Jeff's Technology Weblog

It seems like almost every video game requires an update these days — even if you get it on release day. This is true on the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360.

But there is big difference between these two consoles. Updates that take seconds on the 360 can take 30 minutes on the PS3. I waste far too much time waiting for the PS3 to download and apply these updates.

Whereas Microsoft has made updates painless, Sony continues to inflict pain on customers again and again with no relief in sight. Consequently, I dub the PS3 the Naystation.

Want to play a game? Playstation says no.

In a previous post, I had some included some photos on the first part of my fire system installation for my Spec Miata race car. Today, I completed the job and have a few more photos to share.

Fire Bottle

Engine Compartment Discharge Nozzles

Driver Discharge Nozzle

Release Mechanism

The following few screens are an example of how utilizing different technologies for search can result in an inconsistent and confusing experience for users. Taking the generally excellent Yahoo! Sports as an example, you will see two search boxes on the Yahoo! Sports front page. One box is for web search and the other is for a sports-specific search.

Presumably, the user should use “Sports Search” for anything sports related and “Web Search” for anything else. But of course, the web is full of sports so there isn’t any reason why “Web Search” can’t be used for sports-related search. However, relevance for “Sports Search” should be better since the results should be drawn from a more relevant set of inputs. But you can see that this is not always the case.

Taking a search for a player on my favorite hockey team as an example, the search contains a result for the wrong “Mike Green”. Despite the strong query “mike green washington capitals”, the results show the photo and related information for Mike Green of the Washington Redskins. That’s not quite what I had in mind.

Furthermore, the general web search results while reasonable are confusingly different — even the ads.

From a user perspective, it is hard to understand why the results are so different. Surely, such a specific query should produce fairly consistent results containing a mix of recent news, profiles, stats, images, web sites, etc?

And if the look/feel of the results pages are anything to go by, they suggest the same underlying technology is at work. However, this certainly cannot be the case given the differences. The technologies underneath the hood appear to be different or at the very least assembled/configured differently.

For Yahoo!, this surely cannot be the indicative of the innovation around search that it has in mind. Getting the basics right around something as simple as consistent technology bases and look/feel would be a good starting point. And in the context of the Bing search deal with Yahoo!, it is only going to become more challenging for Y! to produce a consistent search experience as general web results come from Microsoft and Y! property search results will no doubt come from Y!-based technology.