Yahoo! India launches Glue
The formal explanation of what this whole glue thing is about. Well, Glue is the latest offering in the the search field by Yahoo!.
In Glue, the search results page has a classic search results section and a lot of visual information collected from various sites (not just Yahoo! sites) over the web. The results page has got information flowing in from everywhere (I am not listing the various Y! services here), player biography from cricinfo, google blog search results, lastfm music tracks, youtube videos, job results from monster, gaming information from various sites, information from howstuffworks.com, wikipedia & the list goes on and on. The more you search the more you will discover. I think they are fetching relevant information form all sources, be it cricinfo or for that matter google. The information displayed in search results page is highly relevant irrespective of its source. The complex search queries wont have a glue page, but the most common queries will have one.
I was amazed to see the content on the glue page for call of duty 4, there was a nice description along with the quick facts of the game from wikipedia, some youtube videos(which play inline), images (which link to various gaming sites), latest news about the game from gaming sites & this one surprised me the most, a set of images which link directly to the product page (not the lame search results page) on ebay. WOW! this is simply amazing.
Search results: The Classic search results are displayed on the left side of the page & all the rich information is in the right side of the page. The ‘related pages’ link on the top nav gives links to glue pages which are related to the search query. A tab on top of the page allows easy switching between the classic search results page & glue page.
After having a look at all the rich content on the page I was curious to know the yslow grade of the page. It scored 98 (Grade A) for the results page, I expected something like a ‘B’ for a page with so many images. Looks like a lot of effort has been put in improving the performance of the page.
They have a provision wherein you can request to put your website on the glue page. I have already submitted mine.
If given a chance to rename this product, I would call this ‘Open Search’
[tags]yahoo!, india, search, glue, social [/tags]
We worked on performance improvement in the Beta stage hence you see it in A grade
Its already on CDN.
Swapnil Parulekar
7 May 08 at 9:58 pm
Cool Search Experience. I like it Very Much
A.R.Bhaskar
7 May 08 at 10:47 pm
@Swapnil CDN, Nice.
I think we should also appreciate the fact that the modules fetch data via an XHR call & don’t follow the traditional web 1.0 method.
@Bhaskar Me too. This is one of the few products I like from Y! India
Praveen
7 May 08 at 10:59 pm
The product was already at B initially due to excellent design. Full credits to the designers and developers.
Swapnil Parulekar
8 May 08 at 11:08 am
@Bhaskar thanks for mentioning about the wrong timestamp setting.
I messed up all the settings while upgrading WP, didn’t really get time to fix everything.
Praveen
8 May 08 at 11:09 am
too limited yet. it showed glue page for call of duty but it won’t show for either open arena or battle of wesnoth. i dunno what exactly is the current scope of glue pages…but as far as artists go, its superb thing.
Diabolic Preacher
4 Jun 08 at 1:54 am
@DP yeah very true.
Glue is in its pre beta stage & they are constantly improving it. The system will learn as time passes, just like we add new spellings to the spell checker everytime.
Soon we will be perfect!
Praveen
4 Jun 08 at 9:39 am