Recent posts in my Yahoo Category
February 27, 2010
The Sun relying on 'copyright thieves' Google and Yahoo! for their Wrightys XI campaign
Despite Murdoch's stance that search engines steal his newspaper's content, The Sun are using search keywords as the main marketing thrust for their 2010 FIFA World Cup competition.
January 26, 2010
African Cup of Nations online coverage review: Part 1 - UK
During the course of this year's African Cup of Nations tournament in Angola, I've been reviewing news coverage in the UK and in Africa itself. In the first part of this series, I look at how, before a ball was kicked, the terrorist attack on the Togo team made print front pages in the UK.
July 29, 2009
Social media unplugged: Part 2 - Yahoo! Buzz and Delicious
This week I'm looking at 'social media unplugged', finding out what the user experience is like if you click one of the multitude of share buttons that litter the web without being logged in to the service you are attempting to use. In yesterday's first part I examined Digg and StumbleUpon. Both of these put the novice user through a registration process, only at the end to have not captured the URL that they were hoping to submit. Today I'm...
January 26, 2009
Is 'Search online for "Act on CO2"' costing the taxpayer unnecessary pay-per-click money?
Tamlyn posted late last week after spotting that the Government's 'Act on CO2' campaign was asking people to search for the term rather than publishing a URL. It is a trend that Cabel Sasser noted is well established in Japan, where the fact that URLs have to be formatted in the Western alphabet is a significant marketing challenge. The trouble with the Government initiative is that once you announce that you are asking people to search for specific non-trademarked terms,...
November 26, 2008
Mumbai terrorist attacks show that search engines still can't get breaking news right
We are used to hearing that search engines are one of the primary routes that people find news on the net, but I've just been having a scout around the three major search engines as news of the terrorist attack in Mumbai unfolds, and I have to say that they are not performing very well. Google does have some news results inserted into the one word search for 'mumbai', but they are not in the top slot. Searching for 'india'...
November 14, 2008
8 Search APIs for Hack Days
I spent most of yesterday at The Guardian's first ever internal Hack Day. I gave one of the short five minute 'lightning' talks that got the event kicked off. I wanted to outline a few of the search related APIs out there that might prove useful as people put their hacks together. Here's the written down version... Google AJAX Search API I'll start with the big one - the Google AJAX Search API. This lets you put Google Search in...
September 8, 2008
No news is usually good news - unless it is the Chipwrapper feed
Those of you who rely on a live RSS bookmark of the headlines from Chipwrapper might have found the last couple of weeks to be slow news weeks. In fact, for some of the time, it even appeared to be a no news week, as the main RSS feed failed. I've vaguely ascribed the blame to a combination of Yahoo! Pipes, the Daily Mail and the Express. In fact, anything pretty much except my own shoddy Perl ;-) What appears...
May 12, 2008
Newspaper widget review: Yahoo! Widgets
I recently gave a presentation at the Miami IA Summit about Information Architecture and user-centred design ideas for widgets, and I very often blog about newspaper websites on currybetdotnet, so it seemed like an obviously great idea to put the two together, and blog about newspaper widgets. Well, obvious maybe, but it turned out not to be such a great idea after all. Rather than ending up with a lengthy series of posts looking at all the available widgets and...
April 13, 2008
Newspaper "Site Search Smackdown": Round 6 - Google vs The Search Engine All-Stars
I've been running a series of Newspaper Site Search Engine Smackdowns to see which papers were able to index their own content faster than Google could. It turned out that the answer was not many, with only The Daily Express, Daily Mail and The Independent getting close to indexing news stories faster than Google's web search did. Although it is the dominant player in the market, Google is not the only search engine, so I also carried out the...
February 28, 2008
Making the most of blog comments: Part 6 - Making a unified blog post and comment feed with Yahoo! Pipes
I've been writing a series of posts looking at various aspects of implementing comments on blogs. This week I've been concentrating on the way that blog comments can be output as RSS. Yesterday I explained how to add a recent comments RSS feed to Movable Type. Today I want to look at how you can publish one feed from your blog, which features both the entries written by the author, and the comments left by users. What I want...
February 6, 2008
Flickr users protest about Yahoo! takeover. Again.
The interweb's tubes have been buzzing that Flickr users are already in open revolt over Microsoft's offer to take-over Yahoo!, Flickr's parent company. Image by sebestyenistvan "A splinter faction of Flickr photo-sharing community members is threatening a symbolic 'mass suicide'" - Wired "I'm not cross and I'm not bitter - I'm just a little sad because I have a belief that things can be good/great without taking the obvious route". - grange85 "My fear is that over time they won't...
February 4, 2008
IA Summit bloggers mash-up feed
Last week I published a list of 37 bloggers who are participating in the 2008 IA Summit in Miami in April. As well as in individual list, there was an OPML file to allow you import all of the sites into your feed reader of choice in one go. I've now put together an alternative way to subscribe to them. I've mashed 35 of the feeds together using the awesome Yahoo! Pipes - partly thanks to Kevin Cheng who features...
