This week has been a busy week for PR people, journalists and bloggers. Google and Yahoo (and even Amazon’s A9) launched interesting and future will proove how usefull products.

Both Google and Yahoo made a step further in their ranking process and accepted the fact that any alghoritm can be partially replicated. To compete with that they are using the net users as volunteers raters. But the way they approached this is completly different:

Google:

Google’s way is somehow….cloaked. In order to use it you have to login to any Google service and the rest is on automated pilot. This is the G00d thing and the UGLY thing.

• Good: fits well the grandma test. You don’t have to be a power/medium user in order to rip the benefits. Sites you click in results pages are placed higher when you repeat the query. As simple as that
• UGLY. Well here is more. First of all I don’t know how many users will nptice that something has been added. That makes imposibile for them to pause the whole tracking process. Second I’ll tell you my searching bhavior. I use Firefox and when I do a search I open in new tabs all the first ten results and evaluate them. That means that in time I will have the same results on TOP 10 and I will miss fresh content. That is VERY ugly

Yahoo:

Yahoo’s approach is rather geeky. There is no automated process and you will have to manually save the pages you find usefull in a section called MyWeb (this time Yahoo has brought Google’s BETAmania to a higher level; both MyWeb1 and MyWeb2 are in beta….). They have also added tagging functions and social functions by connecting groups of users.

What both Google and Yahoo avoid telling is to mention how those features will affect the “public” results

P.S.

If you want to see a complete summary of this full week check out Guillaume’s coverage