14 DAY TRIAL // The battle between Google and Yahoo for the most powerful application is very important for all users because it can only provide better products with improved performance as well as new projects meant to attract more customers to the companies. Although they provide a huge number of products, Google and Yahoo are currently challenging one another for the best search engine, both firms revealing new functions and features.
Google Reader is an innovative product designed by Google that allows you to organize and manage your RSS feeds and read latest news or other information from all around the world directly from the official page of the service. It works just like any RSS client, but it is online based and available using a simple Google account. At this time, no other company ever developed a similar product with powerful features, Google's Reader being one of the most used services developed by the search giant.
Although it is not quite a similar Google Reader product, the giant portal Yahoo announced today the Pipes solution, regarded as a feed aggregator and manipulator. The service is based on drag and drop mashup support, allowing you to connect and process internet data sources, as well as redirecting the information.
"Using the Pipes editor, you can fetch any data source via its RSS, Atom or other XML feed, extract the data you want, combine it with data from another source, apply various built-in filters (sort, unique (with the "ue" this time:-), count, truncate, union, join, as well as user-defined filters), and apply simple programming tools like for loops. In short, it's a good start on the Unix shell for mashups. It can extract dates and locations and what it considers to be "text entities."
You can solicit user input and build URL lines to submit to sites. The drag and drop editor lets you view and construct your pipeline, inspecting the data at each step in the process. And of course, you can view and copy any existing pipes, just like you could with shell scripts and later, web pages," Tim O'Reilly sustained according to Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Land.
Even if the service looks quite powerful, its loading time is extremely slow, so I wasn't able to test the new Yahoo product. Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Land reports the same issue, so I think Yahoo should improve it immediately if the company aims to attract users quickly. Because the documentation of the service is not accessible, you can read a huge blog post published by Jeremy Zawodny on this link.