Feb 12

Microsoft Forking Out $$$ to Lure in Search Users

Posted in: Google, Software, Today's Chili, Web Sites, Windows

This article was written on May 21, 2008 by CyberNet.

We’ve known for a while that Microsoft is not content being solely a software company. They know the Internet is a place they need to be, but so far they’ve struggled with trying to get people to use their search site. Google comes in first when it comes to search market share with Yahoo in 2nd and Microsoft in a distant 3rd. So what’s a company to do to lure in more users? Pay them cash!

Today Microsoft will be announcing a new program called Cashback in which they will give cash to users who use Live Search to search for products and then purchase them from stores online. They’ve partnered with companies like Barnes & Noble, Home Depot, Office Depot, Sears, and more. According to Todd Bishop over at Seattle P-I, Microsoft will give users anywhere from about 2% to 30% of the purchase price back in cash. Bishop points out how this move by Microsoft really shows they’re struggling. He says, “It’s an unusual move that illustrates the lengths to which the Redmond company is willing to go in its struggle to gain ground on the Internet search king.”

The site that Microsoft has put together for this program is already available for viewing. They explain the process in three steps:

  1. Search – search for cashback deals at search.live.com/cashback – results will clearly show how much cash you’ll get back by purchasing at certain retailers
  2. Shop – compare and sort products by the bottom-line price
  3. Save – once your cashback account reaches at least $5, and you’ve passed the 60 day wait period after your purchase (because of possible returns) you’ll be able to “claim” it – it’ll be deposited via PayPal, direct deposit to your bank account, or through a check in the mail

live search cashback.png

Taking a look at their FAQ page, it was interesting to see their answer of “Why are you paying me cashback?” to which they said, “We want to earn your loyalty and reward it with cashback savings for your everyday online shopping. We are “The Search That Pays You Back!”. I guess that sounds better than saying “We want to take down Google and Yahoo and we’re hoping by paying people to use our search, they’ll come back…”

Thanks for the tip Omar!

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Feb 11

YouTube to Start Sharing the Wealth Next Week?

Posted in: Google, Today's Chili, videos, Web Sites, YouTube

This article was written on April 19, 2007 by CyberNet.

Back in January, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley confirmed plans to share revenue with users who upload original content to YouTube. At the time, he said not to expect it right away, but also not to expect one big release. Instead, the feature would be rolled out over the period of a few months.

Several sources are reporting that YouTube is now in fact ready to start rolling this feature out as soon as next week.  Revenue would be split 50/50, and users will have the option of selecting whether they want the ads at the beginning or the end of their video.

This continues YouTube’s quest to promote creativity which they thrive off of.  Recent numbers indicate just how important original, creative, non-copyrighted material is for YouTube. While many people thought they really needed the big media to stay afloat, they’ve proven that they don’t.

YouTube wouldn’t be the first online video service to split revenue with their users. Revver and Metacafe have shared the wealth with their users, and some of them have made a pretty penny off of it. The more popular your video becomes, the more money you make — which will help push the creative content.

Also keep in mind that YouTube’s filtering system is set to debut soon– perhaps “claim your content” and revenue sharing will be launched at the same time?

Source: Mashable

 

 

 

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Feb 09

CyberNotes: Get Company Reviews and Salary Information

Posted in: CyberNotes, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on June 28, 2008 by CyberNet.

CyberNotes
Weekend Website

When I was in college, one website I always checked before a new semester started was “RateMyProfessors.com.” It’s a site dedicated to rating professors. Students can create an account, and then rate the teachers they had for all to see which helps out future students so that they know what they’re getting into before school starts. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were something similar for the workplace, somewhere that you could go to rate your boss or a company and get information on a future boss? There is such a site and it’s called Glassdoor.com. There you can get ratings and reviews about employers and companies, but you can also get salary information as well. Today we’ll be taking a look at all they offer and how you can contribute to the site anonymously.

glassdoor.com logo.png

What is Glassdoor.com?

Glassdoor.com is a fairly new site that collects company reviews from employees of large companies. They call themselves a “career and workplace community where anyone can find and anonymously share real-time reviews, ratings and salary details about specific jobs for specific employers.” The nice part about all of this is the fact that it’s anonymous. Most people don’t want to go and complain about their boss if there’s a chance that they would get caught. All of the information available is free, the only thing they ask is that you contribute by sharing a review or salary of your own.

