.Comparison
between Yahoo, Altavista and Overture.
We had to compare the 3 various search engines to find out the difference between them. Each of the search engines is evaluated through 3 criteria respectively. They are:
i)
i)
Ease of use
ii)
ii)
Content scope
iii)
iii)
Search results
A more detailed description of their performance is further explained below.
To fulfill the ease of use criteria, we look for simplicity and user friendliness. As Internet users, we want a lot of features and attractions but minimal distractions (pop-ups, etc) with the added gist of appealing design.
Yahoo allows its users to search for results in their preferred language. Yahoo also has many shortcuts to different categories of topic and users can narrow down their searches, this can and will definitely help new Internet users to get use to its controls easily. Compared AltaVista and Overture, Yahoo’s categorized indexes are far broader and well organized. Overture and AltaVista both have limited amount of categorized indexes and sometimes we couldn’t find what we need from their page, simply put it as Yahoo goes straight to the point where else Overture and AltaVista would list websites which aren’t even relevant at times.
Yahoo and AltaVista offers advance search for the users but Overture doesn’t. The advance search option can help users narrow down their search and get the results that they want. There is another option for the users to choose and that is the filter option. Only Overture and AltaVista offer this option.
1.2 1.2 Content Scope
Yahoo, AltaVista and Overture are all search engines and they all should have the same content but the competitive market these days have form them into changing their content and shaping them into different unique sites.
Yahoo’s site contains the most links and shortcuts. It has news and current event on the main page. Yahoo also has many interactive games to be played by users and it provides its e-mail to its user as well. AltaVista’s site contains mostly categorized indexes and links to help user find their searches.
For Overture, its site has contents mostly about its company and its partners although it does try and provide a “Yahoo style” shortcuts and indexes. Overall I think Yahoo’s site has more content and it is easier for users to find information there. It also has many entertaining content and up to date news and movie reviews.
1.3 1.3 Search Results
The most vital part a search engine has to offer is the search service that it provides. It must be accurate and straight to the point. Helping the users to narrow down their search to suite the need of the user is a plus too. Results that are found must also be relevant to the users.
As a test, we searched the word “Malaysia” in all the three search engines and the results are as follows, AltaVista came out with the most results but a lot of them are irrelevant and the articles are not as lengthy and creditable compared to Yahoo’s results. Yahoo’s results is categorized in to website matches, sponsor matches, travel matches, inside Yahoo matches and categorized matches.
Yahoo’s matches are all narrowed down for the users to get better results. Overture has the least results and all their result could be found in Yahoo and AltaVista that means that whatever results we get from Overture, we can get that exact same results from Yahoo and AltaVista. Most of Yahoo’s articles and fact contains statistic and factual information, while AltaVista and Overture’s site did not contain very factual articles.
1.4 Conclusion
Through our testing and observations, we have concluded that Yahoo.com has edged Overture.com and Altavista.com as the preferred search engine. It has a good and friendly user interface and a wide content scope. Besides that, the edge that Yahoo.com has over the rest is attributed to the fact that its search results were precise (most of the time comparatively), organized and informational.
2. Comparing
two similar sites in the same category based on three personal criteria.
Criteria: 1) Price 2) Service and 3) Quality of products.
As a foreign student, buying phone cards is like a weekly activity for us because we need to communicate with our family that are far away from the United States. Therefore, the price, service and quality of the phone cards are rather important to us. And the 2 websites that we are going to compare is phonecardsonsale.com and phonecardsforsale.com. both websites sell long distance phone calling cards but each of them has their own uniqueness.
Phonecardsonsale.com is a website with a clean and clear outlook. The price of the phone cards although discounted it is still consider expensive comparing to the other website. But since we paid so much, we will be expecting a high quality phone card and service, and the phone cards in this website didn’t disappoint us. The phone cards, although slightly expensive, the connections using their phone cards are clear and it never cut the line off in a sudden. They are able to provide smooth flow of communication all the time.
As for phonecardsforsale.com, the website outlooks is clear but it seemed a bit simple and crude. This outlook doesn’t seem to impress the customers as much as phonecardsonsale.com. With this outlook, we as a customer will expect some phone cards with more discounts and lower quality, and we are right. Compared to phonecardsonsale.com, this website’s phone cards seem to be a better deal but after trying the quality, we understand the reason. The phone cards in phonecardsforsale.com might suddenly cut you off the line or there will be some interruptions that make the connection unclear. And that pissed us off sometimes because interruption while we are communicating on the phone is irritating.
As for the service of both websites, we all agreed that phonecardsonsale.com provide a better service than phonecardsforsale.com. Customer will be expecting a replied email from the website to inform them about the status of their order and after a few minutes they will send them the phone card’s pin number. Phonecardsonsale.com never forget to send the email but sometimes phonecardsforsale.com does. This makes the customer worry about their order status and again the customer might get frustrated with the confusion and waiting.
And thus we all reached a conclusion, saying that although the price of the phone cards in phonecardsonsale.com is higher but it is worth it. Due to the smooth communication services that their phone cards provide and efficient customer service, we highly recommended this website.
eBay and uBid are both online auction companies, their job is to auction off anything and everything that is available, whether from companies or from the typical individual. Items of all types are available for bidding, and the item will be sold to the highest bidder at the end of the dateline.
Both the online auction sites are evaluated through 3 criteria:
i.
i.
Ease of use
ii.
ii.
