A human on10.net

by on March 31, 2006

Speaking of humans who are accessible, Larry Hryb, Xbox Live team's top blogger, is On10.net today showing off some cool games.

Off to do take care of the humans who write me in email (hundreds waiting, whew).

  • Christopher Coulter
    Well glad to know he's "human", as it would really suck if he was a flesh-eating alien from someplace beyond Pluto.
  • Since I get a DNS error trying to use your link, I have a nagging question that I hope you can answer:

    How do you pronounce Larry Hryb's last name? Herb? Hairb?

    Huh? Just curious.
  • anon
    Ask.com, even with only 6% market share at the moment, has done a great job within a short time and may gain momentum in the near future:

    http://www.internetoutsider.com/

    As far as search results go, I think most of the top search engines are currently more or less comparable; what Google has that others don't is more of a hype/perception/habit nature. Therefore, whatever edge one can add to search capabilities (like Ask.com did) may go a long way to enhance users' perception of a search engine's capability.

    And I think perception and habit are extremely important to gain/maintain market share. Even if others catch up, or even exceed Google's search engine performance, it's not necessary that users will switch service, unless their search performance is vastly superior to Google's, or they provide some compelling features that Google doesn't have. And even if these are the cases, users still have to be convinced through various means (advertising/marketing, test and actual usage) that a certain search engine is better than Google's, because as of now, Google is virtually synonymous to search.

    I have a Yahoo mail account and use Yahoo's IM. I didn't bother to switch to Google's Gmail or Google Talk since they don't provide any compelling features for me to switch. I did switch to Windows Messenger (since most of my friends use it), and Google has been the main search engine I've used for a long time. Indeed, it used to be superior to others, including Yahoo's and MSN's.

    Lately, even though I don't think it's significantly better than Yahoo or MSN (if at all), I still use it out of habit until recently, when I ditched it out of their despisable hypocrisy and go back to Yahoo/MSN.

    However, with ask.com's revamped search, I'll give it a try for a while, and so far, I really like it. It does have a few new compelling features that other search engines currently don't.
  • Mike: Herb is it!
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