Amr Awadallah Blog

This brief video trys to explain the life cycle of stars at a 2nd grade level. The video was created as a school project for Lina (my daughter), she was in 2nd grad at Hoover School (Palo Alto, CA). We filmed this around April 2005. The sounds effects are from World of Warcraft :). Let me know if you like it.

I am writing this post to ask some of you what they think about flashy advertising that yahoo frontpage does every now and then, specifically things like:

Do you like this kind of thing ? If you do not like it, are you ok seeing it every now and then ? assuming that a majority of folks do indeed like it ? (after all TV ads are much flashier than this).

BTW, if you are a search focused person, you can always use the search frontpage (search.yahoo.com), which looks like:

Also did you happen to see the new frontpage that Yahoo is testing, it looks like this:

Do you like this new design ?

If you notice at top left of that design there are two buttons: MY YAHOO and MY MAIL that convert the look and feel of the front-page to be mail focused or my-yahoo focused. Would you like to also have a SEARCH button up there that converts the look and feel to be search focused ?

— amr

PS: I need more than 5 folks to respond to this 😉

Caterina pointed me to a ValleyWag posting with this title:

“Searching across the tracks: We’re sick of seeing Yahoo employees with Google on their home pages”

They were referring to my homepage which does feature a search box for Google Scholar. Well, I did mention in a previous blog of mine that I love Google Scholar and unfortunately Yahoo does not have an equivalent product. Note that ValleyWag later on made another blog posting acknowledging my google miss prediction (sorry, cant help but keep rubbing it in 🙂 )

I have to admit that this is not the only Google Search Box that I use. I have a side family business for Egypt and on that site I use the Google Adsense Search Box. Even though Yahoo does have an equivalent search box, it does not pay me a share of the revenue for the searches the site generates (btw, SpiffY!Search is an even cooler implementation of an in-page yahoo search box).

 Hopefully one day yahoo will offer competitive products and I will switch right away.

 — amr

PS: Egypt Football (aka Soccer) team won the African Cup yesterday, 1000 congrats.