Qwest has started redirecting DNS queries to their own servers. Not because I asked them to, they did it to start pushing their own search results page when DNS queries failed (like so many others have and some still do). This new “service” is called Web.Help. In order to do this they reset my DSL line this morning (which was irritating), but they did at least provide some links on what this.
After reading through some of their information on their new “service” I found a link indicating that I could opt out (not that I ever opted in). I’m not sure what they were thinking here though, instead of the “opt out” taking me to a page where I could opt out, it took me to another documentation page on their new service. I had to dig through three or four layers of “opt out” links before I got to a page that would actually turn this off. Which of course reset my DSL connection again about 5 minutes later. We’ll see where this ends up.
The search results they were showing for failed DNS queries were from Yahoo. I wonder if Yahoo is paying Qwest to do this.
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.
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.