If you ever wanted to know what actual employees really think of a particular company, this is a good resource for you. The only downside we can see is that someone could easily write a review for a company they really don’t work for and submit a fake salary which could goof things up.

Of course Glassdoor.com had to start somewhere, and so they decided to start out by focusing on tech companies in the San Francisco Bay Area in California, but they intend to (and have already) included companies from other regions. With time, they’ll expand and it just might become the go-to place to get employer information.

Ratings & Reviews

glassdoor ratings and reviews.pngThe ratings and reviews section is only partially useful to you unless you post your own review. This is how they’re going to help the site grow. Once you do submit your own review, you’ll have access to all of the reviews that they have available for various companies.

Once you click on the name of a company, for example, Microsoft, you’ll be able to see all of the reviews that people have submitted. There are three main components to each review – Pros, Cons, and Advice to Senior Management. You’ll be able to see the employee’s overall satisfaction rating on a scale of 1-5, and then you’ll also see their CEO Approval rating.

On each company page, in the right sidebar you’ll also see a column that lists more employers like the company you’re viewing. For Microsoft, it showed me that their top competitors are IBM, Oracle, and Google. If you’re looking for a job, this can help give you ideas of where you should apply.

Browsing for Reviews

In the right side-bar of the Ratings and Reviews section, there are different browsing options. You can browse reviews by industry, or by job. Example of reviews by industry include computer software, computer hardware, media, financial service reviews, retail reviews, etc. Example of reviews by job include software engineer, senior consultant, product manager, program manager, etc.

What I learned from the ratings and reviews section about Microsoft is that employees (including those from the past) give Microsoft a 3.9 satisfaction rating (on a 5.0 scale) and 52% approve of their CEO, Steve Ballmer. They’ fit in the 5000+ employees category and have over $51 billion in revenue. You can get this kind of information for many, many companies out there.

glassdoor reviews.png

Salaries

If you switch to the “Salaries” tab, you’ll be able to see the types of salaries people are earning for various positions within companies. They graph out the range of salaries that people receive for a specific position, and then provide the average salary. You can either view salaried employee information, those earning hourly pay, as well as bonus information.

Continuing with our Microsoft example, we found that the average salary for a software development engineer is $94,397 but that the salary for that particular position ranges from $65,000 to $145,000 (from the people that have contributed so far). As of writing this post, 665 people had contributed their salaries for Microsoft.

Below is a graph which shows the range of salaries for various positions at Microsoft.

glassdoor microsoft salaries.png

Contributing to the site

It’s almost necessary to contribute to the site if you want to get the most out of it. As mentioned, if you post a review or a salary for a position you hold or held at one point, you’ll get access to their whole collection of ratings and reviews. Remember, it’s anonymous which means your employer won’t ever know if you wrote it. They’re trying to promote contributing to the site, so each month they pick someone who wrote a detailed and helpful review and give them $500 bucks! Nice!

Wrapping it up

If you’re looking for a job, or you’re just curious how under-paid you may be in your current position, you’ll want to checkout Glassdoor.com. They’ve got a lot of helpful information that can give you some insight on whether you’d be a good fit with a company and how well you’d get paid.

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Feb 09

Is the Younanimous Search Engine too good to be true?

Posted in: Google, search, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on March 27, 2007 by CyberNet.

I’ve always been told that if something is too good to be true then it probably is. I sure hope that’s not the case with the new meta search engine Younanimous because it is already really remarkable, and there is still a lot more to come!

Their blog explains a lot of what’s going on, so this will be a quick overview. Younanimous is a meta search engine that brings together results from Google, Yahoo!, and MSN into one convenient location. It uses the search ranking of the results from all of those search engines in order to determine the ranking on their own site.

Younanimous

In addition to showing the ranking numbers from each search engine to the left of the result, you’ll also find some things located below the result. This includes the Alexa Rank, Google PageRank, and links to social networks like Digg, Del.icio.us, Furl, and Reddit. All of this in one tight little package. There are also links to a cached version of the search result from each search engine, and as long as the icon is in color (not black & white) then that means a cached version is available.

