Wundrbar vs Ubiquity(blog.wundrbar.com)
blog.wundrbar.com
Wundrbar vs Ubiquity
http://blog.wundrbar.com/2008/08/wundrbar-vs-ubiquity-our-thoughts.html
5 comments
We'll be opening Wundrbar up soon. Not quite true open source, but close. Enough to allow a ton of scripting / hacking / mashing up. More news on that real soon...
"Aside from auto-complete, [Google's single text-box] interface hasn't significantly evolved in the past 10 years. But it needs to. Really."
This seems to be the default view but no one ever says exactly why. If it needed to evolve, really, Google would have evolved it already. Type in what you want, and the computer finds it for you.
Ironically, "type in what you want and the computer finds it for you" seems to be exactly the interface that Wundrbar and Ubiquity are implementing. The pattern recognition of the query to front-load/limit the results can help, but it's still the same interface. Admittedly, being able to interact with the site as part of the _results_ is a MUCH better feature than the "show a screenshot of the destination web page" feature meme that a lot of sites seemed to think was valuable but actually has limited utility.
This seems to be the default view but no one ever says exactly why. If it needed to evolve, really, Google would have evolved it already. Type in what you want, and the computer finds it for you.
Ironically, "type in what you want and the computer finds it for you" seems to be exactly the interface that Wundrbar and Ubiquity are implementing. The pattern recognition of the query to front-load/limit the results can help, but it's still the same interface. Admittedly, being able to interact with the site as part of the _results_ is a MUCH better feature than the "show a screenshot of the destination web page" feature meme that a lot of sites seemed to think was valuable but actually has limited utility.
To a certain extent, it looks like Ubiquity was very much impressed by Wundrbar. Best of luck to you guys for competing against Ubiquity.
Also, Ubiquity is open source.
don't worry, IE will continue to dominate for the next 5 years...
You're probably right, although currently a disproportionate number of our visitors ARE using Firefox, in part because of our toolbar. It'll be interesting to see how that trends over time...
But from a broader perspective, we want to distribute Wundrbar in as many forms as possible -- as a website, a browser extension, an embeddable widget, a mobile app, etc -- because people shouldn't be tethered to a single application or platform to get their information. That'll be a big difference between us and products like Ubiquity moving forward.
But from a broader perspective, we want to distribute Wundrbar in as many forms as possible -- as a website, a browser extension, an embeddable widget, a mobile app, etc -- because people shouldn't be tethered to a single application or platform to get their information. That'll be a big difference between us and products like Ubiquity moving forward.