Business Week just ran a series of reviews on Google products. Here is how it all broke down. First, the obvious: Google search is damned good, but everyone else is catching up:
Snags more hard-to-find info, packages content atop results. Struggles with some queries, rivals are closing the quality gap. The most comprehensive and highest-quality search toolsSecond, Gmail is nice, but too quirky to be useful. The upcoming Yahoo! Mail redesign is the best of breed for new webmail clients and Microsoft's Hotmail is the best of breed for old webmail clients:
But you know something funny? I rarely use my Gmail account. It's clever, I find, but weird. And the soon-to-be released Yahoo! e-mail service that I'm testing blends the good features of Gmail -- lots of storage, great search -- with a more traditional approach that I find comfortable.Lastly, Google's new blog search is nothing special and there are better blog searching engines out there. The Google blog search also includes too many spam blogs to be useful:
[I]t's fast. Doesn't provide complete results, and includes too many spam blogs. The search giant fails to deliver a KO. For now, it's just another blog search engine.Glad to see that Business Week isn't still only kicking Yahoo! around anymore. Glad they are spreading out the punishing reviews and even praising Yahoo! from time to time.