Yahoo doing Evil against Google?

Marketing Pilgrim are posting the incident of an individual who download Yahoo Messenger, and upon installation, he got an innocent vague looking auto-update option, which he normally assumed it's Yahoo Messenger related update and decided to keep it. What he found out later is that the update downloads the IE7, sets it as default browser with Yahoo as the main page, and not only that. It changes the default search engine to Yahoo from what it was, Google.

This is a very strange incident to be, and someone already mailed Yahoo for comments. Read more and see snapshots from the original post.

Best 100 Companies to Work for in US, Google Tops Them

CNN Money have compiled a list of the best 100 companies to be working for in the US for 2007, and Google fairly tops the list. Competitors Yahoo and Microsoft came in the 44th and 50th position accordingly. Is it a coincidence the order is inversely proportional to the company age? And that with time and as Google grows bigger it will become more vertically structured oriented and start to lose it's advantages? Possible, but still avoidable.

Click here for the full list.

Best SEO Blog of 2006

SearchEngineJournal have revealed the results of their competition for the best SEO Blog for 2006. You can see the results here and find use of the top blogs.

Santa's Toy Hunt on Google Earth

Starting from Dec 12, up till Christmas eve, every day there will be a clue outside Santa's north pole, which if you could solve will lead you to the hidden toy on Google Earth. This is the new quest launched by Google, thats sounds really interesting and fun. Education to the end user as well. Google can use it to pin point the hot areas that people might miss otherwise.

Read more about it on the Google Blog or go to the main quest page.

ViewDo shows you how to do it!

few years back in my college days, a friend told me he has a graduation to attend and he doesn't know how to wear a tie. He said he looked for it on the net and couldn't find anything. I thought its kind of funny. Apparently, I was too naive. ViewDo does it for you. The site is a media library of explanatory videos showing how to do things, like wear a tie, create a network cable, roll a sushi and anything else you can think of.

It is the kind of target video community for people who want to share their knowledge (by video), or for people looking for that kind of knowledge. What's more is that you can download the videos to your iPod, Play Station Portable, or any other media device. The site is still kind of new, but if it lives up to what it promise, this could be a real hit.

Bye Bye Google Search API

It was never complete great, it was never carefully taken care of. It was something that's done once and left for Beta forever. Google Search SOAP API has been (quitely) taken out of service for good. No more users are accepted in the program, and pretty soon we are likely to see existing ones not able to query anymore.

The service was introduced in Beta back in 2002, and remained so with limited 1,000 query a day, and 10 results per query, until it was canceled for good. I was working with the API, I loved it although it had some stability issues. I and many others were waiting for it to go live with unlimited queries and have more flexibility. Unfortunately, this thing never happened. Tough luck for the Google Hacks author and people who bought it like me!.

Google are inviting users to use the AJAX Search API, which is apparently even more restrictive and does not allow reordering or mixing of results. Shall I agree to change to AJAX API and obey by the terms, what makes me sure the AJAX API will not be dumped in 3 years time again?

Google Answers cancellation may have been a must, as it was a wrong concept perhaps. But the search API is a strong slap in the face of programmers. Now geeks have another reason to scrap content of Google search their own way!

Original source

Google Patent Search released

What's best than introducing new service, simply by summing up what services you already have. Google have their search engine, and Google Book Search technologies both applied to come up with the Google Patent Search . The new service allows people to search for the full text of U.S. patents and browse through them just as they do with Google Book Search.

Source: Google Blog

Google Finance update...

Since it's launch, I have been very impressed with the unique way Google Finance have been designed. Specially the dynamic expanding/shrinking graph, associated with the news items so that you can tell what happened to the stock price at the time of the news. I remember also that there was no feedback link in that service in the beginning, which was kind of a let down for me. I thought that means this is the kind of one time practice that's never going to be revisited. Well, apparently I was wrong.

Few days back, Google posted on their official blog about the new and improved Google Finance, which now contains from the main page:

- Section Summary: The ups/downs of each sector as a progress bar, indicating the percentage of change as well.
- Market summary graph for the Dow, Nasdaq, and S&P 500.
- Today's News
- Top Movers
- Recent Quotes: Hint that you can search Google for stock symbols and you are done, e.g. GOOG

Charts are also now more comprehensive with over 40 years of data for US Stocks. Despite being so late in the game, so far I prefer Google Finance over the rest.

Google Book Search rival from Microsoft

BBC News that Microsoft have launched the Beta release of their Book Search service, currently including book collections from the British Library, the University of California, and the University of Toronto. 3 other institutions are coming in 2007 as well.

All scanned books currently are non-copyrighted, but later on copyrighted material will be added, Microsoft says, and will also be incorporated into the general Live.com Search engine. Looking at the new Live Beta service head to head with Google, I could easily say right now Google search time is much faster and stable. Very often I do encounter Live keeps searching forever, or at least longer than I can tolerate! The dynamic load content on scroll down idea from Live does not seem to be convenient much, at least not with my 256 kbps connection. Browsing the book has been also made easier in Google Book Search, where you can use hot keys to flip pages, and you can open two pages in parallel. Page loading also in Google is faster, however, very often if I do flip too many pages in Google the browser crashes.

Regardless of all the differences now however, the favor will be to the side who has the better book collections, and who succeeds to deal carefully with the copyrights issues involved in it.

