Read this blog in French

My first go with Yahoo Pipes.

Fascinating stuff, but I’m finding it frustrating. I tried to do an illustrated blog using For Each Annotate and the Flickr module. I can’t get it to work. I managed to get some images retrieved, but couldn’t get them to display, and their relevance was marginal, even using the Content Analysis module which is meant to retrieve key words. Noticed that the official example which does the same thing doesn’t seem to work either (at the time of writing), which makes me feel better.

Another problem is that the output always truncates each feed item. Any French readers trying the above link will be disappointed when they click the link, as it reverts to English. Not easy to fix, since Yahoo does not publish a Babel Fish API. I could put a Translate link on the blog page, but that wouldn’t be Yahoo Pipes.

 

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Why Microsoft’s search share is declining

Internet Explorer is the dominant browser, Windows the dominant desktop, yet Microsoft’s share of internet search is apparently declining. Here’s why. I’m researching Yahoo Pipes; I forget the exact url for the Pipes home page so I type the search into the IE7 search box, where Microsoft’s “Live search” is the default.

The page I want is not on the first page of results. The ads are irrelevant. Some of the search results are at least relevant, but they are not what I would call top tier results.Even the O’Reilly link is a page for all articles tagged Yahoo, not one of the actual Pipes articles.

So I switch to Google search. The page I want is top of the search results. The other entries are more relevant. Even the ad is moderately relevant (at least it is about software Pipes not metal tubes).

This is of course anecdotal. It was also a tough test, considering Yahoo Pipes is new. Perhaps there are hundreds of other searches where Live Search gets better results. All I can say is that I rarely discover them, whereas I frequently find Google’s results much better. This just struck me as a good example.

Microsoft will never improve its share of search unless it can deliver at least equally good results.

See also my IT Week comment.

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