All About Content

I changed the look of my blog. And by “I,” of course, I mean someone else. And by “changed the look,” I mean, finally got rid of the crappy slightly-tweaked-but-still-obviously-a-Blogger-template template. Still not enough ponies, but much better from a readability point of view, no?

Other Design News and No-Longer News
One of the major things that sets Google apart from its portal competitors Yahoo and MSN (besides superior search results, perceived or real) is the sparseness of the Google homepage. Rightly or wrongly, people think of it as “just a simple search box on an otherwise blank screen. No extraneous information or links, no clutter, just the one thing Google does: search.” That’s one of the things that’s come to define Google.

So imagine my surprise when I went to the Google homepage and found news, weather and movie information. Google.com was defaulting to my personalized Google page even though, I swear, I had never clicked on the “Personalized Home” link or did anything which would have affected my preferences. In fact, I’d never even seen my personalized page. So what’s up with that? Was this one of Google’s user interface tests? Am I hallucinating?

Last month, Yahoo updated its homepage design, and somewhat more newish to Yahoo is the incorporation of Yahoo Answers into the main search results, prominently displayed on the upper right of the results page.

And just yesterday, Yahoo released a new design for MyWeb, emphasizing social/taggy/Web 2.0ish shtuff. (Oh, and btw: Yahoo rolled out an update to its index last week, which I wasn’t able to blog about.)

Okay, that’s enough non sequiturs for today. Hope you like the new design.

I just needed to vent. What is UP with Blogger these last few days? If you can get anything to load at all, odds are that none of it actually works. I’m trying to update the blog with lots of great Pulitzer-worthy stuff that will make you want to come back every day, I truly am, but Blogger won’t let me. I’d consider migrating over to TypePad or something, but that would mean having to rebuild the template, which, you may have noticed, was just rebuilt for your viewing and usability pleasure.

According to Ben Charny of eWeek’s Google Watch column:

Recent comments by Google execs make it clear that Google views Dell Computers as its secret weapon against chief nemesis Microsoft.

In fact, there’s lots of evidence pointing to an important nexis between Google’s recently rebuffed anti-trust allegations about a new Microsoft Web browser and the three-year-long deal Google recently reached with Dell Computers.

The Dell deal will help Google counter Microsoft’s built-in advantage (of having it’s own browser) by making Google the first thing seen by tens of millions of new Dell users. With the partnership, Google gets the same, if not a better, advantage without actually having to go out and build a competitor to Internet Explorer.