Tagged: google RSS

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

     

    • 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 8:29 pm on February 24, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: cloud computing, gmail, google, offline, outage   

    GMail outage and cloud computing myth 

    A couple of days ago I was enjoying a talk with my fiancée about the myth of cloud computing. As an example of volatility of this kind of solutions I pointed out a hypothetical situation when GMail goes offline and many people loses their emails as they store all the emails on the Google servers only.

    So today it happened. GMail and suite of Google web applications went offline today for 2,5 hours. Looks like a large part of 115 million users were not able to perform their daily tasks losing real money.

    It makes me think cloud computing is right as long as you own your data!

    PS) I don’t use GMail at all.

     

    • Dexter 10:28 am on February 25, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      I couldn’t agree more about cloud computing idea.

      I remember that not so long ago one of friends joked at me that I’m so “oldschool” that I still use desktop mailing application for storing my correspondence locally. Well.. :)

    • Łukasz Milewski 1:29 am on February 26, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Although I was impacted by an outage, I’m using Google Offline with Chrome so still I was able to access my current emails and archive just like if it was desktop application. But no new e-mails or sending ones.

      • Jakub Pawlowicz 11:08 am on February 26, 2009 Permalink | Reply

        I don’t know exactly how Google Offline works but are you able to export the offline database to a text file or a XML database? So do you actually own the data?

    • Psi 7:57 pm on April 1, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      I think you’re overreacting… I think I didn’t even notice the GMail downtime, I just don’t check mail every 5 minutes. It’s not like everyone lost thousands of emails, they just couldn’t access them for 2 hours.

      Sure, there are some people for whom it’s critical to be able to access all their emails and check for new ones all the time, but it’s probably less than 10% of the users…

      • Jakub Pawlowicz 8:38 pm on April 1, 2009 Permalink | Reply

        If it was as you’ve said then 10% of 115 million users is quite a lot of people actually :)

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