Yahoo has updated its Desktop Search and now supports Thunderbird email. Although previous versions of YDS did index and search Thunderbird files you had to search them under the “All files” category. Now you can chose just “Email”. The number of file types supported in the main program has been considerably reduced, though. If you want the full range of 300+ file types you have to install the expansion pack.
For me, Yahoo Desktop is still by far the best with Copernic’s offering coming second.
Yahoo to the Max is a new book from Ran Hock that tells you all there is to know about Yahoo together with recommended strategies for getting the best out of the service. I sometimes suspect that Ran knows more about Yahoo than Yahoo themselves!
Yagoohoogle, mentioned in a posting on April 7th, has becomeTwingine. Same features (compares Google and Yahoo side by side) but the title and URL are much easier to remember!
Yahoo! Mindset: “View Yahoo! Search results sorted according to whether they are more commercial or more informational (i.e., from academic, non-commercial, or research-oriented sources).”
I really like this one! Type in your search and Yahoo! Mindset gives you the first 10 results with a slider bar at the top of the page. At one end of the bar is “shopping” and at the other “researching”. You start off in the middle and can slide the bar in either direction to change the emphasis.
A test search on ‘gin vodka sales UK’ actually came up with a good result at number 1 with the slider in the middle – the Gin and Vodka Association (yes, there really is one and the site has some good statistics!). Moving the slider towards ‘researching’ started to move the Gin & Vodka Association down the list but brought in equally interesting data I might otherwise have missed. As expected, moving the slider towards ‘shopping’ brought up sites selling gin and/or vodka, books on Amazon telling me how to make gin and vodka cocktails and a site with the wonderful name of Dinky Drinks!
More research orientated strategies such as ‘climate change’ and ‘hubbert peak oil’ were not as varied and the shopping side was more about books on the subject. What they did highlight, though, was that shifting the bar in either direction significantly altered the results that appeared in the top 10 and presented pages that one might not have normally seen.
Highly recommended.
An interesting tool that runs your search on both Google and Yahoo at the same time. It displays your results in two fames alongside one another in your browser so you can view both sets at the same time. Actually – its better to look at them one at a time; I started to feel seasick trying to compare the results in both sets. If you just want to compare coverage and results between Yahoo and Google for a particular search strategy then use Thumbshots Ranking.