The top search result for prologue on Google is Matt’s Prologue theme announcement. That same announcement post is number 5 on Yahoo! and on Live Search / MSN Search it doesn’t show up on the first page of results at all.
Feel free to speculate on those data points.
Earth to Google, I am not a virus or spyware. I’ve been using your services for years, I have deleted all of my Google cookies and answered your captcha several times in the last few days, yet you still insist on not processing my search requests. Since most of my searches are done from the search field in Firefox it is very easy for me to switch to another search engine. Which I’ve now done.
I realize that I’m just one lone user in a sea of millions, so my switch to using Yahoo for search is unlikely to make a dent for you. For me though this is a big deal. I’ve relied on your services for years and hate the idea that I won’t be able to continue to use them for years to come. You better not screw up Gmail or Gcal, exporting all that data to another service would not be fun.
At some point in the future I’ll be checking back, hopefully by then you’ll have gotten over your “Joseph is a virus” obsession. Because I’m sure there are lots of spyware applications out there looking for city boundary maps of the city of Sandy, Utah.
Autocomplete HTML/CSS/JavaScript/python/xml/php/c with CTRL-X CTRL-O - parsed.org - Add autocomplete features to Vim. Wish I’d come across this sooner.
Tags: vim autocomplete php javascript html python
OpenID Splash - Looks like Yahoo has taken major dive into the OpenID pool.
Tags: openid yahoo
I was thinking a little bit about the Yahoo/Google/Microsoft battles this morning. Sure, I almost always uses Google for search, but then it dawned on me that there is a Yahoo site that I use on a regular basis (if not daily, darn close to it), del.icio.us. It is far and away the Yahoo service that I use the most. Coming in second would have to be Flickr, but that is a pretty distant second.
It has been almost two years since Yahoo purchased del.icio.us. And more than a year since I’ve seen any talk about how much traffic they get. It would be nice to get an anniversary update.
Douglas Crockford presents “An Inconvenient API: The Theory of the DOM” in a three part video series at Yahoo!. Depending on how you look at things this is either really exciting or really depressing :-)
Javascript has been making a monster come back (in a good way), and I hope that continues.
Douglas Crockford has post on the Yahoo! User Interface Blog discussing ways to reduce the size of your Javascript code, Minification v Obfuscation.
There are a couple of things that I wanted to highlight out of this discussion. One, obfuscators won’t prevent someone from figuring out your Javascript secrets. It might slow them down, but that is about it. So if you’ve been entertaining the idea that you can effectively “hide” your Javascript from users, don’t bother. Two, gzip can be your friend. As Douglas’s little table of code size shows, just using gzip can make a huge difference in the size of the file that your users have download. This of course only works for users of web browsers that support gzip encoding, but that is becoming less and less of an issue as time goes on.
Go read through some of their comments, especially Dustin Diaz’s example on using PHPs ob_start (”ob_gzhandler”); to make compressing easy.
So now Yahoo has purchased Del.icio.us. There aren’t many details in the announcement, so we’ll have to wait and see where this goes. Hopefully this goes better than the purchase of Blo.gs, which has been up and down since their buyout. The Blo.gs home page has been down for the last few days, with a note indicating that it should be back up in a few days (as of 7 Dec 2005).
Although some people were pretty ticked off with having to merge their Yahoo and Flickr accounts after Flickr was bought out, for the most part it seems to have been operating well since then. I’m sure everyone will be wondering if they same sort of account merger will happen, especially given Yahoo’s My Web 2.0 service. Will they try to merge everything into My Web 2.0?
I suspect that the growth of Del.icio.us made this move a given. Without more money and resources it would be difficult to continue operations with the type of growth they’ve seen.
Okay Yahoo, this is another change to will people over, by not screwing this up. Loyal customers aren’t made when you sell them something, they are made when you fix things that are broken.
UPDATE 12:20pm 9 Dec 2005: Yahoo also has an announcement of the purchase on their blog.
The Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) now supports having their ads placed in feeds (RSS, ATOM). It looks like only Movable Type and WordPress are currently supported. Instructions for adding ads to your feeds are provided, but the images they used are barely readable. The WordPress screen shots are bordering on useless they are so difficult to read. Somebody should have caught that before these instructions were posted.
I’ve added the YPN ad feed code to the feeds for this blog to try this out. If these ads work in a reasonable way then Yahoo may have taken a big step forward over Google AdSense by supporting WordPress in addition to Movable Type.
Kottke posted some ideas on how the WebOS will develop. It’s an interesting read that looks at the development of a WebOS from the point of view of Google, Yahoo, Mozilla, Microsoft and Apple. No matter how the details play out, I’d expect all of the players involved to fight pretty hard to for their share of the market. This will be most true of Microsoft, who has the most resources to fight with and has the most to loose.
So the rumor is that Yahoo! is working on a Technorati killer (via Scoble). This was mentioned by JeremY! at Open Tech 2005. With Ice Rocket searching feeds with support for tags things are really getting busy in the feed search (tag:feedsearch [Technorati, Ice Rocket]) field. With Yahoo! getting in the feed search game it seems like Google and Microsoft will be pulled in eventually. Perhaps one of them will buy Technorati?
I always figured that Bloglines and Technorati seemed like an interesting merge though.
