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Yahoo Glue Pages - Universal & Blended Search
Riddle: Ask.com has well-organized ones, Google has ugly ones, and now Yahoo is implementing them too. What are they?
Answer: Universal search result pages (a.k.a. blended search or federated search).
Universal search pages, or as Yahoo calls them, "Glue Pages," have been showing up on Yahoo India late last week. While still in beta, Yahoo’s Glue Pages appear much more like Ask.com’s SERPs than Google’s. And since I’m still looking for a way to opt out of Google’s hideous universal search, Yahoo’s Glue Pages are a leap ahead along with Ask.com’s SERPs.
Tags: Ask, Google, universal search, YahooCinco do Mayo? Ask.com Misspells.
While the rest of the world celebrated "Cinco de Mayo" yesterday, Ask.com’s homepage flaunted a "Cinco do Mayo" as seen below.
It was probably just a hasty typo and I don’t think anyone will (or should) be fired over this, but let’s poke some fun at Ask for the oversight anyway. 
Random thoughts that come to mind:
- With such a small percentage of the search market, who really cares whether Ask can spell or not?
- Now might be a good time to boost Ask.com’s staff from 460 to 461 people.
- Ask.com’s new focus of catering their search engine to women has taken priority over proofreading.
Today, Ask’s homepage has a link to a news story about Cyclone Nargis’ impact on Myanmar (Burma), and a link to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent societies.
Tags: AskHitwise’s March 2008 U.S. Search Results
Last week, Hitwise announced the latest figures of March’s U.S. search engine searches based on a sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. Google achieved an all-time high, while the other G.Y.M. members (Yahoo and Microsoft) sunk to all-time lows. The results are summarized below.
Percentage of U.S. Searches Among Leading Search Engines
|
March 2008 |
February 2008 |
March 2007 |
|
|
|
67.25% |
66.44% |
64.13% |
|
Yahoo |
20.29% |
20.59% |
21.26% |
|
MSN / Live Search |
6.65% |
6.95% |
9.01% |
|
Ask |
4.09% |
4.16% |
3.48% |
Source: Hitwise
The remaining 1.72% of searches is shared among 46 other search engines in Hitwise’s study.
Apart from the search engine giant continuing to rack up U.S. users, particular verticals have been gaining tons of search momentum. Since March 2007, the categories of Travel, Entertainment, Business and Finance, and Sports have all shown double-digit increases in their shares of traffic coming directly from search engines.
Tags: Ask, Google, Hitwise, Microsoft, YahooAsk.com: The Beginning of the End?
As reported in a Wall Street Journal article yesterday, Ask.com has undergone some “restructuring” (a.k.a. layoffs) of its workforce. Forty people have been laid off, which actually accounts for a whopping 8% of the total staff over at Ask.
Now I understand the need for the occasional downsizing to stay ahead of the pack (or in Ask’s case - with the pack), but this latest decision comes packaged with a “reorientation”, as Ask’s new CEO Jim Safka has described it. This new strategy will be taking Ask out of the search engine game. Let’s look a little further.
Tags: Ask, comScore, HitwiseGoogle Universal Search Opt-out, Please!
For the most part, Google has always been fairly keen on new innovations and staying ahead of the pack. However, their design and layout of universal search (a.k.a. blended search) result pages leaves much to be desired.
Simply put, there is a lack of organization in the universal search results - let alone any logical or intuitive organization. The results look like a head-on collision of text, maps, images, news, videos and any other number of verticals all meshed together.
Tags: Ask, Google, universal search