where technology is simplified
Web Services
Freely available online services that become indispensable once you start using them.
Yahoo! Search – The Next Generation
Oct 31st
Google vs. Yahoo – the two major internet giants go head-to-head against each other in online search. According to the latest Nielsen-NetRatings U.S. Search Share Rankings Google caters to 54% of the total web-searches trailed by Yahoo coming in at about 20% But this has not slowed down the development of Yahoo Search in any way – in fact Yahoo seems to have taken on this challenge. Yahoo is currently testing out their next generation search engine on an isolated corner of the web – on the Yahoo Australia site.
Yahoo! alpha search results include a sidebar on the right showing results from a variety of other sources in addition web-search results in the main window. This is quite similar to the Searchmash results that I had previously discussed. Sidebar shows results from – Photos by Flickr, Yahoo!7 Answers, Videos by YouTube, News by Yahoo!7 News Search, Wikipedia, Opensearch & Sponsored Results by Yahoo! Search Marketing. This can be customized to a great extent by going to the Preferences page. If you search for ebay auctions a lot more than Yahoo Answers then you can set your preferences accordingly.
Y! Alpha Search provides a number of site-search widgets that can be customized for your site. You can select the color of the search box, copy paste the code and done!
Simply customize the sources for your users (such as adding your site as the primary info source), prioritize the layout then copy and paste the code below into your web page and voila! Your users will be getting a great search experience in no time.
Google v2.0
Oct 29th
Google is the king of internet search there is no doubt about that. I can say with some certainty that each and every computer user has at some point used Google’s excellent search service. More importantly these users found what they were looking for with relative ease and accuracy. But most do not know of the secret Google – Searchmash.
From Searchmash site – SearchMash lets you search the internet in new ways. It is constantly evolving as we come up with ideas and figure out what works and what doesn’t. Check back here from time to time to see what has changed, and also to tell us which ones are useful to you. Please bear with us when the site is unavailable as we are limiting its use.
You don’t have to have your cursor in the search box to start typing your query. Your previous query will be replaced with whatever you type.
Click on “hide details” in the title bar to collapse the display of web or images results, allowing many more results to fit in view.
You can see other types of results, such as images and blogs, in the blocks to the right of the standard web results. Expand a block by clicking on its title.
Click the “more results” bar at the bottom of the page (or hit the space bar) to show more results instantly.
You can watch a video by clicking on its thumbnail. Click on the video that’s playing to pause it.
But keep in mind Searchmash Terms of Service only allows for personal use and NO automated searches – SearchMash is made available for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use SearchMash to sell a product or service, or to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales. You may not take the results from a SearchMash search and reformat and display them, or mirror any SearchMash page or results pages on your Web site. You may not “meta-search” SearchMash.
A typical search on Searchmash provides the normal Web search results in the main window on the left. But it also comes with a sidebar on the right with expandable search results for – Images, Blogs, Videos, Wikipedia. Notice the “hide details” link on top of the web search results. You can click it to only display the page results of the searches (restricted to one result per line)
