Yahoo gears up!

Yahoo beefs up its search technology by integrating its Yahoo Music, Yahoo Movies and other services. Today I yahoo'd (not googled) “Eastern Promises” and got results giving a link to the movie on Yahoo movies widget plus show timings in the nearby theatres. In addition, a search for a famous artist like Shakira gives links to the Yahoo music widget with the most popular songs. I was very satisfied with the Yahoo assist feature. It was certainly at par with the similar suggest application by Google. Another difference I noticed is that Yahoo numbers its search results serially. Finally I yahoo'd and googled my name (i.e. Amit Deshpande) and found that Yahoo [253,000] had more search results than Google [157,000].
Will all these features be successful to bring back the lost glory for Yahoo? Can Yahoo be number one search engine? More than technology Yahoo will also have to change the perception of the users. Google has become a “verb” today. Can Yahoo beat it?

Google Experimental search

Try out the new features Google is planning to implement to better the search experience at Google experimental. Google experimental is the new application launched by the Google labs where they make available the features they are planning to implement for the search engine. The strategy is to get a feedback from the user about the proposed feature and implement it in case there is a consistent positive feedback. This technique works well both for Google and their users. From the users perspective they get the features they like and for Google it makes them more sellable. It greatly reduces the probability of a product failure and potential customer loss. The strategy also reduces efforts spend on developing and testing features which will never be implemented. There are also some pitfalls. From the Google’s perspective, they are exposing the future application in advance to their competitors. In addition, it may also potentially reduce the user appreciation for new features because the features are already 'old' for them.

Summarizing, I think that the new 'preview' strategy for the new products can serve as a win-win deal for both Google and the users.

GOOG-411

Google recently started a local voice search service for getting the required information on telephone. So what’s this stuff? Consider you are in driving in a new city and you want to know the nearest pizza place. What do you do? Just drive nearby and hope to find one, call up a friend who has an internet access or just don’t eat? Well, GOOG-411 addresses such issues. You can call 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) and get the required information instantly. One can also get connected to the business (in our case the pizza shop) for further details. You can get the details by SMS if you are using a mobile phone. And the best part is that all the services are free except the phone charge you incur (which depends upon your service provider).
The system is still in experimental stage for the fine tuning of the voice recognition system. For further details visit: http://labs.google.com/goog411/index.html

English to Hindi

Just came across the Google’s new tool for translating English to Hindi in Devnagiri script. Please visit http://www.google.com/transliterate/indic/ for details. The tools works really works quite well with Hindi formatting and grammar. This is certainly the best available tool so far for automatic translation to devnagiri script.

‘Yahoo’ googled more than Google?

Yes that’s true just try it yourself. Yesterday, I used Google Trends to compare Google and Yahoo searches on Google.com and guess what … I found that ‘Yahoo’ is googled more than the word ‘Google’ itself. Isn’t this interesting considering that both are arch rivals targeting the same web search business?

What this result mean is that people actually go to Google and search for Yahoo services on Google. This is a bit absurd for me. If they want to use Yahoo services why should they go to Google.com and search yahoo? They can easily go directly to Yahoo... right? To add to this why will one ever use Google.com and google ‘Google’ keyword itself? To see the results I performed this search (Google on Google.com) myself. The results were as follows (in descending order): Google Maps, Google News, Google Video, Google groups, and then Google.com itself. Thus googling Google gives Google as fifth result and not the first. Anyway still the question remains unanswered: what is the motivation behind googling Google or Yahoo?