The Internet still needs Yahoo! Search.

Searchers are sadly creatures of habit. When we find a search engine that delivers results we're happy with, we tend to stick with it. Although we might be open to changing search engines if something better comes along, most of us rely on one search engine. Google once was that better thing that came along and changed the world of search forever; it's still, in my view, the best search engine around. I rather think that too many people agree with me at the moment, for it can become dangerous for choice when a sizable majority of people come to prefer the same thing. With a new Yahoo! CEO at the helm, rumors that Yahoo! and Microsoft will strike a search deal are swirling once again. Such a deal might or might not make sense from a business point of view, but any potential tieup between these two Internet giants remains as bad for the consumer as ever, even though John Q. Consumer may not realize it yet.

I've always been one to dabble with different search engines, but ingrained habits die hard. Although I used to run the odd search with Hotbot and other search engines, Altavista was my bread and butter search engine for a long while; it was the site I searched with first almost every time. When I discovered Google, it quickly usurped Altavista's role in my search life. So, even though I may preach a lot about how having multiple search engines is very important, I myself use one search engine disproportionately more than I use any other. I want to change, though. Truthfully, the more I use Yahoo! Search the more I recognize that it is a necessary counterweight to Google. Trusting in Google's search results means accepting that Google's ranking system will always list the sites you want to see. For the most part, I am satisfied with Google's search results, but I still wonder, "What else is out there? What am I not seeing?" I don't want to totally depend on Google to let me know what is on the Web. When I search with Yahoo!, I often come across different sites that I don't see on Google for the same query even several pages into the search results. Sometimes these different sites are worth viewing, sometimes they're not, but they're certainly not so heinously inferior that I don't want to use Yahoo! anymore. Truth be told, I've thought that Yahoo! has grown into quite a decent search engine for a while now, unlike Microsoft's offering Live Search. Yahoo! does seem to have a preference for older sites, and it can't be compared to Google when it comes to indexing the Web (for instance, it thinks I last posted on this blog last spring!), but it's still the second best of the offerings we have right now. Even though I don't think too highly of Live Search's results, I'm glad that Microsoft is still in the search game, too -- the engine can always be improved, and I know Microsoft very much wants to become a serious search player. However, if Microsoft and Yahoo! end up partnering and canning Yahoo! Search in favor of Live Search, the Internet searcher is the big loser here. Not only would we lose a good search engine, but the new second best search engines would be even further behind Google in terms of quality.

Webmasters in particular should want to see multiple search engines continue to coexist. I normally don't get a lot of traffic from Yahoo!, but it really likes one of my recent projects for some reason and it has been sending me more traffic to that project than Google has so far. It's great for webmasters to know that they are not doomed to total obscurity just because one search engine doesn't like them any longer. If Yahoo! and the other search engines soldier on and hopefully grow more in popularity, neither webmaster nor searcher will have to depend on one company's ability to search, index, and rank the Web. We still need Yahoo! Search as much as ever.

Google Video is a service in transition.

Google Video recently announced that it will soon no longer accept new uploads. In effect, the service is transitioning from a hybrid video hosting platform/video search engine into a video search engine only though it will still host all its preexisting video content. I must admit I'm not as upset at this change as I am at some of Google's other recent moves, like the ending of development of Google Notebook, but that's probably because I've used Google Video primarily as a search engine for a long time now. (Of course, it also helps ease the pain to know that Google is still operating the Web's most popular user-generated video site: YouTube!) I've found that it's generally faster to search for videos on GV as opposed to searching individual video sites and it's also more effective because GV knows about more video sites than I do. I wouldn't say that Google Video is quite on par with Google's web search service in terms of delivering quality, relevant results for every search, but it's not too bad and I'm glad that the Google team plan to continue to work at tweaking it. A common complaint seems to be that YouTube dominates the search results, which is true, but I've personally found a lot of obscure, often country specific video sites through Google Video as well. Frankly, YouTube is the busiest online video host so it may well always dominate video search engine results.

Google Video did have at least one definite advantage over YouTube: it allowed all of its users to upload long videos whilst YouTube now restricts virtually all of its users to uploading videos with lengths of ten minutes or less. Formerly at least YouTube directors could upload longer videos -- actually, existing YouTube directors still can, but new directors no longer gain this ability. In part because of YouTube's restrictions, much of Google Video's popularity has stemmed from its welcoming stance towards long videos. In particular, it became a popular online destination for documentary watchers. Classic documentaries uploaded with the permission of their producers will still make Google Video a worthy video site in its own right for a long time to come, but it's sad that there'll be no new documentaries added in the future and that the diehard doc fans will have to find a new place online to call home. In the long run, though, I think Google Video will reach a larger audience as a search engine than it ever could just as a video content site in competition with YouTube. I don't agree with those who think YouTube will eventually usurp GV's search role, too -- it just makes more sense to search for video content on Google Video than it does to search on something called "YouTube."

In the face of a recession, Google shrugged.

