2005-02-04

3 cool new tools

one from amazon, one from google, and one from microsoft

A9 Yellow Pages
When you tell A9 to find a starbucks near west 110th street, it not only gives you the address but it shows you a photo of the storefront and the storefronts of the adjacent businesses.

Google Video
Remember that Seinfeld episode where Kramer has a line in a movie...? Something about pretzels...? Try searching for "Title:seinfeld pretzels" Be sure to click on the result when it comes up.

MSN Search
Microsoft finally released its "google-killer." It's actually pretty good. MS is taking advantage of its resources such as Encarta encyclopedia. Try searching for "what is the volume of lake michigan?" or "what is the capital of madagascar?" For me, the coolest part about MSN Search is that the bottom of every results page has a link to RSS (for more information about RSS, go here)

6 comments:

J-Wild said...

Very cool! I have to say that I do prefer the clean look of Google's homepage, as well as they way in which they formatt their results. Of course I am a MAC user so we all know why I prefer a cleaner more sophisticated look!

Brandon said...

That's an interesting observation considering the homepages are basically identical. We may need a ruling from Kenny on this, but I tend to think of "clean" and "sophisticated" as antonyms when it comes to web design.

kenny said...

I think we can all agree that google's homepage is "cleaner" than Yahoo!'s. That "sophisticated" word is the stickler. Different people use it differently. I think Jason is using "sophisticated" to say "simpler" which in some cases is appropriate usage. I would guess that Brandon is seeing "sophisticated" to mean "more advanced." If you're looking for a ruling, I would say that Google is much cleaner and simpler (ala apple interface), where Yahoo! is clean... but much more sophisticated in it's layout and features. Personally, I prefer the simple, unclutteredness of Google as my web browser of choice. I'm also a firm believer that until you've searched at least 3 different search engines you haven't really researched your topic fully.

Brandon said...

Yahoo? I thought we were comparing www.google.com with search.msn.com

kenny said...

Oh... ha.
Well, my comments were in regards to Yahoo! vs. Google. I'll have to explore MSN more to do a proper comparision.

Anonymous said...

I don't mean to break the conversation but - is this Brandon - as in Beth Isbel's husband? If not, just ignore me...Peace.