Talking about the weather
Gary Price notes that Google’s new weather search is nothing new, but what he fails to note is that it doesn’t suck quite as badly as the competition. Having a feature is nice, but actually providing what people want, without requiring a click and some ad views, is a whole lot nicer.
You can search for weather 90210 at Yahoo, but then you’ll have to click the link in their shortcut to get anything but the current conditions, and when you do you’ll get a generic forecast page, with the same sort of lowest common denominator ads you’ll see on thousands of forecast regurgitation pages (though, oddly for Yahoo, no ads for their Personals service: I thought they thought absolutely everything makes people horny, but apparently weather is the exception).
You can search for weather 90210 at Ask Jeeves, and get a very pretty display of current conditions, but then you have to figure out what you want to click through to, from “detailed weather report” (which is actually a nice two day forecast, by morning, afternoon, evening, and night, not a report), or “7 day forecast” or “seasonal weather” (which is actually climate, not weather).
Or, you can search for weather 90210 at Google, and just get what you probably want: a four day rough forecast and current conditions. If you want more, the actual search results will be littered with people happy to oblige.
Of course, like a certain other recent Google feature, this is just a pure evil naked power grab, as Google tries to steal traffic from the hard working folks at weather-cities-us-hotels-forecast-travel.com, but I see that at least the ones with memorable domains aren’t bothering to even try to make themselves easier to use. I’d be happy to type weather.com/90210 or even wunderground.com/90210 in my browser’s addressbar, and not to get all Scoble and start talking about connectors, but, I’d find that cool enough to talk about, and show my friends how to do it. Sadly, both just return a 404 Clue Not Found.
You’re using Firefox, right?
I’m guessing you already use this, but Firefox users don’t have to wait for sites to create more intuitive search URLs. A keyword bookmark named ”weather” with this URL gets what you want:
http://www.weather.com/weather/local/%s
Then you can type ”weather 90210” in the address bar.
Slick, though I’m more likely to want the forecast through a long weekend of fishing than the forecast for tomorrow’s one-day fly in, fly out business meeting, so
http://www.weather.com/activities/other/other/weather/tenday.html?locid=%sis more my speed. Shame that none of the dropdown options in the search banner involve ”long-term,” since I’m much more likely to right-click and ”Add a keyword for this search” than I am to go through the too-awkward steps for manually setting up a keyword bookmarklet. I wish someone could figure out a still-Firefoxy way of letting the add bookmark dialog switch between simple and full, so the times when you want to edit the URL and add a keyword wouldn’t require creating, finding, right-clicking.But, what I think my point was supposed to be was that none of those are viral: I’d tell someone about them if they asked me, I might even write about them if I was talking up Firefox and needed an example, but I’d never grab random strangers and say ”hey, look at this, you can just…”
And have you tried the ForecastFox plugin? Lovely thing.
Thanks for reminding me! I used it for a while, loved it for the constant reminder of things like ”today it’s sunny, tomorrow it’s going to rain, step away from the computer and go to the beach right this minute!,” but then I decided to trim my main profile down to something I could test bugs on, and after I realized what a bad idea that was forgot to bring ForecastFox back.
Yes, Google does it better, but they only support U.S. locations. Searching for ”weather auckland” only reveals a summary forecast in Ask Jeeves.