I decided to focus this blog on the services offered by the five major Web players because at the time I started this blog I believed that they were coming up with some of the most innovative online projects and also because I thought a project backed by one of the giants would have a better possibility of surviving long-term. I have to admit now that I was totally wrong. None of the giants -- with the possible exception of Amazon -- really seem to stand by their projects. None of them -- with the possible exception of Amazon -- take care in what projects they choose to tackle and release to the public. They seem to release and kill projects at a whim. It might not be the bandwidth bills or server costs that kill their projects as so often happens with independent startups, but the projects die pitiful and sudden deaths nonetheless. I've long been planning on opening a sister site to this blog that just covers independent web projects, and the latest spate of project killings by Google has made me more determined than ever to do this. Frankly, the giants just can't be trusted.

Google has in the past done quite a good job at keeping its projects going. Yes, Google Answers was unceremoniously killed, and several projects have been ignored after their release or acquisition. The company has been reluctant to use the axe, though, and I thought that showed a commendable commitment to both its users and its projects. With the economy tanking, things have changed. Google's 3D community Lively was killed before most people even knew it existed. The long-ignored projects Jaiku, Dodgeball, and Google Catalogs were more recently canned. In my view, Google's recent decision to cease development and disallow signups for Google Notebook was the worst move at all. This was a useful service and seemingly a reasonably popular one; it seems to be the killed service that will be most missed judging from the online reaction to Google's recent moves. Granted, Google hasn't started hated its users -- it is throwing them a bone where it can, letting current Google Notebook users continue using the service and opensourcing Jaiku so that anyone will soon be able to start their own microblogging service on their own servers. Still, I have a hard time believing that these types of cuts were really necessary on the part of a huge company like Google unless they are in worse financial shape than is commonly believed. I have to wonder what service might next be axed for arbitrary reasons...perhaps it will be Blogger, the Google service I count on the most apart from search? Is any Google service really safe?

What is most unforgiveable about all this is that Google did not really explore their options with these canned projects. They didn't put ads on Google notebooks. They killed Lively before it had time to build enough of a userbase to get corporations and other advertisers interested. They didn't let Jaiku become a serious Twitter competitor when Twitter was experiencing serious growing pains because they never allowed open signups. It's almost as if the company didn't want these services to be successful -- or, more likely, they just couldn't be arsed to explore all these potentialities. The most annoying thing about web giants is their incredible inefficiency. On one hand, they have the talent and ingenuity to produce these often very interesting projects. On the other, they seemingly don't have the manpower or the will to build many of these projects up into something profitable and successful. They do have people willing to greenlight projects only to then kill them off suddenly, though.

Perhaps we'll be able to look back on this one day and say, "Well, it was just the recession. Google's stock sure took a beating back in '08 -- they had to streamline. The way they acted then didn't really reflect the kind of company they really are." I'm not confident that it is just the recession, though -- I think the malaise and inefficiency that has long afflicted Yahoo!, AOL, and Microsoft's web division may also have infected Google. Users beware: the service you love today may well be axed tomorrow.

Hexolabs is stretching the limits of YouTube.

When you think YouTube, you think "Video." Some people go to YouTube for funny pet antics, some go to it for news, some go to it for vlogs, some go to it for copyrighted content...but it's mainly video stuff that drives people to the site, apart from the ubiquitous "song + photo slideshow" offerings. Interaction to this point on YouTube has largely taken the form of communication between people -- through comments, messages, and video responses -- rather than direct interaction between people and the videos themselves. Hexolabs, an India-based mobile company, doesn't seem to think that YouTube needs to be such a passive experience. They have utilized YouTube's annotation feature set to produce one of YouTube's first interactive games. Who would have guessed that YouTube might ever become a GAMING platform?

Hexolabs' game is called "A Car's Life." It follows the animated adventures of a car travelling through a simple black and white world. To advance to each successive level, the player/viewer must click on the annotation link that crops up on each video; if you fail to click the button in time, you get to watch the car suffer a terrible demise. The button is really merely a link to the next video in the series -- you can certainly watch the videos out of order. In fact, you can "win" the game without even playing if you want. Because the link to the next level disappears very quickly, you may well find yourself tempted to cheat -- the link is fully clickable if the video is paused. Once I knew where the link was going to appear on each level, I personally didn't find it too hard to win the game the "right way." All in all, I enjoyed the experience, mostly because it forced me to change the way I view YouTube. It's amazing how a feature like annotation can create a whole new world of possibilities. As a game, "A Car's Life" is obviously very simple and more of an experiment than a polished product, but for a YouTube game in 2008 it's fantastic. If you enjoy the visuals of the game, you might want to give some Vectrex games from the 80s a try -- for some reason, I kept thinking of "Armor Attack" while I was playing around with Hexolabs' creation. I know what I'll be playing for the rest of the day...

I'm sure we haven't seen the last of gaming on YouTube. It will be interesting, though, to see if game development is something that will be encouraged or discouraged by the corporate overlords. One could argue that gaming on YouTube makes the site less pure as a video destination -- "A Car's Life" is cool because there aren't many YouTube games right now, but if you want to play online games there are tons of sites out there that'll let you do that to your heart's content. Personally, I welcome the chance to do something a little different on YouTube from time to time.

AOL Video's P & G Classic Soaps and Google's News Archive show us that even the ephemeral can be eternal online.

