This Week in Lumps
#5 [19/06 - 25/06]
· After uncerimoniously killing off Jeeves in February of last year, everyone behind Ask.com has been working hard in re-designing, promoting and ‘getting the word around’ that it was still alive, and was going to be coming back bigger and better than ever. In the early part of the year, you may have noticed adverts appearing in and around London (especially on the tube) talking about an ‘Information Revolution’. Well, in the early part of this month it was re-launched, with a brand new home page, new search functions… like a new start, almost. But what’s most important here is the question “does it deliver better than the others?” Well, where best to try it than right here.
Of course, if you’re going to try and test something, you want to test it against the biggest and best currently available, which you all know is the daddy of searches: Google. Google has gone from being just another search engine, to being THE search engine, and it doesn’t stop there. They’ve successfully created one of the best, if not the best web based email clients currently on the market, they’ve also distanced themselves from the crowd with online advertising, revolutionized online mapping, office productivity, and video sharing, among hundreds of other bits and bobs. One day in the future I’m setting myself the goal to go 24 hours without using anything Google related, which unfortunately is going to be much harder than it sounds.
Ask.com should be looking at how Google have grown over the last 8 years, and use that as a template for themselves. They have the ability and the resources to compete, they just have to prove they can. So lets try them out with 4 tests. The first is:
Basic Information Searching
Everyone searches for information daily, especially if your job involves sitting at a computer. As someone who works around conveyancing, I do spend a lot of my day using maps, and if our built in mapping service cannot help me find what I’m looking for, Google Maps, or Google Earth can clear it up. But not just that, I may need the name of a Developer, or a building firm to find Plot maps. So lets put Ask and Google to the test; points awarded for speed and accuracy, for anyone who can help me find the website for the new skyscraper currently under construction in Glasgow. I’ll pretend that I couldn’t remember the name, so lets see what I can find.
Ask.com starts me off, I type “new skyscraper in Glasgow” into the machine, and wait patiently. Okay, so speed isn’t an issue. I’m not bombarded with adverts, and luckily, the site I’m looking for is the 4th on the list. It’s not the wiki link, nor is it the official page, but a sub-link of glasgowarchitecture.co.uk. which is fair enough, I’ve got what I asked for, so I can’t complain.
Google gets the same information fed into its search bar, it gobbles it up, and spits out my results. Speed is never an issue with Google, but the results show that the link that ask.com could only provide 4th, is top of the list.
Not much separating them on basic searching then.
Advanced Picture Searching
Being the big Radiohead fan that I am, I’ve decided to test the results when typing in “OK Computer” (which recently celebrated its 10th birthday). Now, I’m not after anything but the actual album cover, so lets see what they can offer me.
I initially forgot the quotation marks when typing, but expected Ask.com to show me the auto-complete suggestions anyway. Nothing. One of the influential, and most popular albums of the last 20 years, voted #1 album in Channel 4’s greatest albums, came up nothing. Not a good start. I add the quote marks (for accuracy) and… and… and… urgh, this is taking an age… its 9th in the list. Average maybe? No, not when it places “The Best of Van Morrison” in 5th.
Google’s turn. same text typed in, and bang, the results are on my screen already, before I’ve even had time to blink, and not just that, but the album cover takes up the first four images. No Van Morrison in sight.
Google wins hands down.
News Articles
If I type in ‘Chemical Ali’ into the news search bar, I’d expect to be given links to the recent news story that he has been sentenced to death by an Iraqi court for the murder of some 180,000 Kurds in 1988. It’s news, so I expect it to be top, or one of the top searches back.
Ask.com gets the first bite, and it’s #1 search back links me to The Sun newspaper; not exactly a hotbed of excellent journalism, but still, it’s given me something.
Google’s effort brings me back a whole page of different links to click on, and The Sun nowhere to be found. I can get international views by reading about it from the Malaysia Star, or The Australian. Google will get the nod on this one not just for variety, but also because of the stylish layout of the main Google News page. Ask.com’s effort looks like a work-in-progress, something scrapped together at the last minute for launch day.
and finally, the last test…
The Lump Popularity Test
Perhaps the most important? To me it is. 5 weeks old, just how long would it take to find this blog on a search engine? The test involves typing the blog name into the search bar and seeing which engine brings it back the quicker. Both companies also employ a ‘Blog’ area, so I may also use that, to see if it helps.
Ask.com gives me a few other lump blogs, all really old and not touched in years, until page 4, and squashed halfway down the page is a link, with the first blurb that I changed weeks ago. Ask.com will only get points here if Google is just as useless.
But it’s not. Halfway down the main page is my link, with a recently updated blurb underneath it, showing that google update their search pages more often, constantly giving you a more efficient and accurate search.
OK, I admit, Ask.com looks impressive, and constant eye catching promos via adverts and billboards, and catchy slogans will slowly get them back into the game, however, Google never had to rely on that aspect. When did you last see a Google advert on TV, or a Poster advertising its applications?
