Fun Search Headlines

Susan’s out sick today (everyone wave), so I’m using my tiny ounce of imagined authority to share a couple of fun search headlines with you. I mean, who wants to wait all the way til Friday to hear the good stuff?

(If there’s no blog tomorrow, I loved you all…)

Yahoo!’s little Talent Show

Yahoo!’s launching the Yahoo! Talent Show in their hopes to find someone to “save the world from bad video” (read: this is the best we could come up with to get you to stop talking about Google and YouTube). The Yahoo! Talent Show is an eight-week contest where users are invited to upload video clips of themselves performing their most impressive talent. The winner will receive $50,000 cash and a development deal to either star in or produce their own online show on Yahoo!. A development deal? Is this a talent show or a reality show?

Right now the contest is looking a little more like America’s Funniest Home Videos than American Idol (which is in no way an insult. That show provokes ears, man), but it’ll be interesting to see how far this goes and what the level of user participation is. Yahoo! has launched some pretty impressive viral campaigns lately.

Sidenote: Is Jerry Yang’s talent that he can talk like a robot? That’s awesome!

How would you redesign Google?

Over at Google Blogoscoped, Phil Lenssen shares some of 17-year-old Joe Critchley’s new user interface design ideas for Google. I’m not sure any would be all that successful, but I like where he’s going, especially with the first layout idea. It’s very factory line-esque. You type your query and then click how you want to search (Web, Image, Video, etc.). The only problem (which Joe notes) is that there’s no friendly search button, it’s kind of ugly and users may not realize you can perform a web search just by hitting enter. Still, I kind of like it.

True dedication means working from Egypt

Googler Niniane Wang shares a snippet from a conversation she had with a fellow Googler while the two have been vacationing in Egypt:

“Me: [after some silence] Do you think Google does this to people? Where we work so much?
Dan: No. We do it to ourselves, at Google.
Me: Surely it’s not normal to work like this.
Dan: It’s also not normal to do amazing things.”

I admit. I aw’d.

(via Nathan)

Move over Google Calendar!

Okay, I’ll leave you with one more gem. Have you heard about Scrybe? If you haven’t, go watch the demo. If this application works the way the demo promises it will, it could change your entire way of life organizing.

Lisa Barone is a writer, content marketer & VP of strategy at Overit Media. She's also a very active Twitterer, much to the dismay of the rest of the world.

See Lisa's author page for links to connect on social media.