Phil Bradley's weblog

Risky websites to be flagged in Yahoo! Search

SiliconRepublic.com: Risky websites to be flagged in Yahoo! Search. From the news report:
Websites that may harm a user’s computer just by visiting them will be omitted from Yahoo! search engine rankings, following a partnership between the search company and security firm McAfee. The new service, entitled SearchScan, also identifies sites that have shown bad email practices, flooding users’ inboxes with spam emails.

SearchScan launched in beta version today and is available for Yahoo! Search users in the UK, Canada, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Spain.

Yahoo! Mindset disappears

Yahoo! Mindset was a great resource - it was the usual search engine, but with a slider option to allow users to re-rank results into either shopping or research relevance. It wasn't brilliant, but it was a great idea. And now it looks as though it's died a death. I found one recent reference in a blog to it, but nothing else. All the links (including those from Yahoo!) are dead, so I think we can say this is now defunct. Which is a shame.

Google priest at the Microsoft Yahoo wedding

News from the BBC: Microsoft wants to purchase Yahoo. They're offering £22.4bn in cash and shares (which values Yahoo at three times the size of M&S), and that's 62% over Yahoo's closing share price on Thursday. This isn't really that much of a surprise, since neither has been able to really compete against Google. Yahoo particularly has been suffering recently (and in the light of my previous 5-year post where they were trying to make more money it's even less surprising), so it's not any great surprise. However, I don't think that either particularly want to get married, and it's really Google who is officiating at this particular joining.

Out of interest - do a search for the story on Google, Yahoo and Live. On the face of it, the Yahoo news is superior, offering me an article from Forbes which focuses on why Yahoo can't fix Microsoft. Really interesting story, until you realise that it's months old. Yahoo however is telling me that its only a minute old. Live is giving me next to no interesting stuff, while Google is right on the nail. I think that pretty much says it all.

Delicious Integrated Into Yahoo Search Results

Delicious Integrated Into Yahoo Search Results. Well, according to TechCrunch they are. I say 'according to' because I can't see any sign of it when I do the same search (java). Yahoo have slid this in quietly and there's just a little Delicious square icon with 'x people bookmarked this page under <tags>'. Makes sense to me - we've already seen FuzzFind incorporating Delicous results into the mix, and since Yahoo actually own Delicious you'd expect them to start using it sooner rather than later.

However... it's annoying that I can't see it! I'm still getting the plain old Yahoo results.

Newbie's Guide to Flickr

The Newbie's Guide to Flickr is a very good overview of what you can do with flickr. It's very well written and easy to follow. If you've been uncertain about trying this resource, read this and then give it a go!

Yahoo! UK Answers

Link: Yahoo! UK Answers. Yahoo is launching their very popular answers service in the UK, and it's already proving popular. In common with the .com version they've got a celebrity to ask a question - Jonathan Ross 'If mankind wipes itself out, what species will become the dominant life form, and why?' There are currently 360 answers, ranging from the serious (rats or cockroaches) to the silly (Z list celebrities). Yahoo is getting a different celebrity to ask a different question (obviously!) each week for the next 8 weeks.

It's going to be interesting to see how the UK version develops over time, and how it differs from the .com version (which, from my experience, is rampantly homophobic and rabidly right wing Christian fundamentalist). Of course, if you don't like it, there's always Google Answers, Answerbag, Wondir, Ask Philosophers, Otavo, or any of the others that I'm sure are out there.

Flickr #1 Photography Site in UK

Link: Flickr #1 Photography Site in UK. Not a stunning surprise this one - what's more surprising is that it's taken that long to get there. It's now 1st above Photobucket and Webshots Community, with ImageShack in 4th and Funtigo in 5th. There's a bunch of others behind that, most of which I don't know.

It's the little things that irritate

I'm putting a presentation together at the moment, and I want to refer to 'My Yahoo'. Now, when I click on the link my.yahoo.com I get sent to the fairly horrible URL http://e.my.yahoo.com/config/my_init?.intl=us&.partner=my&.from=i which I'd rather not include in my presentation. Sure, I could tinyurl it, but I prefer, when I can, to keep to original addresses when possible. So, if I cut the URL back to http://e.my.yahoo.com/ I get a page saying do you yahoo?. That's all. Nothing else. No 'I'm sorry, you're not in the right place' or 'I'll redirect you in a second'. No. Just nothing, except this sarcastic, pointless little message that isn't any use to anyone.
Is it too much to expect Yahoo to, y'know... be helpful about such things?

Hawking turns to Yahoo for answers to his big question

Link: Hawking turns to Yahoo for answers to his big question. This is a Guardian article describing what happened when Stephen Hawking posed a question to Yahoo Answers. "How can the human race survive the next 100 years?" has resulted in over 16,000 answers so far.

Yahoo are certainly pushing the Answers game a lot at the moment - they're getting other celebrities to ask questions as well; Bono asked "How can we make poverty history?" The company is well aware that they are outstripping Google Answers by an order of magnitude and they want to keep it that way.

I have to admit that, having played around with both systems, the Yahoo version leaves me pretty cold. It's extraordinarily anti-gay to start with, which really puts me off. Anyone can ask/answer a question (which is great, and better than the Google 'pay me money for an answer' approach), but it does lead to a very heavy bias towards young Americans who have a preference for Christianity. Recent questions include 'Why do so many hate Christ?' 'Can we feel and interact with God?' which were posted in just a couple of minutes. The level of answers is very varied, from the really useful to the 'I'm just answering this question to get points'.

I can understand the points thing in a way - you get points for answering questions, more points if your answer is seen as 'the best', points for voting for answers and so on. The trouble with that notion is that all of a sudden the process is much less needing an answer to a question and much more about getting as many points as possible.

I certainly wouldn't use either the Yahoo or the Google approach if I needed information - I'd just go and search for it myself. However, if I was just after an opinion I suppose that at a push I might ask a question, and since I'm not about to pay money I'd use the Yahoo version. On the whole though, if other people had questions I'd use one of the 'Ask a librarian' services.

Yahoo UK updates its look

Link: Yahoo! UK & Ireland has been updated. Yahoo has been doing this with a number of other regional sites, such as India and Singapore. The idea is to draw in more users by adding extra features and functionality. Yahoo has said that the new page will focus on search, content, community and personalisation. The emphasis does appear however to be on making money, with Blake Chandlee, UK commercial director saying '[it] is an exciting new proposition for advertisers to interact more with their target market and allow the user to engage more with their brands.'

Consequently I get a 3 column approach (which I can change to narrow view, only it doesn't seem to want to work for me), a bunch of menu options down the left hand side, emphasising things like Yahoo Answers, Sport, Horoscopes and so on, but NO mention of the Yahoo directory at all. (I guess that I'm supposed to either know or guess now. Or perhaps Yahoo just want us all to forget about their origins?) News is featured in the main part of the screen, with featured stories at the top, and other links below.  On the right hand side I can check my mail, use Messenger or check the weather. Below that is a whacking big advert (for the World Cup at the moment). Below all those options are the things that Yahoo wants me to spend time with - Travel, Yahoo Pulse (Top Yahoo User Movie Babes !???) and the market place.

Yahoo India and Singapore are similar, with only minor differences.

Is it going to make me want to use Yahoo more in the future? Nope, can't say that it will. Won't make me use it any the less mind you. While Yahoo may think this is a major makeover, I have trouble expressing my excitement about it; probably because I don't have any.