San Diego.. and a take on Yahoo!

Pheww! Back in action after more than two weeks. It's been a long week with midterms, project submissions and a great trip to San Diego, courtesy IEEE at USD. SD was a welcome change from the dull landscape of Phoenix where the only vegetation is the omnipresent cactus and a few trees transplanted from California. The green hills and cool weather in SD reminded me of Ooty in India where I had some of my most memorable college trips. The houses in Old Town in SD are almost colonial and each house is distinctive, unlike the cookie cutter houses you find in newer cities. If California was a litle less expensive, it would be the best place on earth to live in!

Yahoo! has upgraded it's search engine to catch up with it's main rival and partner, Google. It has taken a page out of Google's book and reduced the graphics on the search results page. Also, a search for any item returns images of those items at the top of the page like this.(compare with Google.) Also, search results now display maps and stock information within the search results which eliminates one level of clicks for many users. However,with all it's improvements, Yahoo! now looks more like Google instead of looking any different, so it's not clear how Yahoo! hopes to regain the converts. What Yahoo! should really learn from Google is it's ease of navigation and apparent reliability. For example, Google puts it's sponsored results with a distinct background on two tiny rows on the top, while the rest of the sponsored links appear in colored boxes on the right. Yahoo! on the other hand puts sponsored results in multiple rows on the top in a way which makes it difficult to distinguish it from the actual search results. To me, it looks like an attempt to confuse visitors into clicking on the sponsored results since the actual results are not visible unless you scroll down the page.

Also, Yahoo!'s product search will have a tough time competing with a killer app that is still being tested by Google labs, named Froogle(a cross between the words google and frugal) which scans sites for products on sale and displays the results in a (yeah, here we go again..) easily navigable manner. Try the same product search on Froogle here.

P.S. The only thing on my mind right now, is how to catch up on all the lost sleep. Will get back to my usual ramblings after I wake up.