Many of the results will also contain a link to “supplemental results” which I think are the results that normally appear indented on some search engines such as Google. These are results that are from the same domain, but are also relavant to your search. The great thing about Younanimous is that it puts those results in an expandable link so that your screen space isn’t occupied by it.

Here is a great screenshot that they put together explaining all of their current features (click to enlarge it):

Younanimous

As of right now they seem to have things half-done because there is no way that you can customize the search experience. It sounds like pretty soon they’ll let users create accounts or store settings locally in a cookie if a user doesn’t want to register. Here is what their blog says is yet to come:

  • Video Search.
  • Settings page where you can add and remove widgets from showing up.
  • Blacklisting, and manually voting ala red and green buttons.
  • Compete.com Graphs.
  • Stumbleupon.com Graphs.
  • Public API for building your own widgets.
  • Opera browser fixes.
  • Site preview ala snap.com thingy.
  • Some code overhaul to increase speed.
  • Advertising program similar to adwords where people can bid on keywords.
  • New loading images, which actually say whats going on.

Currently their search results link directly to the result and does not use a redirect, which will please a lot of people. Not only that, but their image results link directly to the fullsize image and not to the site containing the image!

They are also working on “widgets” so that users will be able to sort and filter results however they would like. Here are some examples of the widgets they will be including:

  • Backlinks from each engine
  • Bookmark Locally
  • Bookmark via Younanimous
  • Email result
  • Instant Message result (Yahoo, AIM, ICQ)
  • Blogs linking to the result
  • Bugmenot plugin
  • Netcraft Uptime and info
  • Whois info
  • Age of domain
  • Translate result
  • Tinyurl result

I’m sure you see what an amazing search engine this sounds like as well. It looks good enough for me to switch from Google, but there are two things that I would have to see first:

  • An option to choose which search engine is ranked over others. I am so used to searching with Google that I would want my results to be purely based off of what they return. That kinda takes away from what Younanimous is trying to do, but it is still nice to see what other search engines rank the results that I’m seeing even though they don’t effect the ordering of the results.
  • I need at least 50 results on the screen at one time. Right now with Google I have it show 100 results at one time because I scroll through them so quickly because I typically know what I’m looking for. I don’t want to be bothered with having to click the “Next” button after just 10 results because that will greatly hinder my productivity.
  • Firefox 3 (pre-release) compatibility! Sure Firefox 3 hasn’t even been released yet but Younanimous doesn’t even work with it. When I try to perform a search it just sits there and does nothing. In order to test the search service I had to use Internet Explorer 7 because I didn’t have Firefox 2 readily available.

Oh, and if you’re trying out Younanimous it is important to note that when you click the “Next” button for more results, it uses AJAX to change the content. I initially didn’t think that the button had done anything but after looking at the initial results that were returned I saw that it really did change the results (hence the numbers located next to the title of each result).

The site has been around for just a few days, but what they currently have available is a strong foundation that they can work on. After they launch their remaining features and updates I believe that it will be the most feature-intensive meta search engine available.

Younanimous Homepage
Source: Frantic Industries

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Feb 08

Browser & OS Stats for June 2008

Posted in: Linux, Mac, Opera, Software, Today's Chili, Web Sites, Windows

This article was written on July 02, 2008 by CyberNet.

Now that the month of June has wrapped up we can see what browsers and operating systems have emerged as victorious. In both segments Microsoft is still dominating the market according to Net Applications, but there are some competitors that continue to crawl up behind them. In fact both Windows and Internet Explorer dropped in market share for June 2008.

I’ve got all of the detailed stats below including how each browser and operating system changed from May to June, but if you want a quick summary here are two pie graphs that I put together. The top one shows the operating system market share for June 2008, and the bottom one shows the top browsers.

market share.jpg

–Web Browsers–

Both Opera and Firefox had big releases during the month of June, but neither one was made available until halfway through the month. So we might not be seeing the full results from the new releases. They both still climbed in the overall market share usage for June, and I suspect that July will be an even better month for them.

