Praveen P.N

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]

Yeah, Its been a long time since I’ve updated my blog. Lazy me, Too many things happening at the same time. Too much happening at the twitter front as well, holydevil – my twitter handle.

Yahoo! India has launched locals. I haven’t really done some serious digging, All the usual stuff like send email, send to mobile, auto complete for cities is all in place. I saw a new feature called ‘leave my footprint’, pretty interesting. They have integrated Yahoo! India maps (one of my favorites) with the listings. As of now there have listings for four major cities of India. Hope they cover the other cities along with Goa soon. Can’t wait to find some new places to eat yummy fish.
One thing which needs a mention here is, Adding new listings in Y! India locals is much much simpler compared to adding listings in Google local for India. Adding listings in Y! India locals is a one step procedure but the same process takes about 5 long steps (excluding the verification process) in Google locals India.

Here goes the url for Yahoo! India Locals – http://local.yahoo.in

That’s it for now. I have a nice topic to blog about, will post it (along with a screen-cast) in a couple of days.

[tags]Yahoo, India, Locals, Listings, Search [/tags]

Its not the usual stuff which comes out from the Yahoo! camp, this ones a killer. It is a mobile product with an open architecture with support for communication tools like email, instant messaging, text messaging & more.
In simple words, Y! oneConnect is a mobile application which will enable users to access their mail (Y! Mail, Hotmail, Gmail, AOL & others), IM (Y! messenger, Google talk, AIM, MSN). The open API’s will make way for integrating these services into Y! oneConnect.
Few of the features announced are:

• Socially connected address book – Will enable integration of the popular social networking services like Facebook, Friendster, MySpace, hi5, Bebo & more.
• Mobile messaging – IM & SMS integration of popular services like Y! Messenger, Google Talk, AIM, etc.
• Status – Get updates from your friends in real time from all the social networking sites.
• Contact card – Create customized cards and select the information like who & what will be shown in the card.
• Location sensing – Exchange information with nearby Y! oneConnect users. Proximity alerts will notify when a contact enters their vicinity.

Status update is my favorite as it allows to select the list of services & update the status on all of them at one go. See screen shot below.

oneConnect is expected to hit the market in Q2 ’08. That’s all what I can recall from what I read.

Check for latest updates at the Y! oneConnect site.