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5 Reasons Why Google Personalized Home is better than My Yahoo!

April 12, 2007 By Leave a Comment

My Yahoo Home Page (Canadian Version) or Google’s Personalized Home Page, what do you prefer? Personally (no pun intended), I can think of 5 reasons I prefer Google’s version over Yahoo’s:

  1. Google Themes are much cooler, although Yahoo has 5 times more themes, they appear somewhat old and so 3 years ago. I also like how themes in Google change throughout the day and mimic your local time settings.
  2. On my personal Yahoo home page is a massive banner, the only advertisement I see on my Google Personalized Home Page is a small text ad in the page the footer: “New to Google Checkout? Sign up and get $10 for your next purchase.”
  3. Managing content in Google is as smooth as silk, simple content management options with the ability to drag and drop content blocks; the tabbed content is also a great addition.
  4. The process of adding additional content is also a more pleasant experience in Google. I like the layout of the content items as well as the feature which displays the “I am feeling lucky” content based on an inputted keyword.
  5. Google includes their regular search features such as: Web, Image, Video, News, etc…very effectively, whereas these items can easily be lost in My Yahoo!

That concludes my thoughts, I hope to continue this series of comparing similar services between Google, Yahoo and MSN in future posts.


Filed Under: Google, Yahoo

Google vs. Yahoo vs. MSN

April 11, 2007 By 9 Comments

When you look at the Big 3 Search Engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, it is difficult to compare them only from a search engine perspective. So I started working on a list which showed a set of categories and listed the product each company brought to the table. After a while I started noticing a trend, Google, Yahoo and MSN have their hands in everything! A user could literally stop using one company’s services and switch to another’s while still being able to accomplish every single task. This is one of the main reasons these companies are so strong, they offer a complete solution. Furthermore for one company to stay competitive with the other two it literally has to be prepared to offer a similar service otherwise it could potentially be left in the dust.


Product Google MSN Yahoo
Search Engine Google Live Yahoo
Email Gmail Hotmail Yahoo Mail
Instant Messaging GTalk MSN Messenger Yahoo Messenger
Feed Reader Google Reader My MSN My Yahoo
Directory Google Directory MSN Directory Yahoo Directory
Social Media / Web 2.0 Blogger,Orkut My MSN del.icio.us,MyBlogLog
Groups Google Groups MSN Groups Yahoo Groups
Maps Google Maps Map Point Yahoo Maps
Finance Google Finance Money Central Yahoo Finance
Shopping Froogle MSN Shopping Yahoo Shopping
News Google News msnbc Yahoo News
Photo Management Picasa MSN Photos Yahoo Photos
Video Google Video MSN Video Yahoo Video
SEO Webmaster Tools Adlabs Yahoo Site Explorer
Sponsored (PPC) Adwords adCenter Yahoo Search Marketing
Analytics Google Analytics Gatineau n/a
Travel n/a MSN Travel Yahoo Travel
Filed Under: Google, MSN, Yahoo

8 Reasons Why Google Finance is better than Yahoo Finance

March 22, 2007 By 1 Comment

I am a financial analyst by no means but I do visit the Google and Yahoo finance sites from time to time to check out stock prices, latest dealings by a company and financial company information. Yesterday I was doing a quick comparison between Google and Yahoo Finance and found Google Finance to be my preference. Here are my top 8 reasons why I like Google Finance over Yahoo Finance.

For this post I compared EBay on Google and Yahoo Finance.

1) There are no graphical ads on Google Finance. Immediately when you arrive on the Yahoo Finance home page your eyes focus towards the bright advertisements for eTrade, AmeriTrade, etc… When I scroll further down I see a large square ad for Pillsbury brownies (as delicious as the brownies might be, the ad takes away from the page).

2) In Google Finance the most important data is displayed prominently. The current stock value and graph showing today’s movement are the focus.

3) Google Finance’s AJAX based chart is quick, simple and intuitive.