The difference here is similar to what Apple must be against. Whilst trying to win new visitors, and new business, you have to 100% convince your user that your product is 10 times better than what they are currently using, otherwise they’ll never leave. Apple are doing amazingly well, but its a flawed market, Microsoft aren’t exactly the monopoly they once were. For Ask.com to take anything away from Google, they need to vastly improve the search function; yes, its currently adequate, but there’s a massive amount of room for improvement. Catchy slogans will win you visitors, fancy layouts may convince people to come back once or twice, but to answer my original question: does it deliver better than the others? Not yet. Will it in the future? With Google not going anywhere anytime soon, it’s looking doubtful.
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· Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is considering selling ’spam-infested’ social networking site MySpace to Internet search company Yahoo!, the Times Newspaper has claimed. In return, News Corp is wanting a 30% stake in Jerry Yang’s Yahoo, estimated to be around $12.3 billion. Although the deal has been described as “tentative“, such an offer might interest Yahoo, who have gone on record of saying that the future of the web does not lie in searching, but in the ‘me’ factor of networking, backing up the rumours that they are gasping for a slice of Web 2.0 to catch up with the ‘runaway iTrain’ Google. Its well known that Yahoo were interested in bidding for Bebo, and its even more well known that they tried and failed to buy Facebook for roughly $1 billion last year. Facebook, the site that the kind of social network you’d bring home to Mumn a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Murdoch admitted that the ‘other’ social networking website was ‘gaining ground’. When asked whether newspaper readers were drifting off to MySpace, Mr Murdoch quipped:
“I wish they were. They’re all going to Facebook at the moment.”
The recent hype surrounding the demise of Myspace, and the rise of Facebook now seems to have solid grounds, according to figures from compete.com. As the stats from Jay Meattle’s blog show, Myspace has had a mere 29% rise from last year, in regards to unique visitors, whereas Facebook holds a much more attractive looking 88%. The site also mentions popular news website Digg, and how its had 22.6 million unique visitors over the last year, compared to Facebooks 20.2 million.
So, is Myspace a worthy purchase? Michael Arrington of Techcrunch’s blog mirrored my first impression, that selling Myspace now is a great idea:
“But if the transaction were to happen, that would value MySpace at a cool $12 billion based on the current value of Yahoo. That’s a not bad return on Fox’s initial investment of $580 million in the site, which they bought only two years ago. And it will certainly signal that other social networks, particularly Facebook, are worth far more than most people currently estimate. Remember, just last year Yahoo only valued Facebook at about $1.5 billion.”
Sites like Forbes however are going one step further, asking the question “So what’s next for Yahoo?”, suggesting two possible outcomes: selling out, or forming a merger; naming Microsoft as the interested party for the former, and, yes, you guessed it, News Corp as potential interested parties in the latter. I would assume that the next six to eight months are going to be interesting ones in the social network chequebooks of Jerry Yang and Rupert Murdoch.
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· According to a survey by cheap-yet-wonderful hotel company Travelodge, 49% of British workers will turn up late for work, while 20% of the tardy nation will be hiding the fact that they overslept. Topping the list of cities that just cant make the clocking-in time are Cardiff and Belfast, while London could only make #9. This slack attitude is costing companies an estimated £619 million a year (just how they calculated that figure is beyond me). So, as a helpful kind gentleman who is always in work early (although I will admit that in my last job, when I found I had slept in, I just called in sick) I’m going to present to you with 5 excuses to tell your boss why you’re starting work at 9:26 and not 8:56…
- “…I saw a bright shiny object…”
- “…I forgot what day it was. I thought it was the weekend…”
- “…It takes a lot of time to dump a body…”
- “…Your wife didn’t have my breakfast ready on time…”
- “…I felt it was better to sleep at home rather than at the office…”
Use them at your peril.
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That was the week in lumps, a week in which: “Yippy-Kay-Yay-Motherfucker” is strangely absent from Die Hard 4, Billy Corgan is bleeding his fans dry, Microsoft Surface on a laptop; LED screen-wipe companies delighted, and I started using OnMyList, a new community around the act of making lists.
This week is drawn to a close with the announcement that the new version of ‘Desktop Tower Defense’ was released on Friday night. You will officially, 100%, never ever ever get any work done again, ever. You can access it at any time you like by clicking its link, found on the right hand side in the links bar.
ttfn
x
I’d certainly like to see a Yahoo/Myspace entity. Mostly because I just like to things get shaken up. I had an interview this morning as one of the topics was the transition from a Myspace world to a Facebook one. Maybe this would reverse the looming Myspace slide.
I’d prefer it to be a competition, so that one doesnt slip in standards, much like ask/google. There’s lots of people who are annoyed that Facebook has added these applications, somehow ‘myspacing’ themselves with videos and “top 8 friends”, so Myspace isn’t totally buried just yet.