I've picked up a few tricks about Internet searching, mostly that I'll probably be using the advanced Search capabilities more often. I compared my usual, Google, with Bing. Both give good but different results and each has it's own set of unique features making it a preference thing. I still haven't figured out how Bing is going to change my life and make decisions any easier like it does in the commercials. Maybe I'm not "connected" enough or maybe I'm not interested enough to really figure out how Bing can chose the right summer camp for my kids.
I tried looking at a bunch of "visual" search engines. Not including the ones that were for searching graphic images, I was not impressed with the eye candy they offered. Some give you a bunch of thumbnails in varying and dazzling presentation formats of the web pages that you must enlarge to see what's on it. Not very useful when reading the the two sentence summary included in standard search pages is much easier. Others offer a big shot of the web pages, again in super cool whiz bang style. Again, not very useful because you only see one result at a time. All of them are bandwidth hogs that need to load the result web pages first before any of the wow presentation methods will actually work and entertain you.
I was disappointed to see that Kartoo has changed it's format since I last visited it a couple of years ago. Search results were presented in a mind-map style layout with similar pages and thoughts categorized in different branches. Clicking on any of the subtopics would take you to a search for that. It was similar to Visual Thesaurus. Upon further reading I just found out that they closed in 2010. Looks like they are back up again but in the format they now have.Wikipedia says that the mind-map presentation they had was ahead of its time.
So, now that I've found my words I guess I have to process them. Without being redundant with my forum posts I'll try to say something new. Zoho Docs has more features than Google Docs but in order to collaborate and share, invitees must have an email address associated with a Zoho account. In Google, you can share and collaborate with anyone, privately or publicly as an open invitation to anyone on the net who knows or can find the document url.
Interestingly, I'm in my personal Google Docs site now and I'm trying to figure out why I have several of my classmates' shared work from previous classes listed. I don't remember giving out my personal Google name and I don't remember trying to connect any Docs between personal Google and Wolfmail. I do have my Wolfmail email pushed to my personal one?? Any thoughts?
Good post and good analysis.
ReplyDeleteMy guess is, despite the features of competitors, Google will be the standard-bearer of online suites, especially with how they integrate all of their other offerings. Then again, in 1995, I bet that Apple would cease to exist by the turn of the century.
If you forward your Wolfmail to you Gmail, any docs shared in Wolfmail will appear in your personal Google Docs.
Hope this helps.
Hope this helps.