Which search engine is best suited for you?
August 9th, 2009
Google-y, Tech Takes, The Evil Empire, Yahoo-niverse
I came across this link on TechCrunch. (Actually, came across it as a retweet of the TechCrunch story by someone I follow on Twitter since I’m not subscribed to that site’s RSS feed.) It’s called the Blind Search Tool. (BTW, the site was made by a Microsoft engineer.) Basically, you search for a term and it shows you three different sets of results in column from three search engines – Google, Yahoo!, and Bing – in a random order (columns are shuffled randomly). Have a look at the search results, and then ‘vote’ for a search engine by click on the button for whichever result set you like best. Blind Search Tool then reveals which set is from which search engine.
To my surprise I found that I almost invariably found Yahoo!’s search results to be the best. But then again, your preferences of what is a ‘good search result’ could be different from mine. What this tool does is that it cuts out all the crap and makes you find out which search engine you really want. I mainly focussed on the top five search results, because quite frankly those are the ones which really matter. Which search engine did you find the best? Leave a comment!
(In case you choose Yahoo! Search too and want a lighter search page, then bookmark search.yahoo.com.)
The dust has settled regarding the news that Microsoft is buying out Yahoo!’s search division. In case you haven’t heard, Microsoft’s Bing search engine is going to replace the backend for Yahoo! search for a period of ten years; in return, Yahoo! Search Marketing will handle ad inventory for both the companies on their search properties. Yahoo!’s current CEO Carol Bartz has confirmed that frontend will still be Yahoo!-branded. This switchover will happen sometime in 2010. Details are still not clear on what will happen to services such as Yahoo! BOSS, Yahoo! SearchMonkey, Yahoo! SiteExplorer, etc (as Yahoo!’s Nicki Dougan told me on Twitter). Carol Bartz is taking seemingly good financial decisions for now; I wonder though whether being out of the search engine game for ten years will stunt Yahoo!’s growth a decade later. (I don’t think they’ll sink money into search R&D for the time being.) Unlike Jerry Yang, Carol Bartz’s heart doesn’t bleed purple and gold.
Yahoo! really screwed up under Terry Semel’s leadership. What else could you expect out of a former Hollywood exec? When Jerry Yang came back as CEO, Yahoo! gained back a lot of its technological advantage…but Yahoo! has failed at marketing its products properly. You may disagree on whether you find Yahoo! Search better or Google Search better, but as you’ll see on Blind Search Test, Yahoo! is at least better than Bing. Despite that, Bing traffic grew by leaps and bounds after its launch purely on the foundation of Microsoft’s marketing.
Personally, the only bit I liked about Bing was the preview of the destination page which you get on hovering over a result. The photos on the front page are nice – although nothing you can’t get on Flickr. Oh, and their logo looks as if it was made in Microsoft Paint.
Originally posted at Youthpad.
Tags: Youthpad
Oh My God!
May 3rd, 2009
Apple Of My Eye, Tech Takes, The Evil Empire
Guest blogged by Anuj on 17th April 2008.
Yes this is that bad, I have to use the g-word. Here take a look at this, seriously play it for a few seconds, then close your computer and cleanse it from the menace by using Apple, Ubuntu (I saw the beta of Hardy Heron, I am waiting for the 24th), fedora, or any other good operating system, whether closed or open source. Uninstall windows after seeing this. I mean it, if this isn’t telling you something, then please go and meditate on it (yeah I am taking my Buddhism pledge seriously, I may be the only atheist Buddhist in the world). I mean these guys have no taste, it’s just like windows, no taste at all. None whatsoever, and you expect them to create quality software?
I was reading Bill Gates book The Road Aheadand you know what? He was lying through his teeth in that book on several things, even though he never talks about windows ‘inspiration’; he indirectly keeps on suggesting through out the book that Microsoft is the true visionary, and even IBM was wrong, but Microsoft is infallible. You know what? He called the guy he ripped off inspirational and he refused delve into the Macintosh, which was a true milestone for computing in general, instead he went into detail about frivolous IBM PCs which failed. You know what really happened after he stole it, while working for Apple?
Note: Steve has called Gates into his office to talk about windows. I got this from here.
“You’re ripping us off!”, Steve shouted, raising his voice even higher. “I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us!”
But Bill Gates just stood there coolly, looking Steve directly in the eye, before starting to speak in his squeaky voice.
“Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”
Unfortunately, it turned out that while the agreement that Microsoft signed in 1981 stipulated that they not ship mouse-based software until a year after the Mac introduction, that ended up being defined in the contract as September 1983, since in late 1981 we thought that the Mac would ship in the fall of 1982, and we foolishly didn’t let the ship date float in the contract. So Microsoft was within their rights to announce Windows when they did. Apple still needed Microsoft’s apps for the Macintosh, so Steve really couldn’t cut them off.
Microsoft didn’t manage to ship a version of Windows until almost two years later, releasing Windows 1.0 in the fall of 1985. It was pretty crude, just as Steve had predicted, with little of the Mac’s thoughtful elegance. It didn’t even have overlapping windows, preferring a simpler technique called “tiling”. When its utter rejection became apparent a few months later, Bill Gates fired the implementation team and started a new version from scratch, led by none other than Neil Konzen.
Neil’s version of Windows, released a couple of years later, was good enough that Apple filed a monumental copyright lawsuit against Microsoft in 1988, but they eventually lost on a technicality (the judge ruled that Apple inadvertently gave Microsoft a perpetual license to the Mac user interface in November 1985).
This is probably why Microsoft has failed to have any standards at all, this is called lack of ethics. Microsoft thinks that they have the perfect formula, they wait around and exploit Apple and other OS designers, and then they build the features into their own OS. They basically steal everything, the typefaces used on windows and all PCs today? They were first put in to the original Mac by Steve after he recalled a college course he took on calligraphy, Microsoft copied it and put it in; just like the new ‘Aero’ user interface which kinda, amazingly enough, looks like Apple’s interface Aqua. They even didn’t change the name a lot, they just took another element starting with ‘A’, which sounded cool and put it in. In short, despite spending billions on R&D Microsoft consistently fails to produce something truly special, something innovative because they never actually did it, they’re just a bunch of businessmen who have perfected the art of exploitation. They’re nothing but a parasite, which needs to be killed
This doesn’t always work, ok it never works. Nobody prefers to buy Vista, in fact several people I know do the opposite. They prefer to have Vista uninstalled and put in something like XP or Ubuntu. On the other hand because the Mac system is seamless and it works so great people prefer to buy a whole Mac just to play around with it (I would). They are original ,they’re not. This goes a long a way in determining the outcome, Microsoft is still the market leader because of two things, business strategy and lawyers. It got a virtual license to use the Apple OS’ innovative features forever thanks to this one judgment, this one thing changed the way we look at the world. Vista is terrible there’s no doubt about it, what pains me is that people refuse to choose the better alternative, which clearly is a Mac. Hell, Popular Mechanics even did a detailed study on the two and the Mac ran Vista better than the PCs themselves, i.e. the integrated solution offered by Apple truly works, it’s so well designed that it can handle a resource hog like vista better than the PCs who have more RAM. As for Leopard Vs. Vista, isn’t it obvious who won?
Anyway forget that stupid commercial and check this one out, you’ll love it;
I am sorry for this random incoherent rant, after all so much has been said on this topic, and the truth is pretty obvious. Also I just had the most pathetic day of my life so far.
Peace out.

