phil ringnalda

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.