Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery ... Or its All Simon's Fault  And the New Yahoo

I was reading over Simon's recent blog entry about the new look and feel of Yahoo and  found this little gem:

The "open in new window" icon for each search result is a clever addition, ...

And even though I had previously dutifully followed Jeremy's link to the new yahoo look and feel and actually used it, that icon , just hadn't reached out and said "Dude! Put this in Feedster.  Like now dude".  But Simon's posting did.  So now every Feedster entry has a color adjusted version of this icon which hopefully will become a standard for "Open this in another browser window".

Thank you simon!  Oh and I was going to post references to a bunch of Simon's recent highly excellent entries but they're pretty much all recommended.  So why don't you go read Simon?

Overall comments on the new Yahoo?  Nice job guys, nice job.  Clean and with a good job of emphasizing the different type of searches you offer.  I particularly like the distinction between Directory and Search which has always been problematic (imho).  Am I likely to use it though?  Probably not.  Why?  The convenience of the Googlebar. 

Suggestion for Yahoo:  Want to wean me off the Google bar then offer that functionality.  Not the whole damn thing you do now but just that.  And be gutsy enough to have a radio button right in the ui onscreen (not a combo box) so I can still send my search to Google if I want to.  Getting users to change over is hard when you're taking away features they already know and like -- so don't.   Let them grow gradually into the new Yahoo.  Even if you're still pulling results from the Google engine, people are used to the look and feel of Google results so accept that you'll give some traffic away initially to get people away from the Google bar.

Google toolbar.  I wonder if they had any idea how "sticky" that damn little toolbar was going to make Google.  My guess?  No.

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If You're Writing an RSS Aggregator ...

Then you really ought to read Quarter Life.  He's put together a set of likes and dislikes.  I know a bunch of my readers are writing aggregators of one form or another and this is probably useful to them.  Lots of good ideas here. 

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Metrics, Feedster, Google and MSN Search

I just saw a good comparison of Google versus MSN Search over on MicroDoc News.  Then I ran into a site where someone used Feedster as a benchmark i.e. "... feedster reports 47 hits when searching for SharpReader." [_Go_] 

That metric was on Monday at 12:16 am as our handy-dandy, ever-friendly permalink tells us.  Now that it's Tuesday at 4 pm, I thought it would be interesting to see the # of hits from Feedster, Google and MSN:

• Feedster - 101 posts
• Google - 19 posts
• MSN - 10 posts

Damn interesting.  Other stats:

• Over 150,000 total queries since I started tracking them
• Over 16,000 different rss sources indexed
• Over 360,000 blog postings indexed
• Over 50% of the queries on a daily basis are now coming in thru an aggregator. 

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So What Was that Link ? Or Search Blogs By Links Has Arrived

Ok.  It has been a bit without some new Feedster features thanks to the vagaries of illness and clients stepping in and bopping me on the head -- hey its easter, shouldn't I be able to draw from Little Bunny Foo Foo?  Anyway --

YOU CAN NOW SEARCH FEEDSTER FOR URLS!

Here's how this works:

1. You put in a query like 'http://www.scripting.com' (No single quites and notice the lack of a trailing slash; on the bug list but works that way right now) or 'www.scripting.com'. Example
2. Feedster finds and gives you all blog postings with a link or links to that site
3. Feedster also now has a Show: Links option next to every blog on the results page so you can drill down to everything a given blog has linked to.  I added this because a lot of times you know you saw it on Blog X but you can't find the exact post.  So if you know that Robert Scoble has linked to something but you can't remember it exactly?  Just click on Links and you can see everything he's linked to. Example.

Limits

1. Support for fully qualified urls down to an exact url is limited right now or it may not work at all.  I'm trying to work out the right code to determine if a given string is a fully qualified path or just a partial url fragment.  If anyone has php code for this or suggestions, much appreciated (i..e I'm indexing base pairs as well as full links and I want to avoid full substring matches at all cost).
2. Not yet supported in rss output.  I know, I know.  Its coming but it'll take another day or so and I wanted to release something new today.
3. If your blog has its rich content like links stored in the content:encoded chunk of an RDF file then your links won't be indexed.  This will be fixed but it isn't there today.

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IE 6:  A Steaming Pile of Gaagh ?  And other Miscellaneous Stuff

Sigh.  Finally feeling better, getting back to work so of course the other hammer strikes.  And strikes hard.  Woke up -- without heat (again)!  This is now the 4th or 5th time this year that I've had this trouble A recent email conversation with someone about tying Internet content to real world addresses is now **astonishingly** relevant.  I'd love to tie this blog entry, tied to these physical coordinates, for the next tenant to the effect: "Furnace sucks green slimy rocks, negoiate hard on that point".  That person had a fairly convoluted approach to doing so.  Elegant, don't get me wrong but a bit convolute.  I'm now just thinking about something as simple as keying in GPS coordinates into a blog entry.  Hrm.....

But I started this with a vent about IE6, now didn't I?  Oh yes, that's right.  I recently, approx last 3 weeks, moved to IE 6 from IE 5.5 with the express hope of better stability but not only is my response to that query "No" but its more like "Hell freaking A no".  What a pile of steaming klingon gaagh.  For non trekkies, that's a pile of writhing worm like things that Klingons love to eat.  And I'm sure I spelled it wrong as someone here will no doubt tell me.  Again I digress, no doubt illustrating the out of practice nature of today's blogging.  I guess the bottom line comment is that IE 6 sucks and this morning I just crashed it with this sequence of keystrokes: View => Explorer Bar => Search.  Pathetic.  I'd ask if anyone else has problems with IE 6 but that's just redundant I suppose. 

Note: I do run Mozilla quite frequently as well as IE.  I was experimenting with IE6 deliberately for Feedster stuff.

So while the past week has been all about illness, fever and utterly monstrous quantities of orange juice, I'm now facing no heat and computer crashes.  Definitely more desirable adversaries.  At least in my opinion.

Postscript

And to make matters utterly fscking perfect, I just realized that 1 hour, 13 minutes after posting this, its STILL NOT UP.  *grumble*

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