beatnic - just wondering

Yesterday I was due to make a Skype call with a friend in Denmark at 1530 CET. I needed to double-check I’d got the right time scheduled so I did a little research.

It turns out that if you want to know the time in, say, Copenhagen you can simply type “time copenhagen” in to your search engine of choice and hey presto!

• Check the time now in Copenhagen using Google
• London time using the UK version of Ask (only Google appears to offer disambiguation between London UK, London Ontario and London Arkansas)
• Current time in New York using Yahoo!

On further investigation, all three search engines also show you current weather conditions (e.g. “weather Paris“) and links to forecasts:

• Check the current weather in Paris using Ask - this will also show the current time and news headlines for Paris in a side-dish
• Current weather in Rome using Yahoo!
• Current weather in Sydney using Google

Handy.

I’m full of admiration and respect for Tim O’Reilly but I get really wound up by what he’s coined “Web 2.0” or “web 2 point oh” as it seems to be pronounced.

It’s just the web. Nothing more nothing less.

Giving it a version number somehow suggests it’s something that can be commoditised, productised, owned.

It’s not like we’re living in “Earth 7.0″

Sure, there are ages of the web, but to suggest that there’s something called Web 2.0 implies we’ve been running up through minor versions of Web 1.0 and that sometime in the not too distant we’ll be pointing our handhelds at Web three point oh purlease…

</rant>

If there are showstoppers ask them upfront!

Don’t let me spend 10 minutes filling in personal details about myself and my other half only to be told that you can’t offer me a quote because of my other half’s profession.

I was just trying to get a quote on behalf of a friend who was on the other end of the phone at a car supermarket in London, where there are computers but you can only use their website - hmm, they’re definitely missing a trick there!

In this case Sainsbury’s Insurance is the culprit, but I’m sure they’re not alone.

A piece in today’s Guardian Online lists some of the web’s top search engines as a “new search war breaks out”

I’ve set them up below for easy access.

The groupings are taken from the paper version of the Guardian. (One or two missing from the original list until I have time to get them to work)