Twingine: Weaning myself from Google
I should be eating our own corporate dogfood more at work and doing my web searches at Yahoo! Search instead of Google but old habits die hard. Yahoo! Search is easily as good, but for some reason I've always got this nagging doubt in my mind of whether I'm seeing the absolute best search results or not. So I end up using Google a lot to ease my suspicions.
I was thinking about this today when I remembered about that site I saw a while ago called Yagoohoogle or something like that, and decided that's exactly what I need. It's now called Twingine and it shows both Yahoo and Google searches side by side so you can compare. Perfect! I originally thought of this as just a site to go for research, but it's actually a great way to track the progress of Yahoo! Search and wean myself from Google.
I've replaced my Google bookmark with Twingine. Now I do a web search, see all the results at once and can keep a mental tally of which engine does which types of searches better. I'm also starting to use more of the Y! Search features like shortcuts ("weather 94025"), RSS, search history and saved bookmarks (My Web). Also, you guys don't get it, but if I'm on the corporate LAN I see an employee link where I can report problems with searches as well which is nice ("Dear Y! Search Team, why am I #10 for 'russell' and not #2 like in Google? Please fix this 'problem' soon, thanks.). I already default to Y! for local searches without thinking about it, so this is a perfect way to use everything else Y! Search has to offer and not feel like I'm missing anything. I've been using it for a day, and I've been pleasantly surprised. In fact I may not need to use it much longer, actually.
:-)
-Russ