I was reading a Robert Scoble post about why Google Latitude product is receiving more attention than Yahoo SearchPad. I totally agree with him. After reading his post about his interview and watching the video, I’ve devised a list of items that’s wrong with SearchPad:
- Where’s our developer API? I, for one, would like to see how I can integrate with this functionality and use it with my own sites.
- Where’s the integration with sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc? I’d like to generate a list of searches and post it as a blog post using the MetaBlog API. Delicious can do this with links that I like. Why can’t I do this with SearchPad?
- Now that I brought up Delicious, another Yahoo property, where’s the integration? I like Delicious, but it has it’s downfalls. I’d like to have more control over the organization of my favorites if I so desire. The tagging system in Delicious is nice, but I’d like to create folders and sub-folders and not tag groupings. SearchPad seems to offer more functionality, but it didn’t appear that my results can be published somehow to Delicious.
- Other providers? One of the cool features I like about Internet Explorer 8 is the ability to change my default search provider from Live Search to Google, Yahoo, or even Wikipedia.
- A stinkin’ video. Are you kidding me? That’s it? Why show something like this off if there’s no easy way to sign-up? How can I provide feedback on a product that I can’t demo.
- Honorable Mention: Next time you request feedback, do you think you can use a more friendly url? Have you heard of TinyURL or the other 100 services that are like it? It’s just not the easiest to trust your “everyday user” to submit feedback using http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/searchpad.html. Actually, I’ve helped you out. I only took 18 characters off the URL, but feel free to use http://tinyurl.com/searchpadfeedback.
It seems like it has the potential to be a great product, but it just doesn’t do it for me right now.