May 2008June 2008Change
Internet Explorer73.75%73.01%-0.74%
Firefox18.41%19.03%+0.62%
Safari6.25%6.31%+0.06%
Opera0.71%0.73%+0.02%
Netscape0.62%0.67%+0.06%
Mozilla0.08%0.09%+0.01%
Opera Mini0.05%0.05%0.00%
Playstation0.03%0.03%0.00%
Konqueror0.02%0.03%+0.01%

–Operating Systems–

I was going to breakdown the stats for the operating systems on a general basis (Windows, Linux, and Mac), but I thought it would be fun to see what the stats are for each of the individual versions. Overall Windows dropped 0.24% in market share and currently sits at 90.89%, while the Mac is approaching 8% of the total market. Here’s the breakdown for the top 10 operating systems:

May 2008June 2008Change
Windows XP72.12%71.20%-0.92%
Windows Vista15.26%16.14%+0.88%
Mac – Intel5.02%5.25%+0.23%
Mac OS2.81%2.69%-0.12%
Windows 20002.25%2.11%-0.14%
Linux0.68%0.80%+0.12%
Windows NT0.68%0.69%+0.01%
Windows 980.48%0.43%-0.05%
Windows ME0.27%0.25%-0.02%
iPhone0.16%0.16%0.00%

I would have to say that the craziest thing about those stats is the fact that 0.25% are still running Windows ME. Yikes! My condolences go out to those people.

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Feb 07

10% off eBay Purchases through Microsoft Cashback

Posted in: Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on June 13, 2008 by CyberNet.

live search cashback ad.jpgThis is pretty big news coming from eBay and Microsoft. Remember just a few weeks ago when we wrote about Microsoft forking out money to lure in search users with their new program called Cashback? Well now they’ve partnered with eBay to offer the same cashback rewards to buyers on eBay who use the “Buy it Now” option after clicking on an eBay paid search advertisement.

We decided to try this out so we went to Live.com (not the Cashback site) and performed a search for “Razr” as in Motorola Razr. When the results appeared, to the right was an eBay advertisement (the ad can also appear above the search box) with the LiveSearch logo, as shown above. Once we clicked on it, we were taken to eBay and a list of Razr listings were displayed. Note: If you were directed to eBay after clicking on a Cashback ad, you’ll see the logo at the top of the page.

cashback on ebay.jpg

Once you click on any of the Buy-It-Now listings, you’ll see a box which shows you what your rewards would be if you make the purchase (shown below). One thing to keep in mind is that just because you search for Razr does not mean when you click on the ad, that you have to purchase a Razr phone to get the rewards. You can start searching eBay for other items and you’ll get the same offer of 10% off eligible items. Remember, to get this discount you have to look for and then click the eBay ad with the Live Search Cashback logo on it. You’ll have to get creative and think of popular items that you could search for at Live.com to try and get the eBay ad to appear. iPhone, Razr, and Playstation 3 all worked for us.

ebay confirm cashback.jpg

Now before you run off to do this, we just wanted to point out the terms and conditions. First, this is available only in the United States (sorry guys!). Another thing to keep in mind is that you have to make your Buy-It-Now purchase within 60 minutes of clicking on the ad, otherwise it won’t work. They say that the rewards will be applied only to “the first eligible item” that you decide to buy. You also have to pay for the item using PayPal and it’ll take about 60 days to get our cashback reward from Microsoft. You’ll be able to get cashback rewards from shopping at eBay up to three times.

[via Mashable]

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Feb 07

Mozilla’s Wiki Has It’s Own StumbleUpon

Posted in: Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on August 10, 2006 by CyberNet.

Mozilla's Wiki Has It's Own StumbleUponIf you get bored sometime then maybe you should head on over to Mozilla’s Wiki and play with the Random Page link. It will take you to random pages throughout the wiki which could be kinda fun and you may actually “StumbleUpon” something useful. I came across some ASCII art that was supposed to represent the new search interface in Firefox 2, and the “artist” actually did a really nice job.

This isn’t nearly as much fun as the real StumbleUpon is but who knows what you will find in the Mozilla Wiki. Maybe you will discover some sort of super secret project they are working on? Or not :) .

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Feb 06

No Need for Google, Go Spock Yourself!

Posted in: Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on August 09, 2007 by CyberNet.

SpockAt some point or another, you’ve probably Googled yourself to see what the results were. Rather than Googling yourself, go Spock yourself instead! Yesterday, Spock officially launched their public beta. They call themselves “the online leader in personal search” and have over 100 million people in their database with “millions added everyday.” Hmm… maybe a company Google would want to sweep up in the near future?

