Yahoo! New search options…if you can find them!

By Charles-Henry Ruyant

Two days ago Yahoo! unveiled its updated search options. Firstly, there is the new option bar on the left side of your search results page.  This left menu option offers you the possibility of looking for one specific source only.  The sites proposed by Yahoo will vary based upon the keyword you use.  For example when you are looking for a person, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter will show up, but when you are looking for ‘how to’,  the sites  ehow, and YouTube  will show up.   It is a pretty good idea which facilitates searching.

 

Yahoo! New left Menu

Yahoo! New left Menu

The other innovation from the Yahoo! search team is the search history.  When you‘re looking for different keywords relevant to one topic Yahoo! can differentiate between two meanings for the same word.  For example, Yahoo! will understand that Jaguar is a car company and not an animal.

All these improvement are very good and quite user friendly, but I am not sure why they are doing all this work when we know that Bing is going to take over. Also, I cannot find any of these new options on Yahoo!. Maybe it is not online yet or I am not smart enough to find it.

categoriaSearch Engine commentoNo Comments dataAugust 26th, 2009
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iGoogle: the new social media platform

By Charles-Henry Ruyant

Google is not a big player on social media, different projects have been attempted but have never really succeeded. Its rival Microsoft owns part of Facebook and Twitter doesn’t want to sell.

Instead of starting from scratch, Google has used its iGoogle. A pretty good idea considering over ten million of people use iGoogle. Google announced the Social Gadget for iGoogle last friday.

iGoogle Social Media Application

iGoogle Social Media Application

The principal is simple; on your iGoogle page you can include some applications that you can share with your friends. These applications include games, to do list, pictures sharing …

The concept is pretty nice; it is a good and cheap way to develop a social media platform. Maybe Google will even take some social media market shares.

This idea also shows that people want to have everything in one place – search engine, game, chat, on one screen.

Lets see how well this social initiative will work out for Google.

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Google Caffeine, the new Google

By Charles-Henry Ruyant

Today Google revealed its new search engine algorithm, Google Caffeine. This new version of Google is being trialled online.

This new version doesn’t make any changes to the Google results page presentation. Based on the Google Webmaster official blog, the new algorithm is faster, able to crawl more, and takes in consideration the reputation of the website in question.

After few tries with different queries, the new search engine is definitely faster (0.20s instead of 0.40s) but for a normal user I cannot see the difference (0.2s is difficult to notice). The result is very similar to the ‘old’ Google, it was very hard to see any change. Most of the changes are on the universal search or on the new crawled pages which used to rank high.

From a users point of view this new algorithm is not a revolution, from a technical point of view this is maybe the beginning of a new era as it is the first time that the notion of reputation is part of an algorithm.

I think that a lot of websites which don’t respect Google rules are penalised (link buying, black hat techniques…)

Now let’s see if Google is going to add some major changes to its Google caffeine.

categoriaSEO, Search Engine commentoNo Comments dataAugust 11th, 2009
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