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March 27, 2005
Search Blues - Opera, MSN, Yahoo, Google - The Importance of Width
I've been yoyo-ing about what search to leave as default and I'm still pretty flux-y about it. I was doing my best to use Opera Search, which you can get to via search.opera.com or the more expansive portal.opera.com. It's good - according to Haavard they use Overture, but it lacks features like image search, languages etc. But it also lacks ads. Unfortunately the main issues are that it's not customisable in that I can't get it to show more hits per page, though I'm sure it could be handled easily with a tweak to the url and it doesn't group hits by site; more importantly though, it's width limited, which annoys me.
Many pages limit how wide the content can be so that it will a) display the same to various monitor resolutions - ie the designers were just lazy b) they want to squeeze more ads in to less content - which I have not too much problem with, except it leads to squeezed content strips which are annoying. I suspect that in certain ways column paragraphs are less intimidating, though it might lead to the wish to format shorter paragraphs otherwise.
But getting back to the searches, MSN I like because the layout is pretty, and so is the butterfly icon. The annoying thing is that the paid searches aren't filtered out by Proxo. Yahoo I'm getting very fond of because it has tended to find the things I want to find - it's also doing a good job of indexing my site, especially my broadvoice sucks post (as is Opera, but not quite as well). The customised Google search is cut down and a bit annoying - I'll eventually upload a fixed custom search.ini. I think I'm sticking with MSN for a bit, but Yahoo is again climbing the charts, despite being a bit plain. But yes Google also tends to limit widths.
I make it a point to format this site to fit variable widths - and testing is easy, just zoom with Opera and you can see how it'll look. granted I have menus on the right with the main page, but that's mainly for navigation - if you read via the RSS feed, you'd never really need to see it, and you get full width pages - the MSN notification thing I still find pretty fun, more so if not for the frames. Not to say I'm able to fund the site on ads (yet), but prospects look promising, despite me not going crazy with them.
I'm considering moving back to the cheaper broadvoice plan. If only to spite them.
Posted by subtitles at March 27, 2005 6:07 PM | Computer Stuff
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