For too long, great content has been discarded hastily for convenience's sake. While many people have stacks of National Geographic magazines in their attic, only the most determined of collectors would dare archive their local daily newspaper. Considering that some of the longest running soaps have thousands of episodes, few of even the most obsessive of soap opera fans are able to relive all of their favorite storylines at a whim. The main obstacle to collectors of the past was a simple lack of physical space; newspaper collectors had only so much attic space and soap opera fanatics could only store so many VHS tapes. Even those brave enough to start such daunting collecting tasks faced serious archival problems related to the natural degradation of physical media. The digital age has made both space and the degradation of physical media much less of an obstacle, but some so-called ephemeral content has been quite difficult to find in digital form. Luckily, AOL and Google are helping to change all that.

AOL Video has featured classic soaps from Procter & Gamble Productions such as Another World and Texas for some time now. Soaps have a very uncertain future when their television runs end. SOAPnet is a cable channel entirely devoted to soap operas, both classic and current, but not every cable subscriber receives it -- I don't, for instance. DVD releases for classic soaps are limited, in part because of the sheer mass of recorded material we're dealing with when it comes to soaps. While best-of collections of favorite episodes might work for sitcoms, it's not a good approach for soaps where the continuity between episodes is very important. There's really no better way to view old soaps than online and on-demand, which is what AOL Video provides as a free, ad-supported service for soap fans. AOL's P & G classic soap collection is not exactly a complete archive of any of its featured series (bear in mind that many episodes of the older soaps no longer exist), but there are hundreds and hundreds of episodes available for viewing. It does annoy me that AOL Video doesn't offer a air date sorting option so that episodes can be conveniently viewed from oldest to newest (that's what new viewers will probably want to do), but I can't feel too angry because without this service some of this content would not otherwise be available. Kudos to AOL and P & G for helping keep classic soaps alive.

Old newspaper content has always been more available than classic soaps, but they've been buried in morgues controlled by the newspapers or stored on microfiche and microfilm in our libraries. What Google's News Archive does is make old newspapers and magazines much more accessible than they ever have been before. The amount of material already available is staggering -- there seem to be many different groups working on digitizing old newspapers, including Google itself. While Google is aiming to make much of this content available for free (monetized through ads of course, with revenue shared with the content providers), some content providers have opted instead to make their archives available on a pay per view basis. Helpfully, the Google News Archive's advanced search lets you limit your search results by price -- if you don't restrict your search to free articles, you may find it hard to avoid being inundated by New York Times PPV articles. There is lots of really interesting content available to be found here, including classic ads, even if you stick with the free stuff, and the archive is only going to keep growing. To me, this project is an example of Google at their best; say what you will about the company's dominant position in the Internet economy, but you cannot deny that they really do strive to make as much of the world's information available freely online as possible.

It's never been a better time to be a scholar, especially if your particular area of study happens to be classic soap operas or vintage advertising. Thanks, AOL and Google!

Blogger has a splogger problem.

One of the reasons I love searching with Google is because I can remember what it was like searching the Web before Google came to be. While AltaVista was a decent search engine, I can't say too many nice things about many of other early search engines that I used to use. Even AltaVista couldn't keep spam from showing up in the first page of results sometimes. Although Google is not unfriendly to "thin" affiliate sites that don't have much content, I rarely come across the machine-generated, keyword stuffed junk that used to clog up the lesser search engines of years gone by while searching with Google. Nonetheless, the junk is still out there, and lately I seem to be running into it more and more often for some reason.

Unfortunately, a lot of the machine-generated, keyword stuffed junk being posted on the Web these days seems to be posted through Blogger. Google Blog Search is a good way to find splogs, no doubt because it indexes most Blogger content very quickly. Try a search related to the financial industry for particularly good (and by good I mean spammy) results. Blogger seems to be a convenient target for sploggers because it is a free service, allows for the unlimited creation of blogs, and is largely monitored by the community. Unfortunately, the very things that make Blogger an awesome blog creation and hosting tool make it appealing for spammers as well. Google seems to take spamming pretty seriously (as they should, since nothing makes search engines look worse than bad search results), and so Blogger has tried to combat the sploggers in various ways, including by requiring new blog creators to solve a captcha. Still, the spam persists; perhaps splog detection is best left for humans. Most native speakers can spot nonsensical machine-generated spam drivel "written" in their language a mile away so it makes sense for Google to offer an easy way to report spam Blogger blogs. I've recently reported a few very obvious splogs I've stumbled across so I'll soon find out if Blogger responds to spam reports in a timely manner.

As someone who has been trying to make money online for many years, I can well understand why spammers do what they do. Still, I can't exactly sympathize with their "plight." As much as I wish I was making a living purely online, I wouldn't want to make a career out of annoying people and junking the Web. I want to write content for the Web because I love the Web. I love being able to conduct a search on most any topic that will lead me to find something relevant to my query. Sploggers, though, don't love the Web; they want to disrupt the search process by putting junk between the searcher and what he wants to find. Some of them still no doubt make good money doing just that, but hopefully Google will be able to make this increasingly more and more difficult in the future.