Announcing the Y!Q Challenge Winners
Back in May I announced the
saying:
What if there was a concrete incentive to
play with some of the stuff we’ve been building? Like maybe a cold, hard $5,000.
That’d buy you a nice new
Our panel of expert judges has reviewed all the submissions and asked me
to reveal them here. They based their judging on four main criteria:
- Relevance: How effectively have you set context so that Y!Q
produces results with maximum relevance? - Prominence: How prominent is the placement of Y!Q on your
site? - Placement: How creative and intuitive are the placements of Y!Q
icons on your site? - Usefulness: To what degree does Y!Q enhance the overall user
experience on your site?
Here’s what they said…
Third Place
Site: Particletree.com
Implementation by
Particletree did a tremendous job with prominence, topping all entrants with heavy visual customization that integrated the look and feel of their Y!Q implementation with the rest of their site. Y!Q links were also included on most of the articles on the site, and in many places within each article, something undoubtedly made simpler by their implementation of “Lazy Linking,” an integration of Y!Q with the TextPattern content management system that they use.
Second Place
Site: Owensperformance.com
Implementation by
Owensperformance did a great job with prominence, with Y!Q links
being available for all article headlines on the home page, as well as the
detailed articles. Relevance was also a strength, with context
being set fairly effectively in most cases. The combination of effective
prominence, relevance and the nature of the content on the site contributed to strong
overall usefulness.
First Place
Site: Geekextreme.com
Implementation by
Geekextreme did a solid job with relevance, perhaps aided by
their development of a Y!Q Mambo
that integrates Y!Q with the Mambo
content management system. The integration provided a simple way to set
context for Y!Q and it appears they have taken full advantage of it to their
benefit, and to the benefit of visitors to their site. Prominence was
aided by a nice visual customization for the overlay. The frequency of fresh
content on the site, combined with the solid relevance resulted in great
overall usefulness.
Congrats to the winners and thanks to everyone who entered the challenge. We saw some very interesting and creative uses of Y!Q and look forward to many more. By the way – we added a few in-line Y!Q’s to this article to illustrate some other Y!Q usage examples. Hope you find them useful.
Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Search
Cool. This would be great with Yahoo 360!
Congrats to the winners!!! I still think my site ROCKS with the best implementation of Y!Q. (www.GoLexa.net)I’m guessing it was bypassed because I was using the Google API and not Yahoo’s. Could you post some of the other sites that were in the contest? I’d like to see some of the creativity. ED
Prominence: How prominent is the placement of Y!Q on your site?
____________________________________
* * Prominence * *
should NOT have been a factor – blending in naturally with a sites’ design – or not as
IN YOUR FACE
as the winners’ use of it, would have been more appropriate
First of all congrats to the winners.
I have to agree with the other posters, Prominence was a dumb factor. In fact, based on the winners, no offense but I reckon the contest was really poor and not worth entering. Probably some sour grapes on my part.
The winners all look like the copied the same Ajax implementation, at least the UI portion of it. They’re all the same! I don’t see any innovation here.
My entry combined ALL the Yahoo Web services, including Y!Q and Flickr and RSS.
Here’s my entry: http://www.FrancisShanahan.com/reader.aspx
GoLexa is awesome and definitely should’ve beaten the winners imho.
-fs
Calm down Fancis. Also, your implementation sucks.
Hey Francis,
I had seen your site before I knew it was in the contest and was impressed with what you did. I agree, I seen very little innovation in any of the winners. I’m guessing Yahoo probably is hiding the good ones like yours and Golexas’ because those sites have implementations that they could actually use….LOL