What I hate about Google !

Why will you visit Blogger, Orkut, or even Google Adsense? The obvious answers would be , to write a post, check scraps, or account status etc. And for all these activities, you are required to login by entering your username & password.

But why do Google thinks that we visit Blogger to find out the new features launched or Orkut, to look at the Pics of those bunch morons because that is what they load first. I mean to say, if you are on a slow connection and want to access Orkut, they will first show the header, then some text followed by the group picture and in the end the box to enter your username & password.

So you have to wait for the entire page to download before you can login, which can be easily avoided if they set the order by the priority of the activity on the page.

I hope someone from their team can hear this.

Best Website for Search

Which is the best web search engine...... Google or Yahoo or ...... ?

I did a small experiment to find out that which is the best search engine and who could tell us better than these sites themselves. So I took votes from Google, MSN (live), Yahoo, Altavista, Ask and Lycos. You must be thinking, what waste of time, everyone one will say that I am the best but the results were surprising.

Methodology:

To take the votes, I asked each of them by typing the word “search” in their keyword boxes. And the first result they that they throw will be the best site that can be associated by this word (as per them) or their recommendation.

And the results were:

Site --------- Recommendation

Google ------ search.live.com

Live (MSN) --- search.com

Yahoo -------- search.yahoo.com

Altavista------ search.yahoo.com

Ask ----------- ask.com

Lycos --------- ask.com

So there is a tie between Yahoo & Ask.

I don’t say that these two are the best sites for searching web, others sincerely need to work on their own search engine optimisation :)

Google is getting CREEPY

If you get a call from your HR manager that he has seen you in a cafe during work hours, or your wife catches you with your secretary outside a Multiplex. Don't be surprised, because the next level of Google Maps is here.

The new Google Maps offers a 360-degree view of many streets in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami, with other cities to roll out later, John Hanke, director of Google Maps and Google Earth, said in a session at the 2.0 Conference.



It may have many repercussions, but to me it sounds really creepy. I may have exaggerated it a bit but at some point of time we have to decide, till what level can we allow Google or anyone else to intrude our privacy. Whether it’s putting up of cameras on Traffic Signals or Satellites, we have to say NO at some level. At least I can not live my life like “ The Trueman Show”.

Google's shopping list

Google thinks big these days. Here are the top 50 web properties according to ComScore, in order of importance (comscore.com/press/release.asp):

1. Yahoo (probably too expensive)
2. Time Warner
3. Google [x]
4. Microsoft (may lead to monopoly issues)
5. Fox
6. eBay (expensive but can be considered)
7. Wikipedia [Wikipedia founder says "no" to this deal)
8. Amazon (can be considered)
9. Ask Network (not interested)
10. New York Times (Nice option, though news has always been a neglected child)
11. Weather Channel (can be clubbed with news)
12. Viacom
13. Apple
14. CNET (same as NYT above)
15. Adobe (why not)
16. Gorilla Nation
17. Wal-Mart
18. AT&T
19. Target Corporation
20. Expedia
21. United Online, Inc.
22. Facebook (extension to orkut)
23. Lycos
24. Monster Worldwide (may make a sense)
25. CBS Corporation
26. Verizon Communications Corporation
27. Bank of America
28. CareerBuilder
29. Gannett Sites
30. Idearc Media
31. Disney Online
32. Shopzilla.com Sites
33. Photobucket.com
34. CraigsList.org
35. Real.com Network
36. Travelport
37. Comcast Corporation
38. Yellowpages.com Network
39. ESPN (already bought cricinfo)
40. iVillage.com women's network
41. ArtistDirect network
42. WebMD Health
43. WhitePages
44. Cox Enterprises Inc.
45. Weatherbug Property
46. Citysearch
47. NBC Universal
48. USPS.com
49. JPMorgan Chase Property
50. Ticketmaster

So what’s next in the shopping list for Google?

My picks will be NYT, Amazon, Monster.com (instead of simplyhired) and i would love to see a Gaming Site in the list too.

What Say??

Web 2.0 - Some thoughts

Search for "Search Engine"

Knowing what you want to search in not enough now days, you should also know where to search. And that does not restricts only to the website but also to the different search engines available there. Because if your are searching for some information, you have a choice of searching through Book Search or Scholars or Blog Search or Product Search or Image Search or Video Search or News Search or Code Search or **??? Search or you can create your own search engine using Google Co-op. Still not satisfied, try the new Voice Search, Accessible Search or the latest Experimental Search. And if that to is not enough try Google Suggest, Google Set or Know more about trends through Google Trends. With so many option available, i think Google itself might also get confused one day :-).

I don't how many of the users are aware of all such option but for those who know, it may sound like a nightmare. It is good that Google has created so many specialized search engines but it would be better that if it gives one search box (like the original Google) and then clusters the results found in specialized search engines. Though it has already started working on the same (because i can see images, videos etc on the same page) but a lot of work needs to be done on the clustering end. They should get some inspiration from Ask.com, they have done some cool UI stuff for clustering search results.

Hope i haven't hurt Google's sentiments yet again ;-)