From Jeremy Zawodny’s blog: “Yup, it’s another public beta. This time it’s My Yahoo Search. And it’s launching in Yahoo! Next, which is where we’re starting to put stuff we’d like the public to play with…
– Update:
http://mysearch.yahoo.com/ is really nice. You can add comments to the results returned, block sites, send the results to someon else. Nice.
Clusty the Clustering Engine. It looks like this search engine is the joint effort by looksmart.com and vivisimo. Looks nice and fast. I will need some time to use it before I can understand its features.
It looks like everybody is talking about Firefox. It’s not just WIRED that declared Firefox “hot”, or Charles Cooper, Executive Editor, CNET News.com, who dumped IE for Firefox. It’s the whole Internet community that seems to love it!
I did a little research and here are the numbers to prove it:
(I guess Intelliseek’s Blogpulse Trends would show the same thing, but the site was not working at the time I wrote this…)
Does anyone else have access to similar stats?
[27/9/2004 11:51 UTC, Update: you can now see the top-10 results returned by google.]
After many experiments, the new and improved g-metrics.com is alive!
* UI improvements.
- The user interface has been redesigned from scratch, and I think that is is much more usable than the old one.
- This comes with a new logo.
* New features.
- There are separet RSS feeds for each “query”.
- If you are a registered user, you can have an agregated RSS feed for all the queries included in your watchlist. When you add or remove queries from your watchlist, the RSS feed is automaticaly updated.
- Much like the agregated feed described above, you can use a link that goes directly to your watchlist.
- A prefiled google search box is displayed with every report, so “going to the results” is one click away.
- Users can change their personal details (username, email)
- when a new query is added to the database, google is imediately polled, so you don’t miss todays results.
* More to come. During the whole redesign thing I changed the backend a lot. There are some new features comming..
- “normalized results” (percent of the total pages indexed by google). [many thanks to Matthew Hurst for the idea]
- a preview of the top 10 results per query returned by google,
- “tags” much like gmail does that will hepl you organize a long watchlist much better.
* BUGS + COMPATIBILITY
I tried a lot to make the “transition” transparent, however there may be some external links that are now broken as the page names have changed.
I also noticed that sometimes, if you had already checked the “remember me” button at the old version, you may have problems logging in to the new. I’m working on it, but you may try to delete the old cookies stored by g-metrics, login and logout once. Then everything should work fine.
As always, I’m eager to hear from you!
Panayotis.
Jeremy asks what we would like to see in a Yahoo! API, sould Yahoo! decides to publish one….
Please, everything! The nice thing with Yahoo! is that they are much more than a search engine. They are a complete application platform (mail, calendar, stocks, contacts,…) Give us access to it and we’ll make aps!
During the g-metrics redesign (it will soon be ready!), I faced a common problem in HTML design: while most elements on a HTML page can be easily an nicely customized using CSS, checkboxes and radio button keep their original, browser-specific look.
I looked arround the Internet, but the alternatives I found were based on creating a little “checked” and the related “unchecked” image and swapping them using javascript. This approach has many problems, and the most important one is that you have to create a different set of images for every size, color, etc. you want to use.
So I came up with a solution that I consider more elegant and easy to use. It is based on displaying a “webdings” (font containing special images) “check” inside an area with border. Javascript is used to dynamicaly change the font color so that the check becomes visible/invisible every time you click. It is easy to acheve other effects (like garying-out when unchecked) just by changing the colors.
Here is a sample code (you can view it here):
<html>
<!–
How to create a custom checkbox.
