No More Customization for Yahoo! Music LAUNCHcast Radio

Although I just found it out today, it seems that since early February, the personalized radio feature that I've grown to love from Yahoo! Music has been banished. It has been replaced by none other than the craptastical CBS Radio, which apprently now runs Yahoo! LAUNCHcast.
With this, the whole good part, the customization, is sucked out of this radio. Basically, now all you can customize is what the music genre that you want to listen to is. You can pick Today's Biggest Hits, Hard Rock, Adult Alternative and quite a bit more but that sure doesn't beat what it was before. You would pretty much pick which songs played with your specified music preferences.
You may say this is a financial decision now Yahoo!, but soon you'll regret this very much. Very, very much. Well, actually I still like Yahoo!, I'll just take it out on CBS; no more CBS on my TV. So ha!

Google Calendar vs. Yahoo Calendar: The Event Organization Wars

Prettiness:

These days, it's been established as a general rule that Google's sites look better than Yahoo!'s. Yahoo!'s are almost always, hard on the eyes with poor choice of fonts and bad colour integration and really pathetic attempts to look modern while Google's web pages appear natural and very modern. This doesn't change in the calendar service battle.

Google: 1 Yahoo!: 0

Features:

Yahoo! doesn't really help its cause in this department. Sure, it has the somewhat (ok, very) uncreative stock tracker, weather and sports tracker but there's really nothing else that it can brag about that Google doesn't have. Contrarily, the competitor supports mobile access, public calendar sharing as well as viewing.

Google: 2 Yahoo!: 0

Convenience:

Another well-established rule on the internet today is that Google is always more convenient than Yahoo!. However, Yahoo! apparently is trying to squeeze in a little rebuttal with their calendar service. While Google's version gets extremely frustrating with their drag concept, huge time bars and the need to scroll to view the entire day, Yahoo! has a list of events and tasks at your fingertips and shows everything at a glance.

Google: 2 Yahoo!: 1

Simplicity/"Understandablity":

Google usually somehow finds the perfect balance of feature-richness and simplicity but not this time. The calendar has way too many buttons that confuse users and again, the drag concept is downright stupid. And the whole fanciness thing starts to turn against them as some thing just get confusing.
Yahoo! though, has a no-nonsense service with a much simpler "Quick Add Event" bar, a simpler way to add events and a moderate number of details that can be specified.

Google: 2 Yahoo!: 2

Sharing:

Both internet companies did a good job in some areas of this. Google allows users to make public calendars that others can view but it seems these days that there is an overload of inaccurate or unmaintained public calendars that some fall into the trap of putting onto their personal calendar. Yahoo! specialises in individual sharing with a very easy way to share calendars with a single person or small groups: All you have to do is send them to a web page (http://calendar.yahoo.com/*username*) and enable sharing. You can also collaborate with them on these calendars with those with the label of "Special Friend" permitted to edit your calendars. With Yahoo!, you can make your calendars totally public too but this feature is not as good as Google's.

Google: 2 Yahoo!: 3

Verdict:

Yahoo!'s ease of use trumps Google's potential masterpiece of features. Too bad they didn't execute.

Why You Don't Need Cuil Search

With a greatly (over)hyped launch, Cuil has hit the world of search engines and is trying to gain market share quickly. One problem; there are hundreds, if not thousands of them already. So basically, what I'm saying is you don't need another search engine: In other words, you don't need Cuil.
To begin with, you obviously can use other renowned and more effective search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live Search.
Each of these websites are much more convenient with several additional search features such as images, video, maps and more (Yahoo! leading the way with pages for music, food and travel).
Also, naturally with the many more pages indexed in Cuil's database, you would get more search results. However, most people aren't going to search engines to look for a lot of things, but a few, relevant items. This is one quality Cuil just doesn't possess enough of. In fact, there is not even as much as a small advanced search tool to help narrow down your results.
Moreover, hand in hand with the thumbnails beside some results, are numerous inappropriate images that really make you question the capability of the Safesearch option.
And of course, how can you forget this little trait that major search engines all have. Simplicity. Cuil's search result page is intensely cluttered, making it hard to appreciate the web content. Here's a cold, hard number; 3. 3 columns doesn't cut it when you want speedy reading.
So although Cuil does have some good potential and considerable aesthetic appeal, it's not something that you want to waste your time on right now.