Widgets – Google v/s Yahoo!
| If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to the RSS feed to receive future posts quickly.It's completely free! Thanks for visiting! | |
Even though I’m on a pathetic network with a speed of max: 8 kBps , i decided to get my hands on google desktop and yahoo widgets.
Google desktop(with widgets and a super cool desktop search engine ) : 2 MB
Yahoo Widgets Engine (with basic widgets) : 600kb (+ 11mb online installation )
Now lets start comparison right from scratch.Regarding the download size, google is a super light weight app with 2mb where it includes google talk, google desktop crawl engine(just like google bot which crawls the web for all your search needs! ), some widgets , a cool side bar ) . And the yahoo one is a bit heavy with 11mb of online installation(and thats just a Widget engine) .
Yahoo widget installation was over within minutes after the file download.Its simple and straight. Google on the other hand needs some hours to set up its desktop file index. It is done in 2 modes .Either you can configure it to crawl the files on idle time or you can have a forced crawl.Crawling is a resource hungry process.It took above 95% of my cpu (1.9Ghz intel P4 
) .So it is better to opt for the first mode.It took around 4 hours to index 120GB .
Yahoo widget engine uses a glossy mac like interface for almost all its widgets.Its really cool and yahoo site hosts over 1000 widgets to choose from.
The engine is basically a java script runtime engine which takes takes full advantage of advanced graphics capabilty of modern PCs.And its available for MACs also! Now who need a standalone widget engine for a MAC?? Yahoo managed to add some eye candy efefcts like fading and sliding effects which seems pretty neat and smooth to me.
Each individual Widget can have its own set of options associated with it.
This allows the user to do things like change the location for Weather, or add, edit and delete To Do list items.
Google seems to have concentrated more on the search and performance rather than on visual effects.The prime focus is indeed local search by which you can search anything(Yea!! even contents of files!!) with a double tap on [ctrl] key. The speed by which it locates files is simply amazing! It has predictive result display , which shows the results as you type .
Look wise, Google is as it is always..plain, classic and white! Some cool widgets are available for google desktop,which integrates with google talk, gmail and orkut.Rss Readers, what’s Hot ( Top most searched keywords in google) , whatsmyip, etc are some of them.
Google desktop has a nifty replacement for windows Media player. Actually its an extention of windows media player(Only Audio formats are playable).
Yahoo provides an engine which is light and neat, and the widgets have a mac look and are movable. It can integrate with yahoo 360, yahoo mail and yahoo search. Google concentrates on search session more.The google widgets actually clutters your desk space , if it doesnt feel geeky to you! It takes some (5%)system resources to run indexing and crawling. But the search engine is a real need if you have a huge pile of unorganized files.It can even index tags from mp3 files.
For me the winner is google for its performance and availabilty of widgets
(without considering the search function)
Google Desktop – Download
Yahoo Widget Engine – Download
when will be pulsar dts-fi will launch .
Nice post. I used to use google desktop a few months back. Nowadays I dont use it bcoz of some difficulties I encountered with the sidebar. One particular problem I encountered was the crawling that it did with my GMail. A huge amount of data transfer took place. For ppl who are on a download limit, such a thing is really bad. But once indexing has been done, its a gr8 experience.
crawling gmail account is a prob for sure!! but u can disable it from the preferences.. I use pop3 with gmail, so all my mails are here in my system.. so no worries abt the d/t limit!