Spock crawls the web looking for metadata which they then attach to results for a specific person. They get their information from sources like social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn) and other websites. It’s almost like one big comprehensive social network that incorporates all of the bits of information that people have at different sites. If by chance you do a search, and you don’t find yourself, you can register with them and “claim your name.” This once again brings up the importance of making sure that you’re careful with the information you include about yourself on social networks.

Another important part of Spock is the way they get people involved. Users are able to find friends, tag friends, and add descriptive tags which other users are then able to vote on. It’s definitely different from what you’d experience by doing a Google search for the same query, and for that reason, I think it could have some potential to go somewhere.

At launch yesterday, they were receiving 300 to 400 pageviews per second (which would come out to around 1 billion page views per month) with people eager to search for their name to see what would come up. They weren’t prepared for that many pageviews, so at times, the site was inaccessible. Today seems to be hit or miss, but go Spock yourself anyways. What did you find, if anything?

 

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Feb 05

MySpaceTV Blatantly Copies YouTube

Posted in: Today's Chili, Web Sites, YouTube

This article was written on June 28, 2007 by CyberNet.

MySpace TV has launched. Go take a look for yourself and the first thing you’ll probably notice is that it has a very familiar resemblance of YouTube. Yep, MySpaceTV blatantly copied YouTube in more ways than one. While it makes sense for MySpace to take a video-sharing route, they could’ve at least put some effort into making the site their own.

Myspacetv

Download Squad puts it best when they say, “If you can’t beat them, become them” because that’s exactly what they did.

Some of the similarities that initially stood out for me:

  • Upload Videos – same location, both use arrow icon
  • Tabbing – same location, just a different order plus one additional tab with MySpace
  • Featured Videos– front and center!
  • Related Videos– when watching a video, related videos are to the bottom right. Same exact location as YouTube

I guess on the bright side, if you’re familiar with YouTube and you’re thinking about using MySpaceTV, there won’t be many changes to get used to!

Mashable put together a great comparison of the two that points out twelve different similarities. This doesn’t really come as a surprise though, because it seems everybody copies one another these days.

Myspacenews

Hopefully for MySpace, their new TV site will fair better than MySpace News. Remember that? There was a decent amount of hype surrounding it when it launched back in April. I just went to check on it today and there are only a few votes for each news story. Rather pathetic if you ask me.

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Feb 03

Jokes For Geeks – Prepare For Laughter

Posted in: Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on November 27, 2006 by CyberNet.

System Administrator Looking for a good laugh today? I wasn’t until I came across two sites that are just hilarious. The second one that I’ll mention is a little funnier than the first but they are both sure to give you a chuckle.

The first one comes from a Google Blogger employee who noticed some common phrases in the code that people wrote. He used the Google Code Search to pull up the results and here are my favorites:

The second site is a list of 101 things that you do not want your System Administrator to say (well, the list only has 97 things so it is short 4 :) ). Picture yourself as an employee that is hearing some of these:

  • What software license?
  • What do you mean that wasn’t a copy?
  • Where’s the GUI on this thing?
  • Damn, and I just bought that pop…
  • The drive ate the tape but that’s OK, I brought my screwdriver.
  • What’s this “any” key I’m supposed to press?
  • Do you smell something?
  • I have never seen it do *that* before…
  • What do you mean you needed that directory?
  • Oracle will be down until 8pm, but you can come back in and finish your work when it comes up tonight.
  • Wonder what this command does?
  • You did what to the floppy???
  • What do you mean that could take down the whole network?
  • The backup procedure works fine, but the restore is tricky!
  • It is only a minor upgrade, the system should be back up in a few hours. (This is said on a Monday afternoon.)
  • I think we can plug just one more thing in to this outlet strip with out tripping the breaker.
  • What do mean by “fired”?
  • now it’s funny you should ask that, because I don’t know either
  • We prefer not to change the root password, it’s an nice easy one

There is nothing like a good laugh on a Monday…that’s what helps the week go by faster. :)

Both of these were found via Digg (here and here)

P.S. Sorry about the picture…I just couldn’t help myself when I saw it on this site which is also sure to give you a laugh.

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