4) Google Finance’s incorporation of the latest blog posts regarding the company. It’s very interesting to read about the hottest topics from bloggers’ perspective.

5) I enjoy reading about different company’s executive teams (esp. their earnings) and it’s nice that Google finance makes that available right on the home page.

6) Also available from the home page are a given company’s financials: net income, profit, operating income, revenue, etc…

7) The ability to scroll through a company’s latest news without refreshing the page.

8) Google makes its search box big and bold, while Yahoo’s is small and tucked away. Yahoo’s web search is actually more prominent than their finance search.

Filed Under: Google, Yahoo

Latest Innovations by Yahoo!

February 19, 2007 By Leave a Comment

Usually Google is the search engine known for its innovative new products. Lately, I’ve noticed some interesting developments from Yahoo! which have started to peak my interest. Yahoo! has had a slow start to 2007 with their latest statement of revenue falling short of financial predictions. However, I expect to see much from Yahoo! in the near future because they don’t want to relinquish anymore of their strength in the online space (especially to Google and MSN). The products that have recently been released and have caught my attention are Yahoo’s Suggestion Board and Yahoo! Pipes. The Yahoo! suggestion board is similar to a voting based system that Digg and Reddit have already been using for quite some time, whereas Yahoo! Pipes is a new concept where information from various resources can be outputted to a single location.

Yahoo! Suggestion Board

The Suggestion Board, dubbed the Tango project is simple way for users to communicate bugs or enhancements on many of Yahoo’s products. Voting for the submitted topics help Yahoo’s team assess the need for attention per issue. “In addition to reading feedback from other users, you’ll find responses from Yahoo! employees about the issues. Product teams regularly read and take action on your feedback,” from the Yodel Blog. Some of the Yahoo product feedback categories include: Autos, Travel, Pipes, SiteExplorer and Food.

Many Digg users criticized Yahoo! for duplicating Digg’s framework, however I agree with Michael Arrington at TechCrunch that Yahoo! didn’t do anything wrong and is not a competitor to Digg. Yahoo’s system is focused on getting feedback on their own products whereas Digg serves the purpose of a broader range of topics. Topics on the suggestion board are also not news items while Digg Topics are in large portion news related.

However, how well is the suggestion board going to work? I believe it could work fairly well. The suggestion board has a lot of good things going for it, including a clean/simple interface, a user driven framework and a searchable database of topics. If this spreads anything like Yahoo! Answers does, Yahoo! can count on having a unique way to understand how to improve their products for years to come. The framework is very new and I definitely see Yahoo! adding features such as: Top Users and News for Product improvements.

Yahoo! Pipes

“Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.” Using a drag and drop type of interface users can select a set of sources (XML Feed, Google/Yahoo Search Query, Flickr), identify user inputs, apply operators (sorting, programmatic looping, truncate, concatenate, translations with Babel), and output it to a single location.

In order to grow the Yahoo! Pipes community Yahoo! has added sections such as documentation, discussion boards, and the ability to view other users’ pipes. On the home page you can find featured pipes as well as news on the latest updates to Yahoo! Pipes.

I do have to admit that the interface is a little clunky and it does have somewhat of a learning curve. Having some programming knowledge is also a nice bonus when trying to use some of the advanced modules. There have been times the interface crashed on me and I was unable to save my changes, however I think that this product will continually see improvements and enhancements. I was able to develop a simple pipe of my own which included combining 2 feeds, sorting them by date and applying an English to Spanish filter.

Some of the “hottest” pipes include: New York Times thru Flickr, Merging all the Official Yahoo! Blogs and Techcrunch Citations.

As I mentioned before, I think we’ll see Yahoo! continue to build additions to their portfolio of products or enhancements to existing tools in order to remain competitive. Yahoo’s suggestion board and Yahoo! Pipes are a great start to 2007 and the purchase of MyBlogLog late last year was also a great addition. I am interested to see what else Yahoo! comes out with and I plan on trying to stay on top of it all.

Filed Under: Yahoo