This is one of those ideas you may have thought of yourself because it makes alot of sense, but its all about excecution.

The site is partnered with all the major utilities companies in Ireland. If you’re like me you change your address around the city quite allot. This site allows you to notify all of them of a change of address from one point which is extremely useful and saves allot of hassel over the phone.

Now the obvious worry for anyone is privacy and I think they tackle this quite well. First thing is it is connected to a long standing recognizable company (myhome.ie) and they show this very clearly on the main page. Also in the privacy statement they have

“Your privacy is important to us. We guarantee never to pass on your details to anyone unless you provide your consent to do so.“

So I think there execution from an outset is really good. It will be interesting to see if this catches on.

http://newaddress.ie

“IE 7 implements a native XMLHTTPRequest object for Javascript applications, instead of requiring an ActiveXObject to be created. This also means XMLHTTPRequest will function on machines that have ActiveX disabled.”

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/09/13/465338.aspx

XMLHttpRequest will be a native object in IE7, meaning it will work even when ActiveX support has been disabled in the browser for security reasons. This brings the browser’s support for remote scripting—the technology at the heart of AJAX applications—up to the same standard as that offered by Firefox, Safari, Opera, and similar browsers.

Google or Yahoo?

This used to be obvious and I think alot of people still think it is. An estimate I heard recently from a search engine optimization guru friend of mine was that 70% of all referrals from search engines at least come from Google on a fully optimized site. So going by that Google must be more than twice as good as all the rest of the competition.

Google established itself as a fresh ideological company that did things right through simplicity (Less is more) and a brilliant search engine algorithm which took in page relevance for the first time.

Other search engines struggled to keep pace and now Google is recognized by nearly everyone on the net as the only place to go to.

But have we got caught up in the brand? Recently I found Yahoo! to be way more effective in finding relevant results. This may have just been a one off scenario I can’t be sure about this yet until I try with alot more samples.

But more worryingly have a look at the results page from google. It has a ratio of 9/3 for ’sponsored ads’ vs actual results on the screen of a 1024*768 resolution(standard laptop resolution) without any scrolling. The sponsored links above the real results is 3 high for popular search terms.

So Google is better again why?

1. More clutter
2. Less accurate

Were these not the reasons we left Yahoo! and MSN in the first place?

New homepage: Yahoo! Search

Update:

A screen shot of yahoo results