaded by Antonescu Razvan.
Spotted via this post about Yahoo pushing Firefox users to switch the default engine from Google to Yahoo.
First reaction: “whatever another dumb Yahoo joke”.
Second reaction few seconds later was much accurate.
- Google is doing the same crap on Internet Explorer 7. See this screenshot to see what I am talking about
- Yahoo doesn’t modify anything on your browser, registry and so on. The only thing it does is too suggest to try the Yahoo engine and if you don’t like it you can switch easily back
- Yahoo doesn’t install a thing…it’s a matter of choice
- You can make the Yahoo “tip” go away for ever
Conclusion…in some matters Yahoo’s strategies are more user friendly and competition friendly. In other matters they can be….Childish
Posted in Google, Yahoo | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 13th, 2005 |
Both Google News and Yahoo News are theoretically free of splogs due to manually check of any source (at least in the approval stage). Unfortunately it seems that both news channels started to put a greater accent on quantity instead of quality.
A few moths ago I have used Google News and email alerts for certain keywords but I have gave up due to the great amount of duplicate news created by splogs allowed in the system. One site in particular it was the most annoying. I am talking about addict3d that even for a blind brain dead person looks like a splog but unfortunately not for quality checkers at Google.
Today, to my surprise Yahoo News sent me a IM alert from the same .02 website.
Why this sucks? Well…for the following reasons:
1. Real news producers are left out and don’t receive the deserved traffic
2. It shows a lack of interest from the news channels
3. It makes people gave up on service that it might be useful, and in turn news channels will quit developing further
4. It just SUCKS
Posted in General, Google, Yahoo | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 5th, 2005 |
Last week, rumors of a Google Calendar started showin up. The rumors were based on the aquisition of the gcalendar.com and the activation of the subdomain calendar.google.com. The subdomain pointed to the main google.com, but as of today is pointing to Google’s personalized homepage.
Ar they really doing something?
EDIT:
After I pushed the post button, I saw the Yahoo’s reaction to the calendar rumors :). To be honest I would have expected more from Yahoo…
Posted in Google, Search Engines News, Yahoo | No Comments »
Friday, August 12th, 2005 |
Search engine market shares in July 2005: Google - 59.2%, Yahoo! - 28.8%, MSN - 5.5% by ZDNet’s ZDNet Research — HitWise says Google, Yahoo! Search and MSN Search accounted for 93.5% of US searches in July 2005. Google garnered 59.2% of searches. Yahoo! Search and MSN Search captured 28.8% and 5.5% shares, respectively.
Posted in Google, Search Engines News, Yahoo | 1 Comment »
Saturday, August 6th, 2005 |
By way of Search Engine Watch Moderator, OptimizeOnline, Google Launch Phase 2 of Longer Ad Text Beta Programme. Basically, Google AdWords will up the description character limit to 200 and then test the CTR rates of those ads versus the original ads. OptimizeOnline …
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=1992
As it was obvious, Google didn’t contemplate Yahoo launching their contextual ad network and already is making it’s move to consolidate the grounds
Notice anything different in your Yahoo News listings on Yahoo’s homepage, My Yahoo, and other pages within the Yahoo network where Yahoo News stories are listed? Yahoo is placing a little TV screen next to some news stories to showcase its News …
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=1986
This is quite a goody. Why watching only CNN when you can choose to watch multiple video versions of the same story. Add this to human moderated news (Google does that automatically) and you have a good contender to the role of news king
The Mozilla Foundation this week went “for profit” with the launch of a commercial subsidiary which will focus on the Firefox browser. The for profit version of Mozilla (Cashzilla?) will also be responsible for the development, testing, and distribution of the organization’s open …
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=1985
I just hope that this step will lead the way to Firefox branded browsers. Today I was looking too see if clones of Firefox exist and I was amazed to see that there are none. I mean what’s wrong in the picture? IE is not open source but clones like Maxthon and Avant Browser (to name just a few) are here for quite a long time. I expect (and also want) a Yahoo branded browser to give me quick access to the Yahoo services for example. And the ways to explore this are vitually unlimited
P.S. I am doing this kind of post as an experiment. If it works I will stick to it. The ideea is the following:
1. I have installed Blog Navigator and inserted my daily readings (more to be added soon) 2. From the daily posts I will make a selection of the most important (from my point of view) and try to add some personal comments
Posted in Google, News Reviews, Yahoo | No Comments »