January 22, 2008
24/7 TV news websites: Part 10 - Search
Having individually reviewed the websites of 8 24/7 news channels that broadcast in Europe to identify their Web 2.0 type features, I wanted to look specifically at the way they handle a very Web 1.0 piece of functionality - search. Al Jazeera Al Jazeera is the only site I looked at with a search service that does not have a search box on the homepage, or in the templates of story pages. Instead, the user has to select a text...
July 30, 2007
Grade 'F' all round for British newspaper homepages on YSlow
Last week the Yahoo! Developers Network released a Firefox add-on called YSlow. It combines with the fantastic Firebug add-on to allow you to assess a web page against Yahoo!'s 13 criteria for delivering a really fast scalable web service. I thought it might be interesting to benchmark British newspaper homepages against the YSlow performance metrics, to see how well they performed. Some of the technical solutions that Yahoo! recommend require significant investment in infrastructure. I suspect most newspaper editors in...
July 28, 2007
ITV advertise using the keyword 'iPlayer' on Google and Yahoo!
Well, here's one amusing thing that I didn't predict about the day of the BBC's iPlayer software launch. Early yesterday morning, ITV - or someone making mischief on their behalf - were buying up keywords on Google and Yahoo! related to the BBC iPlayer, to trumpet their own streaming on demand service. Boasting that there was no software to download, there seemed to be two or three variations of the advert, which stopped appearing around lunchtime. Some BBC properties, like...
July 26, 2007
A tour of Tour De France news sites - Étape 5: Eurosport / Yahoo!
Like the majority of cycling fans, I have been watching this week's events in the Tour De France unfold with dismay. Most other weeks, someone claiming to be from ETA letting bombs off on the route would be a major story, but yesterday with the expulsion of yellow jersey wearer Michael Rasmussen and the exclusion of the Cofidis team, that hardly seemed to matter. Of course, there is an argument that says that out of the couple of hundred...
March 23, 2007
Flickr imprvment
I'm well behind the curve on this, as I see it was announced at the end of February, but yesterday I noticed a significant user interaction improvement on Flickr around adding photos to groups you don't currently belong to. The old way was a bit cumbersome. Someone would spot your photo of the lesser-spotted outer Mongolian tortoise-shell widget, and you'd get a Flickrmail saying: Hi, out of your 6,512 photographs, I notice that once, in the corner of one,...
December 7, 2006
Yahoo! door-stepping ex-Google Answers researchers
I loved this cheeky little blog post from Yahoo! last week encouraging the paid researchers from Google's now defunct Answers service to jump ship to Yahoo! Answers Please consider sharing your knowledge with millions of people on Yahoo! Answers; connect with users with shared interests; get answers to all your questions; and help build the world's most vibrant and trusted community. They've even set up a Yahoo! Group specifically to help those involved manage the change. I've written before that...
November 16, 2006
Sitemaps in search engine news
I'm always interested to see how search engines provide coverage of themselves when they are making the news, and so at around 3:30pm Austrian time today I had a look to see what searching for 'sitemap' or 'sitemaps' turned up, following today's announcement from Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! that they were converging on one standard. Yahoo! performed best, with an injected Yahoo! shortcut to a Search Engine Journal article about the news. Google, on the other hand, had no mention...
October 11, 2006
Smarter searching: liberating information from the Internet - Yahoo!'s "social search" concept
Download a print version of this article This post is part of a series entitled "Smarter searching: liberating information from the Internet", based on my presentation at the 2006 AUKML Conference in Edinburgh Yahoo!'s social approach Yahoo! have taken a slightly different approach to the personalised route taken by Google, which they have termed 'social search'. One of their social web search products is called "MyWeb" This service allows you to 'save' or 'bookmark' URLs, either directly from the search...
August 8, 2006
Searching for pictures on ImageShack and Yahoo! Photos
I've been looking at the search services offered by the top photo and image sharing services on the internet. So far I've looked at Photobucket and Slide, and today I want to look at two services that very much focus on the hosting of images rather than providing a sharing service....
July 7, 2006
Yahoo! Answers - Beta AND (New)
I know Yahoo! are proud of the take-up levels of their Yahoo! Answers service, but are they pushing it in their current SERPs just a little too much? A service that is simultaneously BETA and (New) in two different places within pixels of each other?...
June 23, 2006
Sloppy search on Yahoo!'s World Cup site
Here are some search results from the FIFA World Cup site for the word Budweiser - you'll note some of the pages have got "Budweiser Man of the Match" in the title of the documents. So how come when I search for the phrase "Budweiser Man of the Match" I get this? I thought search was meant to be one of Yahoo!'s core competencies?...
