Yovav (Jay) Meydad's Personal Blog

Just got an announcement from Xoopit that they are shutting down Xoopit for Gmail in order to focus on improving Yahoo mail and My Pictures. This comes as a surprise to me and does not smell like a business decision for two reasons:

• Xoopit should have more resources now that they are part of Yahoo
• I agree with Ouriel that Yahoo could benefit a lot from the data Xoopit collects about Gmail usage

For these reasons and also for the way their email ends, I actually think that it was Google who forced Yahoo and Xoopit to make that decision -

Thank you for using Xoopit for Gmail. We’ll miss you!

Anyways Xoopit, it was fun to use you. You helped me find some forgotten pics that were buried deep inside my Gmail archive. I will miss you as well.

A few months ago Google officially released Google Suggest to be a primary feature on Google’s home page. In a blog post that announced this, the product managers in charge of the feature explained the different improvements including personalized suggestions, navigational suggestions (link to official site) and sponsored suggestions (very similar to the Israeli PredictAd).

Today I discovered another hidden feature that I was not aware of – suggestion of the right spelling for a query that contains a misspelling. For example, start typing the the query “waist of t” and Google will suggest terms such as “waste of time” or “waste of space”. Pretty cool as it saves you the extra “Did you mean?” search.

By the way, when comparing this feature of Google Suggest to the other search engines, I would rank them in the following order:

1. Google – variety of offers and misspelling correction
2. Ask – misspelling correction but small variety of suggestions
3. Yahoo – strong bias towards suggesting misspelling
4. Bing – No variety, no misspelling correction. Still needs to do major improvements in that area.

In the last year I have seen several house ads running on the AdSense network, promoting different Google services such as Chrome, Picasa and Google Analytics. But today while reading TechCrunch, I saw for the first time an ad targeted to acquire new advertisers.

I wonder if that is a response to the fact Microsoft AdCenter came out of beta recently or to the Bing launch, a search engine that I highly recommend using.

BTW, does anyone know if (and how much) Google pays publishers when visitors clicks on these house ads and take action (download picasa or chrome, sign up for analytics or as advertisers)?

google-house-ad-adwords

Despite what a few bloggers have posted lately, despite the fact Google wants to buy Twitter very much, despite Twitter’s speculated price tag, I am calling the Twitter executive team not to sell itself to Google’s.

If Twitter will be part of Google it is probably going to go down at the same time Gmail and other Google services go down (you can check status here). This would leave millions of folks in the twittersphere with no effective tool to immediately post their rants.

Biz, Ev, You have built the internet’s freedom of speech best tool. Don’t do it.

Earlier today, while reading Google’s response to the Gmail outage, a little “Sign up for Gmail” text link had caught my eye. I know it is an editorially selected link rather than a target ad, but it reminded me those complaints from advertisers who don’t want their ads (display or text ads such as Google AdSense) to show next to certain types of objectionable or sensitive content, for example an airline ad on a page that talks about a plane crash.

So what do you think was the CTR on this text link and what was Gmail’s sign up process conversation rate for those that were brave enough to click?

I was using Microsoft Excel the other day and had that Eureka moment. I typed in a simple formula that had a closing parenthesis but forgot to put an opening parenthesis. An error message popped up and I realized that I have been getting that same error message, for doing the same mistake, ever since I have been using Excel. And even though Microsoft has released several Excel versions along these years, this specific problem has been carried from version to version without getting an elegant solution.

I am pretty sure that the same exact error happens to millions of users every day, and many of them are clueless and do the same thing – they get frustrated, delete the formula that has a minor error and start over.

So, here’s my suggestion to a very simple killer feature – AutoParenth. Excel should automatically add an opening parenthesis whenever it detects that a cell: (a) has a function (first character inside the cell is minus, plus or the equal signs) and (b) it has a closing parenthesis. This feature should be built similar to the AutoCorrect feature to give the users greater control.

If that’s too difficult to implement, Excel should at least provide an informative error message, just like Apple Numbers and Google Docs do. This is such a common error that a specific error message with clear instructions is necessary.

Apple Numbers informative error message.

Google Docs also provides enough information to guide the user.

I hope that someone at the Microsoft Office team will read this post and add this request to their todo list.

Interesting. Google is running a campaign on iPhones via AdMob to promote the google voice search app.

I saw it on QuickGold which is an app (great one – the Quicksilver version for iPhone) that can be installed only on a jailbroken iPhone.

This makes me wonder, does Google, a long time Apple partner, advertise on semi-illigal applications? Or is that a RON type of buy?

I just came across these holiday icons that appear on SERP pages for holiday related terms.

I wonder if that’s a way for Google to boost holiday sales grabbing people’s attention and pointing them to the sponsored results rail on the right.

Menorah (kw=Hanukkah)

Candy cane (kw=Christmas)

Candy cane (kw=Kawanzaa gifts)

Globes.co.il published the results of a survey that was done by the Israeli research firm BDI-COFACE to rate the best Israeli high-tech companies to work for in 2008. BDI’s results were somewhat surprising (Intel first, Google ‘only’ second) so Globes decided to do their own survey.

But Globes forgot to include the “Other” category on the results page although it was one of the options. Oops.

So, let me fill the missing piece for you. Google does come first but the ‘Other’ category comes second with 23%. The remaining 8 behemoths (Intel, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, CheckPoint, Nice, Comverse and Amdocs) do not look that attractive anymore to many people.

So, if you are an Israeli start-up or an entrepreneur looking to build a team, there are plenty of people out there that might want to work for you.

ComScore reported yesterday that Google increased their US search market share to 61.8%. Yahoo is at 20.6% and Microsoft only at 8.5%.

I took a screenshot of my Google Analytics account and compared the results to ComScore’s report. During the month of May 2008, 96% (!) of the search users who came to this blog were Google users.

And yes, the numbers are small, they do not represent the US population and not statistically significant, but still, I find Google’s dominance among the readers of this blog to be really amazing.