Jakub Pawlowicz – Thoughts on life

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• Jakub Pawlowicz 8:44 pm on June 14, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: cnet, contextual search, google (2), vertical search engine, wikipedia, wolfram, yahoo (2), youtube   

  The way I search 

  In the past months I noticed a shift in the way I search things over the internet. I started using vertical search engines (like YouTube or IMDB for music/videos related topics, Wikipedia for articles, BBC for news, or Wolfram for scientific data) more often in cases when I definitely know what I’m looking for. For these tasks I don’t use Yahoo or Google search engines anymore because these give me too wide set of results often from categories that don’t interest me at all. The traditional search engines still do work fine when there is no evident place to look for a piece of information or data is scattered between multiple pages, but these are no more an entry point in searching for something.

  Some wise people foreseen such a shift a couple of years ago and I see it becomes the case for me, an experienced internet user. It probably won’t be a case for beginners and casual internet users but since Google and Yahoo start to enhance search data with more contextual results it feels the change is about to happen.

  Is this a case for you too?

  Jakub Pawlowicz, Jo B, and Psi are discussing. Toggle Comments

   

  • Psi 9:16 am on June 15, 2009 Permalink | Reply

    Honestly, I generally still use Google even if I really indent to find something on Wikipedia… I think it’s just easier to type something in Firefox’s/Safari’s search field than to go to some website first and then do the search. So even if I specifically want information from Wikipedia, I type ” wikipedia” in the search field and click on the first result It’s just laziness, I guess… But this is how it works for me.

    It doesn’t work in all cases though, e.g. if I’m looking for a video, I go to Youtube, because Google will only give me 1-2 video results. Although sometimes Youtube doesn’t show me that video because of some ridiculous copyright issues, in that case I go to Google and do the search there, and it shows me results from other video sites, which aren’t as restrictive.

    • Jakub Pawlowicz 8:26 pm on June 15, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      I guess it is laziness because the same thing was happening to me. However I then realized that it’s actually a waste of time as going directly to a page where I know the information is take less time. At least for me. I type quite fast

  • Jo B 1:17 pm on June 15, 2009 Permalink | Reply

    Is it possible to get a list of vertical search engines for highly specialized/categorized searches?

    • Jakub Pawlowicz 8:31 pm on June 15, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Hi Jo! Once I read your question two things came to my mind – ask Wikipedia, and ask Google. I checked both and looks like Google gives Wikipedia as a first result. Anyway you may find these pages helpful:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_search_engine
      http://searchenginewatch.com/2156351

      And still YouTube for audio and video, Wikipedia for articles, WolframAlpha for scientific data. Enjoy!

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• Jakub Pawlowicz 12:05 pm on December 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

  Site redesign 

  As you may have already noticed during the recent weeks I’ve been busy updating my home page. Right now its first revision is pretty much finished with only minor things left out for update in the coming days.

  Feel invited to check what have changed and drop a comment on what you do and don’t like.

  For the web-savvy  users – you may find it interesting to check how the page looks like in different browsers as I used progressive enhancement to provide more functionality in modern, more advanced browsers (like Firefox, Safari or Chrome).

  Enjoy!

   

• Jakub Pawlowicz 10:37 am on October 3, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: front end, goldenline (2), login process, social (2), Usability (2), ux (3)   

  Login screen done the wrong way 

  Today I’m going to talk a little about GoldenLine.pl, a polish social network, one of the biggest on our market. I needed to create an account there recently, and came across their registration & login process. Registration was standard and pretty painless. The interesting things started when I needed to login for the first time.

  Here’s how the login form looks like:

  

   

  Interesting, isn’t it? The very first question that came into my mind is what’s the default action? Signing up? It should be signing in as majority of users are ones who have the account. Something like this:

  

  I noticed this, as I made a mistake the first time I was signing in. The second time I did it the “right” way, but it isn’t the case. User should not adapt to the service’s interface. This is interface role to guide user by using right information visualization (like using right colors to highlight more likely actions). 

  The second thing: they should use the information entered in the login form to check if user have an account even if he or she clicks “Sign Up”. This is because user may forget about having an account in the system or they clicked a wrong button. If user doesn’t have it, then move to the sign up form, but with some fields already filled in (like email).

  Good systems already implement such preemptive approach (see Pragmatic Programmers as an example). 

  Right now I’m going to ask GoldenLine.pl what they are going to do with this. Stay tuned.

  Login screen done the wrong way - revisited « Jakub Pawlowicz’s Weblog is discussing. Toggle Comments

   

• Jakub Pawlowicz 2:28 pm on August 29, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: mash, social (2), social networking, user experience (3), web 2.0, web applications, yahoo (2)   

  Yahoo Mash shutting down (or how to shut down a web application the bad way) 

  I’m not a Mash user, but I found this story interesting. As you can read on TechCrunch, Yahoo Mash, a social networking site, will be shutting down in a month from now. As always it is not a nice thing for a user, but sometimes it happens. And here’s what makes it very interesting from the usability perspective. 

  If you carefully read the email posted on TechCrunch site, then you may notice it says you need to copy your data manually as in a month it become completely unavailable. Wait a second. Manually? Manually is so last century. It is so Web 1.0. Don’t they have a way to export all user data into an XML file, or all the contacts as vcards? Or maybe a nice PDF presentation with all the data on it? It is not that hard to create such a functionality, and from a user perspective, in this not very pleasant conditions, it is at least a nice way to say them “thank you” for using the service.

  Looks like somebody at Yahoo didn’t do a homework.