June 13, 2006
A history of the online World Cup
Download a print version of this article In the run up to World Cups it is usual for acres of print to be expended on the history of the tournament. Not a single English newspaper supplement about the contest can have been printed that didn't mention 1966, and I'm sure the same can be said for this year's hosts, who view their triumphant 1954 West Germany team with similar rose-tinted reverence. All of which made me wonder about the online...
June 4, 2006
"You can only select 2 teams"
I hate bugs in web applications, and more than that, I hate bugs in web applications that imply that I'm the one doing something wrong when I am not. Yahoo!'s official FIFA World Cup site is meant to allow you to customise the homepage with personalised news about two of the teams in the final tournament. Unless you are using Firefox, in which case you just don't seem to be able to add a second team. It keeps insisting on...
April 22, 2006
Yahoo! points to the Firefox search box
I don't know how long they've been doing it, but if you visit the Yahoo! homepage using Firefox, after a short while a large banner ad loads at the top of the page, pointing out that you can search Yahoo! directly from the search box built into the browser. 1. Look for the search box in the upper right corner of your browser. 2. Click on the small triangle in the search box. 3. Choose Yahoo!. You're done! I guess...
December 1, 2005
Yahoo My Web 2.0 Beta - My 6 month report
Over the last six months or so I have been playing with Yahoo!s My Web 2.0 Beta. I think it looks like potentially a very good product for getting niche communities of interest to work together collaboratively. It is also a great place for me to tag and bookmark URLs that I know I am going to need when I can't get to my own computer - particularly whilst travelling through Europe. One thing I was very impressed with was...
September 1, 2005
Yahoo! Using Flickr To Supplement News Coverage
Via the ever vigilant Zawodny Linklog I see that Yahoo! were using the Flickr tag for hurricanekatrina as a related link in their news coverage. In a great example of a reciprocal feedback loop, the screengrab of Yahoo! doing this was then posted to Flickr by natekoechley. In his description he wrote: As Flickr fans know, Flickr can be a fantastic source of current events coverage. User-generated content is powerful and relevant. This is the first time I remember seeing...
August 24, 2005
Searching For Google Talk
With Google diversifying into IM/IP Telephony, and Yahoo! being described as a messy media megacorp, I was interested to see how their core services - search - coped with today's launch of Google Talk. There has been a lot of focus recently on their relative index sizes, and at the moment Yahoo! has a slight edge reported in the relevancy stakes. My experiment today looked more at freshness. At 5pm today search for "Google Talk" on Google yielded no links...
July 2, 2005
Firefox Search Plugin For Yahoo! My Web 2.0 Beta
Like many Flickr people I was intrigued by the Flickr Blog suggestion to try out Yahoo!'s My Web 2.0 Beta test. I love the idea of trying to use collaborative filtering with search results - at one point within the BBC we spent a lot of time trying to work out whether we could leverage the use of our search by teachers and the like to improve the Best Links we provided in specific areas. Anyway, like Lloyd, I also...
April 17, 2005
Google and Yahoo! Playing With Video Search
One of the advantages of being a broadcaster is that if you want to experiment with audio and video search technology, you've got loads of material to carry the research out on. In fact the BBC has so much we are still in some cases actively destroying it. Often when I am at search conferences or events people ask how they can get hold of BBC audio/video material to play with. I've no doubt that some of the early adopters...
July 4, 2004
Yahoo! and MSN both tweaking their search
New designs left, right and centre in the search world over the last couple weeks. Or rather Yahoo! and MSN have done their hardest to ape the cleanliness look that Google pioneered. My first look at Yahoo! was impressed not so much by the design, but by the fact that they expose sites with RSS feeds in their search results, with an option (if you are logged in) to add them straight to your My Yahoo! RSS Reader. As...
May 20, 2004
Andy is back...and blogging?
Someone has set up an "Andy Kaufman Returns" blog - and Yahoo! News are reporting the content as fact: "Twenty years ago, on May 16, 1984, most of the world believed that we had lost a comedic legend forever. This has turned out to be what will inevitably be known as the greatest comic prank ever conceived. Andy Kaufman, by all accounts, is alive and well at age 55 and is now living in New York City on the...
March 25, 2003
Searching for the "War on Iraq"
BBC News has been reporting that the Iraq war is the number one search term according to the Yahoo! Buzz index. With a self-deprecating flourish the Yahoo! Buzz index announced that: "surprisingly -- or perhaps not surprising at all to those who question the intelligence of the average American -- terms related to the war with Iraq never managed to upstage buzz mainstay American Idol" It hasn't been much different this side of the Atlantic. The top ten searches...
December 26, 2002
Early Christmas present for Yahoo!
The festivities have interrupted the analysis of Yahoo!'s Christmas Eve acquisition of web search provider Inktomi - see their press release. There is a lively debate going on at webmasterworld.com about what this means for Yahoo!, for Google, and by extension for MSN and AOL. There is a great deal of sense being spoken by key contributors like Brett Tabke. And also some inevitable nonsense....