Interesting new approaches to search coming out of Yahoo!

Yahoo! Glue – a new web search interface
When you perform a search on Yahoo! Glue you get a sort of Topic Page – automatically transcluding relevant info onto a single page with a clean URL. For instance, a search for ‘yahoo’ would be at: http://in.glue.yahoo.com/page/yahoo. Curiously these pages are being indexed by Google. There are currently 159,000 ‘glues’ in the Google index – that’s more than knol.

BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) Yahoo!’s open search web services platform [yahoo! developer network]
Use Yahoo’s search API to build your own search UI. Useful and it might be a smart move in the fight with Google, but more likely it won’t be causing Google to loose much sleep.

Whether or not Captcha is broken, it is a human problem

Captcha is broken – now what? [The Guardian]
“Ultimately Captchas are useless for spam because they’re designed to tell you if someone is ‘human’ or not, but not whether something is spam or not. Just because something came from a real human being doesn’t mean it isn’t spam, which is why content-based solutions like Akismet are the only long-term solution to the spam problem.”

The new guardian.co.uk infrastructure is letting them do some interesting stuff, the right way

guardian.co.uk are doing a really good job rebuilding the site – the new user pages are now at lovely semantic URLs
The main page of a user’s contributions (at http://www.guardian.co.uk/users/username) now contains a list of the most recent comments and clippings they’ve made, while the sub-pages /clippings and /comments contain exactly what their names might hint at.

Just down right scary…

Web of Debt – It’s the derivatives, Stupid! Why Fannie, Freddie and AIG all had to be bailed out
The dominos go down in a cascade of cross-defaults that infects the whole banking industry and jeopardizes the global pyramid scheme. The potential for this sort of nuclear reaction was what prompted billionaire investor Warren Buffett to call derivatives “weapons of financial mass destruction.” It is also why the banking system cannot let a major derivatives player go down, and it is the banking system that calls the shots. The Federal Reserve is literally owned by a conglomerate of banks; and Hank Paulson, who heads the U.S. Treasury, entered that position through the revolving door of investment bank Goldman Sachs, where he was formerly CEO.

Don’t know what’s going on here – but these two are bonkers [news.bbc]
And how they didn’t die is a mystery.