Ramblings about my employer.
JZ comes back, asks what did I miss?. A good round-up is provided in the comments. (Nice to be an A-lister.)
Dude. You missed the teeth gnashing on TheUnofficialGoogleWeblog:
It is difficult to type this, but increasingly I find myself pushed away by Google’s intrusive attempts at personlization [sic]. At the same time, I am actively courted by Yahoo!’s lightning-quick embrace of current trends and technologies.
For the job seekers: jobster notes that HotJobs search results now contain Job Results From The Web. Sponsored listings get top billing, but check out all the new listings that have been found from hither and yon (do people still say that?). Nice to be able to go to one place rather than poke through every employer’s web site…
OK, I admit it. I’ve never understood how Yahoo! Buzz works. I’ve just decided it’s one of those things I’m not supposed to understand, like financial accounting. I think my math skills should transfer, but they don’t. Maybe Swaroop C H can explain it to me (Buzz, not accounting).
Given that, Buzz did something with blogs. I think. So “Fark” gets the top spot on Y! Search, but it’s only #5 on Technorati?
I’m sure there’s something cool and insightful I can glean from this. Maybe about the different demographic profiles of Yahoo! Search and Technorati users. I’ll think of it, I swear.
Eric goes ga-ga over Google Earth. I like eye candy as much as anyone (the visual look of my blog notwithstanding), alas no Mac version yet.
But it struck me as odd when Eric said:
I’d love to add my personal notes about which restaurants in Portland, Oregon best accomodate two year-olds.
Wouldn’t you use something like Yahoo! MyWeb 2.0 for that?
Another cool little service: TagCloud. It uses the Yahoo! content analysis engine to search your RSS feed, analyze the content, then uses Javascript and CSS to produce a little cloud of clickable tags that you can embed on your blog (or wherever). I tried it on my RSS feed, but there’s not enough content here for it be useful (e.g. many terms it displayed only show up in the feed one time). FYI, here it is:
It’s a start.
I’m way behind in blogging due to a disastrous week – connectivity-wise that is.
I did see that while I was out of the office, Yahoo posted blogging guidelines internally (Jeremy posted them also.) I’d heard that there was a team working on guidelines. Now that they are published, I don’t see anything surprising or non-obvious, which I suppose is a good thing.
You know how you try to do some research on the Web, and when you type in a term on your favorite search engine, you get a ton of links related to buying stuff? Bleh.
Totally randomly, I stumbled across Yahoo! Mindset, a demo from Yahoo Research Labs. It uses machine learning applied to the problem of text classification.
Check it out:
Notice how each search term has a little colored bar that tells you if the link is considered more shopping oriented, or research oriented. And you can twiddle the slider to re-rank the results, without a page reload. Sweet.
There’s a FAQ too.
Is it just me or does this seem crazy? Perhaps all the auto-resize magic happens in the IE plugin, which is how you can dump 300 vacation photos into your mail all at once. But how about some Firefox love?
Yeah yeah, it’s beta.
David W. Boles apparently prefers Yahoo! Sponsored Search.
I wonder how many people have done a comparison?