Tuesday Search Links: Spring Edition
|
Written By Reprise Media | March 21, 2006 | Share This
|
|
Spring is officially here, even if Spring-like weather is officially not (at least in our neck of the woods - 36 degree windchill!). Even if the flowers aren’t budding, here’s some search news that is.
Obligatory Canadian dialect joke goes here Yahoo is testing out some new mail features in Canada and several other worldwide markets, including the UK, Ireland, Germany, France and Korea. The Yahoo! Mail beta promises to be faster than its predecessor, and includes some new features that sound really cool (sorry, we’ve got temperature on the brain). It includes some drag-and-drop functionality, a “comprehensive and speedy” search function, navigation tabs for viewing multiple emails, and an RSS reader built in, among other things. The Canadian version will be free and ad-supported, and it’ll even work with Firefox, eh? (Sorry). Check out the press release.
Why settle for a butler when you can have a librarian? Barry Schwartz points to a great Gary Price interview on the Search Engine Watch blog today. Library Journal talks with Ask.com’s director of information resources about his new gig there and also about search in general (”…a big challenge is just letting people know what’s out there”). In addition to assisting with product development, Price is doing library outreach for Ask and also what he calls “in-reach:”
“I’m letting people at Ask.Com know what services libraries have offered and the great things librarians are doing on the open web…in terms of organizing information…kind of piggybacking on some of the great work librarians have done.”
Ugly: it’s the new pretty…hey, where are you going? There’s an article on Site Reference asserting that ugly websites (like Craigslist, eBay and the IMDB) are profitable for two reasons: first, they’re functional, and second, they’re ugly. Ugliness, the article claims, builds trust with the internet-jittery, who feel that homemade looking sites and a lack of HTML knowledge indicate a relatable human presence. Example A is the hideous dating site Plenty of Fish, which allegedly rakes in 10,000 clams a day in AdSense revenue. Search Engine Roundtable, noting that plentyoffish is neither functional nor easy to use, posits an alternative theory: “it drives search traffic organically, people land on the site, and immediately want to click off. They find the nearest ad, and most attractive part of the page,” and make a hasty exit. If you’d like to chime in, join the discussion here.
Maybe a little too easy About a month ago, when Google launched Page Creator (their easy-to-use web design tool), many critics warned of an apocalyptic wave of Tripod- and GeoCities-style sites, spam-filled and oozing with uselessness. And what do you know? Google Blogoscoped has a gallery of Page Creator madness.
Topics: Search: News |