This clever application compares results from Yahoo to Google. Type in a search terms and see how the results stack up on each engine as the lines between dots connect the *same* site on each engine.
Yahoo vs Google Search
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Category Archives: yahoo
Yahoo Hack Day is Rocking!
Yahoo Hack Day is already shaping up to be a fantastic event. I really hate to miss this developer campout down in Sunnyvale that is featuring hands-on developer classes today, a yet-to-be-named big time entertainer tonight, and a hack contest tomorrow. Folks are camping at the heavily Wi-Fi armed Yahoo campus in rooms and the lawn. Cool.
Some resources for those of us who missed this are over at Jeremy’s blog.
Yahoo! …. I finally bought the company….well…I bought a little piece of Yahoo!.
I’ve been watching Yahoo the company and Yahoo the stock for over a year, and finally put my money where my mouth is and picked up 600 shares at 25.31
I feel the stock is really undervalued due to what should soon be a huge wash of new cash that Yahoo will get next spring from the launch of the publisher network to a wider audience. This is Yahoo’s version of Google’s adsense which nets Google about 43% of their revenues and growing. This is the long tail money and I think the smart money says the long tail money will eventually be the big money. In the old days I would have thought “Wall Streeters MUST understand this process and thus the price MUST already reflect this”, but after the internet stock meltdown it was clear that Wall Street did not understand many aspects of the online economy and didn’t care about them much anyway.
Also important to my decision was that Yahoo’s been doing the best 2.0 stuff for some time. For example today’s Yahoo Hack Day, a special event open to developers from all over, is a brilliant example of how Yahoo! wants to take back their old reputation as the coolest company and may just do it.
They deserve to be treated much better, both by online commenters and by Wall Street, because Yahoo!, far more than Google or MSN, is coming up with both simple and complex developer tools to facilitate the new internet, which is shaping up to be a monstrous, layered, interconnected, cross referenced and community-fied ocean of information where distinctions between websites and even businesses are broken down along the lines of what people need to learn and need to do. That’s cool.
| Action | Buy |
|---|---|
| Symbol | YHOO |
| Description | YAHOO INC |
| Quantity | 600 |
| Order Type | Market |
Blog readers vs writers III – Cicarelli’s fleeting fame
Even thanks to a highlight by A-list blogger Jeremy of my AOL lawsuit post yesterday it looks like my Cicarelli “test post” is by far the top interest item here at Joe Duck, and it appears this is due to high placement at MSN for the term … Cicarelli.
This little Cicarelli experiment is suggesting to me that the gap between readers and blog writers is much wider than I’d thought, and it may change my approach to blogging. Perhaps throwing in junk topic posts every so often is a good way to shake up search prominence even for non-junk topics. Hard to test that but it seems to be happening – presumably as people who come for Cicarelli stay to read about …. Web 2.0 or Global health and welfare?!
But alas at Technorati we see that Cirarelli is down to search term number 9. I fear her fame, and mine, shall be as fleeting as a teenager’s search preferences.
Posts that contain Cicarelli per day for the last 30 days.
Get your own chart!
AOL lawsuit over data release and, more importantly, storage of search database of intentions
Over at TechCrunch there’s a discussion about the lawsuit against AOL for releasing search data and also challenging their right to store the search histories of AOL users. I’m surprised this took so long because Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc have been storing all of our searches for some time and probably are using that data to adjust the search experience including refinement to advertising and organic results.
It frustrates me (or I should really say it pisses the heck out of me) that 1) Search engines think they should have rights to my search info with no obligation to tell me what they do with my info and 2) there is a lack of concern in the online community about this. John Battelle has been one of the few voices pointing out that this issue is big and getting much bigger, that these privacy issues need a lot more clarification, and that search companies are sneakily dodging many key issues with search and privacy.
Contrary to many comments I read from other onliners, the Government viewing my data is low on my list of privacy concerns because I doubt they’ll choose to or be able to effectively process the information in sinister ways. However it bothers me a LOT that my search “fingerprint” is getting used without my consent, understanding, or permission in an effort by Google, Yahoo, et al to sell me things and adjust my search and internet experiences.
If they want to do that they need to let me know the process they use to do it. If they think sharing that process violates their need for commercial secrecy then…do NOT use my stuff. I never gave you permission, and you should not assume you have my permission. In fact few people even know that Google and Yahoo and MSN store every single one of their searches – Google, Yahoo, MSN cannot reasonably claim they have implied permission for the search storage identified to individual computer level when very few people are even aware they are doing it!
If you are in it only for the money you won’t get as much … money.
When he’s not coming up with self serving pseudo communities like Squidoo, (am I too harsh? maybe…) , Seth Godin has lots of excellent marketing insights such as this one that suggests the big innovations come from passion about the topic and not from the quest for the holy big buck, which Seth suggests forces people to *stop innovating* too early. He cites Apple Computer, Google, and others that really do support the hypothesis.
I don’t think this is the *main* story of success however. I still prefer to view success as an evolution of ideas where 99.9% become “extinct” and .01% survive due to forces outside of the control of the company – forces like global economics, weather, personalities, lucky timing, zeitgeists, etc, etc.
We tend to look only at “survivors” and forget that an analysis of corporate success would take a large number of company starts and follow them to their demise or success and then look at the factors that led to their fate.