2004-09-22, Panayotis Vryonis
http://g-metrics.blogspot.com/
–>
<head>
<style type=”text/css” media=”screen”>
.customCheckboxON { color: #0000aa ; }
.customCheckboxOFF { color: #ffffff ; }
.customCheckbox {
color: #ffffff ;
border: 2px #0000aa solid ;
background: #ffffff ;
font-weight: bold ;
font-family: webdings;
}
</style>
<script language=”JavaScript” type=”text/javascript”><!–
function chkHandler(id) {
var obj = document.getElementById(id) ;
c = obj.className ;
if (c == ‘customCheckboxON’) {
obj.className = ‘customCheckboxOFF’ ;
document.myform.my_checkbox.value = 0 ; //update a form field
}
else {
obj.className = ‘customCheckboxON’ ;
document.myform.my_checkbox.value = 1 ; //update a form field
}
}
//–>
</script>
</head>
<body>
<form name=”myform”>
<p>
Check this: <span class=”customCheckbox”><span id=”box1″ onClick=”chkHandler(‘box1′);” >a</span></span>
<input type=”text” name=”my_checkbox” id=”my_checkbox” size=”1″ value=”0″>
</p>
</form>
</body>
</html>
There are by some estimates more than 3 million weblogs. But most of them get no visibility in search engines. Only a few “A-List” blogs get into the top search engine results for a given topic, while the majority of blogs just don’t get noticed. But this posting could solve that. Let’s help the smaller blogs get more visibility!
This posting is GoMeme 4.0. So far we have tried 3 earlier variations. Our first test, GoMeme 1.0, spread to nearly 740 blogs in 2.5 days. This new version 4.0 is shorter, simpler, and fits more easily into your blog.
Why are we doing this? We want to help thousands of blogs get more visibility. How does it work? Just follow the instructions below to re-post this meme in your blog and add your URL to the end of the Path List below. As the meme spreads onwards from your blog, so will your URL. Your blog will be part of the pat for everyone downstream from you. That way they can see where they got this message from. Everyone in the Path List below benefits in a similar way as this meme spreads. Try it!
Instructions: Just copy this entire post and paste it into your blog. Then add your URL to the end of the path list below, and pass it on! (Make sure you add your URLs as live links or HTML code to the Path List below.)
Path List
1. Minding the Planet
2. g-metrics blog
3. (your URL goes here! But first, please copy this line and move it down to the next line for the next person).
(NOTE: Be sure you paste live links for the Path List or use HTML code.)
–
PS.
I have also added a g-metrics query for “GoMeme 4.0″
Panayotis.
I just found a nice service using the Google WEB API. It is called H-Bot. Here is what Dan Cohen, posted to Google Groups:
We’ve just launched a beta version of an application that uses the
Google API in combination with other resources to answer historical
questions like “When did Charles Lindbergh fly to Paris?” “When was
Nelson Mandela born?” “What was the gold standard?” “Who was Lao-Tse?”
We are still developing and testing the application, called H-Bot, and
are very interested in receiving some preliminary feedback before
doing a more official launch to students and teachers.
You can try H-Bot out on the web at http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/h-bot/
or via an AOL instant messenger client by adding a buddy with the AIM
screen name “chnmhbot”. If you type in “help” it will give you some
tips on using it. Also, if H-Bot gives you an incorrect answer, you
can type “wrong” and it will automatically log the error so we can try
to fine tune our programming.
Thanks in advance for the feedback of anyone who might be interested.
Dan Cohen
Director of Research Projects
Center for History and New Media
George Mason University
Nice idea!
The Athens Olympics are over… It was fun for us Greeks, I hope the rest of the world enjoyed them as much as we did (it looks like you did!). I think Athens was proud to have all you athletes, visitors, journalists, tourists here for some days, and… we will miss you!
Here is how g-metrics reported on “olympics”. It will be interesting to see how the graph goes in the next 4 years!
I’m working on the new version of g-metrics.com. The backend is being rewritten almost from scratch and the user interface will be much more clean and easy to use.
Here are some new features I have in mind to implement:
- “orphan queries”. After a couple of months of operation there are queries that have been eitrher entered by mistake or are of no interest any more and they no user has them in his watchlist. There will be a list of the “orphan queries” that (unless someone adds them to his watchlist) they will be deleted after some time.
- top 10 results. The query details page will show the top 10 results returned by google (and will probably include a link directly to the google results page.
- edit profile. Registered users will be able to edit their profile (email, name, opt-in for newsletter).
- rss feeds. There will be a link to the individual rss feed at the query details page.
- new query initialization. when a new query is added to the system, google will be imediately polled (now you may wait up to 24 hours to see the firs results).
Any other ideas? I can’t promise anything, but I’ll try… 
(some of you asked for virtual folders so that a long watchlist can be organized better, but this will have to wait for a later version…)