Microsoft's LiveSearch cashback program

Ooohhh...is this the Google killer? Are they going to grab market share from Google? Apparently some of the analysts think so. Hahaha is all I can say. I won't be surprised if people search on Google for cash back and then go to the Microsoft's cashback site to take advantage of the offer. Thats still secondary. Here's the kicker....

I picked the very first thing I saw on Live Search - a Canon PowerShot A470 - gray and with Cash back, the lowest offer $107.31.

I did a Google Product search for the same thing - Cheapest Price - $97.99 from Amazon!

Here's the thing, you can offer people all the candy they want, but once the candy runs out, they're not going to stay for a second longer. It's like the politicians and their promises, it only lasts till election day.

So, for Microsoft to "disrupt" the model, I sure hope they come up with a better search engine, not better candy. Otherwise, all they're going to do is spend their money and get nothing for it in return.

Ohh - and by the way - from what I see on Microsoft's site, when the vendor charges you more, you get a bigger cash back (ofcourse, it's not enough to beat the lower price by any margin).

I think I'm going to stick to Google. I'm waiting for Google to announce it's next quarter results. It would be really nice to see Google announcing better returns and more searches, and Microsoft announcing ....well....!

Tools to Evaluate Web Design

I've spoken about how much I like coradiant, especially with the way they can capture all of the Web users session data etc.

On a different note, while thats good to evaluate the response time of pages etc, what about how much users actually like the webpage, or what they're doing on a webpage. I came across this posting from sixrevisions : 7 Incredibly Useful Tools for Evaluating a Web Design. Sixrevisions is going to be come a daily stop for me now!

I already use YSlow and it's pretty neat, especially when you want to track down whats taking the most time, or how best to optimize your webpage, but there are a few more tools that caught my eye.

Also, incase you miss it, there is a note about
Crazy Egg from one of the commenters on sixrevisons :

ncdeveloper

April 22nd, 2008

Crazy Egg is NOT for a production website by any means. I use it for the EPA websites and while it looks nice and flashy, it is not accurate at all after a few weeks. The counts just seem to go loopy after a few weeks. Support is just as weak. Every time I called, it sounded as if I woke the guy up or pulled him away from a tv show. Obviously a small company that was unprepared for moderate to high volume. If you have clients that want a real and accurate heatmap, look elswhere.


Please note, that that comment is there only because I'vnt tried it yet, but its also a fairly significant comment. I'm sure the reader(s) of this blog will understand that I'm in no way for or against using any of the tools on that site. I've tried only YSlow and I highly recommend it though :)

MySQL applications

Well, I've been using MySQL for the past few months now, and I guess, this list is again a good list to keep handy i.e. Handy Applications for a mysql database.

http://sixrevisions.com/tools/applications_mysql_databases/

Some really cool Web Developer tools

Ok....this got "Dugg" and is on my list. I've tried some of the tools provided on these pages, but some of the tools (FireBug & Web Developer for Firefox) are just amazing.

Here's a list of the Top 20 Useful tools for Web Development.
http://sixrevisions.com/tools/20_web_development_tools/

And if you do use IE (ughh)
http://sixrevisions.com/tools/internet_explorer_extensions_addons_web_developers/

Apparently - one of my colleagues who used the Microsoft Web Developer toolbar long time ago had tremendous trouble with it. He doesn't know how it is now.

Anyways - now there's more to look at.

SQL Statements - Always evaluate on the right side of the expression

While trying to tune a SQL Stored procedure, the DBA came across this statement....

select X from where id * -1 = id

That would mean that the optimizer doesn't know what index to use and that simple query took almost 1/2 second with 1000's of reads.

All he did was switch that around
select X from where id = id * -1

It executed in 0 seconds.

The entire stored procedure shed more than 1/2 the time it took to return data!

His simple statement: Always evaluate on the Right Hand Side!

Truesight TCP Timeout

So, this past week when looking at the TrueSight data from Coradiant, something jumped out at me. Though the data was being returned on the screen (from the Web app), truesight was reporting it as a Timeout (Server time out). This was odd.

I put in a call to the friendly Coradiant tech support. In 2 mins, the support tech got to the bottom of it. It turns out that TrueSight's TCP timeout was set to 30 seconds. Well, with our Ajax call, it just didn't work. Getting that time out set to 300 seconds (yes, horrible performance -- I know, we are working on that too) took care of it.

This information on how to make this change is not public, and must be done only by a Truesight tech. So, while its not something that we can change, it's something that the new Truesight image will atleast allow us to change!