Flickr even suggests an evolutionary model both as idea and within the company. Flickr started as a game maker rather than a photography sharing community. Flickr’s evolution seemed to be a combination of luck, serendipity, brilliance, and (Caterina Fake might say most importantly) her realization of the potential of the “little idea” that became a huge online community. Also important is that from Yahoo’s perspective Flickr probably needs to generate a LOT more cash before it’ll be considered worth the $20-30 million they paid for it. Hmmm – I wonder if founders Caterina and Stewart are eyeing Yahoo’s possible 1 billion dollar offer for Facebook with any envy?
“Dear, we should have held out for a hundred million more!”
But as Seth suggested these innovators are not in it for the money so no worries there I’m sure…. hmmmmmm……
The death, and rebirth, of user generated content is coming to a home theater near you
I think it’ll take a few years for regular folks to figure out ways to measure the value of their content and for many to even understand the value of what they give away to many sites for free.
User content contributions to Facebook, travel sites, myspace, Google, Yahoo, and many many more make up what I think is an increasing share of the total value of all web info. When people understand this it may – it certainly should – change the internet landscape and hopefully shift more control from big companies to regular users. It also may increasingly commercialize the landscape, which is probably not a good thing though the world has never seen a very democratic and global commercialized landscape controlled by any old mom or pop who sticks up a site. It’ll be interesting to say the least.
To one extent this has already begun with Google adsense allowing publishers to share in revenues, but note that Google itself is built on the backbone of billions of web pages they didn’t have to create.
Most of their money comes from people using Google to search *other peoples stuff*. When will Yahoo or Microsoft wake up to the fact that people will abandon Google search quickly for a variety of reasons including inferior quality, change in habit, inconvenience (Vista Search!?), or payment to use alternatives (cha-ching!). Seems to me that Ask is doing a better job of changing habits than Yahoo or MSN though I haven’t checked the market share numbers to see if ASK’s massive ad campaign is working.
The current thinking by most Web 2.0 sites is that if you create a high traffic community site you’ve got it made, and that has certainly been true with Myspace, Facebook, Flickr, and many more. However users may soon start to realize that the content is more valuable than the consolidation of that content.
You might suggest that Adsense recognizes this since it a pays publishers about 70% of the ad click revenue from their sites. However this does not factor in that the collective site content around the world, indexed by Google et al, is the big money ticket. Google shares none of the revenue they get when somebody clicks on ads presented after a search at Google even though they’d have nothing to show if, say, the collective internet world did what the news agencies are starting to do – challenge Google’s right to present their content.
John Battelle’s Federated Media understands this and is providing mechanisms to better monetize high value content.
However it’s the low brow stuff that brings the big money and I wonder how long before banners above sites will read “Webbers of the World Unite!”
Yahoo is doing a LOT of great stuff. 2.0 Stuff.
I’m slowly working on creating some travel related mashups and Yahoo keeps coming up with better and better mapping tools and tools to add travel information to any website. Even restaurants with reviews. Flickr makes it a snap to add pictures to blogs or websites as well as manipulate your own photos. I pointed out how great the Flickr features were to some Picasa developers at Google last month and asked about Picasa integration with websites. They sheepishly replied they were working on it, but I wish my pal Jeremy could have heard that conversation and gloated a bit, because Yahoo’s still not getting anything like the credit they deserve for fully embracing the new web and easily beating Google by most measures in API development.
Google employees do embrace the principles of the new web, but I’m increasingly skeptical that Google can fully promote the openness of the new web and maintain the huge profits they now enjoy. Increasingly profit protection will collide head-on with the old spirit of openness and innovation, and compromises will be made.
The Yahoo 2.0 enabling tools are great stuff and unless I’m really missing comparable things going on at Google, MSN, ASK, and other big players out there it is clearly Yahoo where the really good enabling development has been going on for some time. Yahoo Hack Day is coming soon and they are inviting developers to hang out and camp out down there for hacking and mashing. Open, fun, and free. Neat.
I just hope all this good stuff translates into better press and success. Go Yahoo go.
WordPress Flickr Pictures Tip 2 – post a single Flickr photo in a WordPress blog post
Flickr has a fantastic, easy feature to post your Flickr picture in your WordPress Blog. First, add your blog to Flickr by logging into Flickr, going to your account and selecting add a blog.
Now you only need to visit your photo while logged in and click “blog this”. You’ll be asked to fill out the description and info *within Flickr*. After completing that and selecting “Post Entry”, your picture and the information you added in Flickr automatically become your WordPress blog post. Neat!
Yahoo Rocks again with Web 2.0!
My previous post, a mural picture from Chaimanus B.C., was done in this fashion.
Also see how to do a WordPress Flickr photo embed
WordPress Flickr – embed Flickr photos in WordPress blog
Maybe I’m just slow, but it took me a long time to figure out how to do some neat stuff with my Flickr pix and my WordPress hosted blog.
To embed your own Flickr photos in your WordPress blog you’ll need to first add the Flickr Widget by going to the WordPress Dashboard and selecting presentation, then sidebar widgets. Then, you click on the right side of the Flickr Widget, which opens up a dialog window, and you add your Flickr RSS feed. To get the RSS feed DO NOT log into Flickr, rather stay logged OUT and visit your own pix. The RSS feed will be located on that page. Note that your feed does NOT show up on Flickr when you are logged in (at least I could not find it and it, confusing the heck out of me for the first time in the otherwise amazingly intuitive Flickr).
Joe Duck 