More scavengers hunt after Google Answers leftover

Should it have been a successful service, Google Answers wouldn't have to close in the first place. Now that it is, everyone seems to be trying to snatch the Google Answers Community to their site. First there was Yahoo Answers who posted a very nice article expressing their disappointment on Google Answers fate, and inviting the researchers to join Yahoo Answers community, offering an operator role as well. There was also the very polite indirect spam comment to my post Google Answers Falls suggesting their alternative site, and just today, I received a special invitation from a very unlikely source, Amazon, to try and test their beta AskVille service. A similar concept to Yahoo Answers where people post questions and gather points.

The service uses same Amazon access credentials, and is still invitation based only. Categories are not predefined, and rather determined by the user specified topic keywords as it seems. The user profile is also still very limited, not containing much information to set. The more you ask and participate, the more you earn points (coins as they call it), and it seems all to be a preparation for a big campaign they are promising in 2007 calling it questVille!.

From the first impression, the site is still new so its hard to judge on the answer response time, though they seem to have a limit of 5 answers per question in 7 days max. Yahoo Answers seems more organized while AskVille did better in response time using AJAX occasionally.

Like.com: Search for the likeness of items...

To be successful in business, they say, you either do different things, or do the same things differently. Like.com is an excellent example of the latter. An image recognition powered search engine, where you specify the portion of the image you are looking for, say celebrity shoes, and then search for similar items. Your search can be based on both color and shape, with an adjustable meter for color, shape, and pattern relevancy importance. You can also specify the color you want, and price range. The site will automatically reorder the items based on your criteria.

While there are many shopping and price comparison sites, this one (still in alpha) is going into a different approach to deliver a unique service. Image recognition is a hot field that's been under going researches for years, and this so far is the best real application of the technology I've came across. What could be more interesting is if the site allows users to upload their own images and search for likeness inside. Right now you can only do this search for images and products that are already provided by sellers. Imagine how wonderful it would be, although costly for the husband, if the wife can photo the necklace she likes and search for it in Like.com for similar items. I am just talking technically here and wouldn't really enjoy the price of it so much!

Google Answers Falls as Yahoo one rise!

The project that started as an idea from Larry Page more than 4 years back, Google Answers, is now closing down for new questions, and at the end of the year, for any new answers as well. This decision comes just few months after Yahoo launched their own Yahoo Answers, which is turning out pretty well.

The difference however is in the concept between the two. Google Answers was for people to post questions, and bit how much they are welling to pay for an answer. Then a group of researchers would look for an answer to your question. Not anyone could answer the question, and you have to pay to get the answer. This is kind of awkward in the rich forum world, and where Google users are used to the free search services.

Yahoo Answers however is more of an open community, where you have points deducted for asking, and rewarded for answering. This have turned Yahoo Answers into a wide fast growing community, where you post the question, and only have to wait few seconds before you start getting answers. Pretty good isn't it? But the draw back of this is the nature of people using it. Usually they are the people looking for fun rather than real answers, so pretty often you would read "What's your favorite color?" or "What's the price of HD Drive?" when they could actually search any shopping site for the best prices. The answers also don't come much as you hope for, if you are looking for a professional answer. One time only I remember getting professional answer for a technical question, otherwise, the service would do you just good if you want to have some fun or know the answer to a general question like "What's the name of the movie that was shown last year about alien invasion?" Those kind of questions, you expect to get answers to them.

All in all, it is numbers that count, and Yahoo are taking this round.

Arabs outdo Google???

Recently I have been reading about a new search engine that is developed by a saudi young guy. The claims are that the new engine, Amamk.com outperforms Google in all aspects. Being a Google competitor by it self is a huge word to be said, while countries are paying millions to outdo Google with no luck. Now that does not mean its not possible, but to hear it all of a sudden, and to come from the Arab world is surely another shock. The site has been growing in popularity in the middle-east, probably more because they feel loyal to it.

Being a search engine fan, I thought of giving it a test. I knew the comments are exaggerating, but perhaps the guy is on the right track. So i had in mind the two main factors of assessing the search engine. 1) Response time, 2) Result relevancy. The first one favored Google with less than 1 second response time, while the second took around 8 seconds for the same word "test". Now going on to the relevancy, searching Google for "test" gave results that seemed more desirable and focused than Amamk, according to several people who have tested it with me as well. But this comparison is judgmental, so I thought of doing the test for images instead. Here are the results I found for searching the word "dog" on Amamk.com and here are the same results from Yahoo . As you can see for yourself, its a perfect match. I have tried other several queries for images and videos as well, and they mostly always match. For Web and Audio, the results were different, and I have read reviews saying Web was powered by Google at a time.

All in all, this site, for image and video at least seems to be powered by Yahoo, but the site doesnt mention anything about it. I have also contacted the site owner by email, when his whole site was down and took the chance to ask whether it is powered by Yahoo and what is the reason behind the results relevancy, but I got no reply.

This is not the only thing that's weird however. Most search engines, if you go to the About Us section, you will see details about their search and ranking criteria, the spider names they have registered, the range of IPs in use to index the web, and how you can submit your site to their engine. Amamk does not even have About Us section or anything else like that. The site instead, urges visitors at the end of the page to click the sponsored ads links to keep powering the site, and offers a client program that reviewers claim allow you to search the net offline! Now who can cache the whole web offline? I think what they meant was without using a web browser.

I know of some good old search engines that emerged out of the middle-east, didnt test them well at the time. But the famous one was Ajeeb.com, and sadly it has scraped its search functionality, and now turning more into a fee based service.