Last week I discovered Twingine via Russell. Twingine puts the results of your query from Google and Yahoo! into frames so that you can compare the results side by side. This seemed like an interesting idea, but the interface isn’t particularly useful, it’s too much work to visually compare the two. Then I remembered Matt’s announcement of using Yahoo’s search APIs at WordPress.org, which started me thinking about the availability of APIs from Yahoo! and from Google.
It seemed like there should be some way of combining these two resources, taking the search results from both Google and Yahoo! and mix them in some semi-meaningful way. So last night I started putting together the Ranked Search website. You enter a query and the site requests the top 10 results from both Yahoo! and Google via their search APIs, giving each link rank. The first link gets rank of ten and so on through all ten links from each result set. The idea being the the links with the highest rank are more likely to be what you are looking for. Then I look for links that appear in both sets, merging them into one, with a new rank that is the sum of their original ranks. All of the unique links from each set are then merged in and the new set is sorted by rank. The highest potential score is 20 (where Google and Yahoo! both return the same link in the #1 position) and the lowest possible score is 1. It is really basic stuff.
Making requests out over the Internet to both Google and Yahoo! isn’t the fastest thing in the west. So I put in some basic caching for every query. The result sets from every query is cached in a PostgreSQL database and is used when a exact query match is found and the results are less than 12 hours old. If the results are more than 12 hours old the query is sent off to Google and Yahoo! and the new results are cached again.
Everything is very plain and basic right now, consider it an experiment. If you have any additional thoughts leave a comment or use my contact form to drop me a note.
Most of this information is also available on the about page for Ranked Search.
It really is amazing how quickly concepts can spread. Tagging data (URLs, images, etc) has impressed a lot of people as a “better way” to organize content. Normally when having these types of discussions you point to del.icio.us, Flickr and more recently Technorati. Today a new, much larger, player is added to that list, Yahoo!. Their announcement about My Web 2.0 emphasizes that the reasoning behind this is to capitalize on the community knowledge behind allowing virtually anyone to tag websites. JeremY! has some thoughts on why this is important.
My first impression is that this looks pretty darn cool! Go start at http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/ (assuming your have a Yahoo! account already) and simply do some searches on the web and start tagging them. You do this via the “Save” link for the site in the search results page. When you save a link it asks your for a description and tags, with the tags field providing suggestions (presumably from tags that other people are using). Permissions can be set to restrict this to just yourself, your community or everyone. Another feature I don’t remember seeing before is the “View as XML” link. It turns out that Yahoo! is identifying RSS/ATOM feeds and then providing a link. So if a site as the “View as XML” link on it in the search results, you know it has a feed. Nice to see search engines trying to divine what features sites have a do something with that knowledge.
You can import an existing list of links from IE, Yahoo! Bookmarks or and RSS feed. Although I haven’t tried it yet, I suspect you’ll be able to import your del.icio.us bookmarks into My Web 2.0 via the RSS import feature. There are some other features that you’d expect from this type of service, like the top 100 most popular sites and browsing by tags. Of course you can also search on just your own set of links. One thing I couldn’t find was way to see how many other people had saved the same URL. This is something that you can do in del.icio.us and it’s rather disappointing to see that left out here. So far that is the most obvious feature that is missing. I should note here that so far the site seems to respond very quickly, which is something that del.icio.us has had problems with, either being down or just extremely slow.
As JeremY! noted, they’ve exposed My Web 2.0 via the Yahoo Search API, which was a very smart move. In the future I’d like to see more this approach, where virtually every feature is exposed (to some degree) via an API that we can get our hands the same day a new feature is released. For now this trend is still pretty close to the bleeding edge, but as time goes on and things mature a bit more, companies that don’t provide APIs will be missing the boat in a major, major way.
It is my sincere hope that Yahoo!’s My Web 2.0 doesn’t get completely overrun by those trying to game and spam search engines. Although Google is still the number target for this type of “attack”, Yahoo! is a big enough player to attract the attention of those who would do evil in this regard. Since you need a Yahoo! account in order to use this feature the obvious spot to defend yourself is at the account creation process. Shore up your defenses Yahoo!, I’m sure the bad guys will be coming with a renewed effort.
The new My Web 2.0 looks impressive.
Wait a minute. I can’t find any way to syndicate my bookmarks (saved sites) via an RSS/ATOM feed? What is up with that? I can’t find any mention of it in the FAQ. Common guys, you covered so many other features on launch, how could you possibly leave that one out? I was about to mention how this was going to be a del.icio.us killer, but I doubt anyone will give up on it until they can get a feed of their links. Fix that and I’ll likely give up on del.icio.us and move to My Web 2.0.
In the meantime I’ll play with this a bit more and look at the API features to see what is possible.
UPDATE 2:30pm 29 Jun 2005: As Toby pointed out in the comments below, you can get a feed of your links via the API. Links for this should be plastered all over the place in My Web 2.0, tagging and feeds go hand in hand in many ways. Interesting, you don’t need a valid application id (appid) in the URL for it to work. So a feed for My Web 2.0 account looks like http://api.search.yahoo.com/MyWebService/rss/urlSearch.xml?appid=somestrangeid&yahooid=somestrangeid. You can get a feed for anyone that you have a Yahoo username for. I’m going to guess that permissions tie into this somehow, a link that I mark as private shouldn’t show up in public feed. Thanks for the pointer Toby.