The Five Things That Yahoo! Search Can Do But Not Google

Google is the world’s favorite search engine but there are a some cool things that you can do only in Yahoo!. Here they are:

1. Compose emails from the Yahoo! search box.

Type !mail abc@xyz.com in the Yahoo! search box and it will automatically compose a new email message for you in Yahoo! mail.

2. Get Lyrics of any song or your favorite artist.

Type James Blunt lyrics (for lyrics of James Blunt songs) or Jmaes Blunt 1973 lyrics (for lyrics of a particular song)

3. Specifiy the order of search keywords in queries

Say you want only web pages where word x comes before y but not vice versa, then just put the search query in Square Brackets. An example:[Sylvester Stallone] - will only return web pages where the word Sylvester appear before Stallone.

4. Search your favorite websites from Yahoo! itself.

For instance, type !wiki google in Yahoo! search box to search Google in Wikipedia.com. Other popular shortcuts are !ebay, !amazon, and !flickr. You can also execute these from the Firefox search box without changing the default search engine.

5. linkdomain - An undocumented Yahoo Web search operator.

A quick question - Can you find the number of articles on Wikipedia website that link to CNN.com ? It’s almost impossible to get this data from Google but you can do so quite easily in Yahoo! with the incredibly useful linkdomain operator. The answer is:linkdomain:cnn.com site:wikipedia.org

Or take another example - How many stories on TechCrunch actually link to the PayPerPost, Arrington’s favorite topic. The answer here is:site:techcrunch.com linkdomain:payperpost.com

Technorati Tags: MDI, Research at MDI, Yahoo vs. Google, Google vs. Yahoo, Yahoo Operators.

How About Karaoke-Lyrics plugin unleashed

How about some karaoke! If I'd say that most of the people (at least the ones I know) use Windows Media Player or Winamp. Wouldn't it be fun if you would be able to sing your favorite song as it is playing. Many would say that it's easy, just open a freaking browser window and search for the lyrics. What if I'd say that it's even more easier. All you have to do is to install what is popularly called as lyricsplugin. This is a small but awesome piece of software. As you play your favorite song the lyrics is pulled right into your players window. Here's a snapshot of how it can be integrated with WMP.

Technorati Tags: Lyricsplugin, Lyrics Plugin, MDI, Research at MDI, Information Management Research

I am not going to Boast

I am not going to be boastful, at least not to the extent of being obnoxious. I just realized that I have a PR of 2. For the less tech savvy guys, PR is Google's patent technology to give ranks to the web-pages. One site can have multiple web pages and each of these pages have their own page rank. Let me scrape a few lines from how Google defines it's page rank.

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance.

Getting a pagerank of 2 is not a big deal, but getting it without any optimization effort is pretty neat. I am not going to struggle to take it to a higher level nor am I interested in selling posts on my blog and make some cheap money. But I'll keep a close eye on how the PR is making a progress.

Technorati Tags: PageRank, Information Management Research, Research at MDI, MDI, Research