Content scope
iii.
iii.
Fees
iv.
iv.
Security
Browsing through the online auction houses can directly be linked to shopping at your local shopping mall. Customers would feel annoyed if there are a lot of items for sale but not arranged and organized in a proper manner. This is what we look for when evaluating the ease of use criteria. We would want to think of the auction site as a normal shopping mall, where the ways its items are organized play a major role in the mood of its users.
In this case, eBay.com definitely provides its users a more comprehensive and neat look on its items on auction. They are all arranged and organized in a way that isn’t a sight for sore eyes. As an example, we examine eBay Motors, cars are separated into different categories (Cars, Luxury, Minivans, SUVs, etc). Click on cars and Ebay will direct the user to the list of car companies and the cars on auction. Everything is then listed in detail without compromising the looks and tidiness of it. On the contrary, uBid, does provide a wide selection of items for bid, but the one thing that we didn’t like was the that we get the impression that uBid tries to make its site look loaded with stuff, but they forget that users would be affected by improper arrangements and organizations. It seems that uBid just dumps everything into their site, hence, browsing through the various items can be quite a task.
Furthermore, eBay offer its first time user a comprehensive tour from how to use eBay to how to sell on eBay. On the other hand, even though uBid offer tutorials, which seems like an overnight work. Not much thought has been put into their tutorials and again organization was poor.
So, in terms of ease of use, we gave eBay a 5 and uBid a 3.
4. B2B: Compare http://extranet.daimlerchrysler.com and www.covisint.com,
based on the given criteria:
i)
i)
Ease of use
ii)
ii)
Security
iii)
iii)
Exclusiveness
A single registration and sign-on process, allowing us to log in to Covisint application through out the site. The website has an integrated home page with access to Covisint applications and automotive industry content. A point of integration for supply chain management, procurement, product development and other functional applications are also available. Standardized and streamlined communication and collaboration capabilities is another assets of the website.
First time user can create an account to get an access to whole material of the Daimler Chrysler website. All contents in the site have separate link to avoid lot of information in on one page. The side has public and secure search engine that will result from the extranet pages. There are many ways of giving feedbacks; if someone has questions concerning a Daimler Chrysler Vehicle they have their toll free number, and if you have problems or questions regarding applications they have Help desk service.
we would certainly give 5 points to Daimler Chrysler because we found it better than Covisint website which we would give it a 4 out of 5. Covisint has lot of information on same page, which can be very confusing to the user.
Given the choice of using Daimler Chrysler and Covisint. Both are the long establishing company and still doing well; top selling car companies that are highly recognized by most. Everyday they have numerous people logging into their homepage. Such as potential buyers, mechanic engineers, car parts dealers, and even students like us who are doing a research. Thus, it is very important for them to limit the necessary information to the users. Also, there are certain information are not suppose to show it to the public, thus they have a filter the information with a login users and password needed to access to the information. Hence, they have use the purpose of extranet. It is also known as security or the login in short. Different users should only be allowed a certain depth of exclusive information.
Overall, Daimler Chrysler has a higher level of security level than Covisint. For instance, when I was browsing through the Application. Immediately, I was shown to the breakdown of headings, such as engineering, finance, extended Enterprise and whole list of applications. While I try to click on the finance, it shows another breakdown of it shows the security symbol. And there are two types, yellow and red. Both colors indicate the necessity of a required login name and password in order to login to the respective site. This way, I rate their security in the scale 5 out of 5. They are able to filter to viewers which are public information and which are not.
As for the Covisint web site, it has more things to view than Daimler Chrysler, and less tidy compare to Daimler Chrysler, but information can still be retrieved. In this website, there is one icon especially for login members which require a password. On the homepage, there listed quite a lot of information that do not need password. Thus, it is less hassle while using it. On the scale of 5 this page is rated 3. Because for those information do not require password; they even show the picture of the machinery, which viewer can get more information than they expected.
After comparing Daimlerchrysler.com and Covisint.com, we agreed that both sites have their own uniqueness. Both website build their website according to the usefulness of their website.
Daimlerchrysler.com has more in depth information about the vehicle but you have to be a member in order to receive the information. This site is unique for its application section, which includes engineering, extended enterprise, finance, general information, logistic, platforms and others. This is the place where we can get lots of information. While for Covisint.com, the information we see in that site is more in a general way. It is mostly concentrated on the industry’s information and updates and thus it isn’t as professional as the Daimlerchrysler.com.
As for the design of the site, we prefer Covisint.com’s design because it doesn’t need to start a new window to obtain the information. It can be very irritating and time consuming because, every time we want some other information we need to click the mouse and wait for the new window. In another hand, we like the cleanliness and tidiness in Daimlershrysler.com. It is user-friendlier than Daimlerchrysler.com because their features are easier to access. Unlike Covisint.com, it seemed to have too many columns in a single page and those columns tend to be distracting.
Thus we reached a conclusion where Daimlerchrysler.com has more detailed information than Covisint.com so we would give it a 4 out of 5; thus it is exclusively for their members to obtain information about the vehicles. As for Covisint.com, it is more publicize, hence it deserves a 3 out of 5. It is exclusive for its varieties of information and links to useful websites.
|
|
Daimler Chrysler |
Covisint |
|
Ease
of use |
5 |
4 |
|
Security |
5 |
3 |
|
Exclusiveness |
4 |
3 |
|
Total |
14 |
10 |
Overall we have rated Daimler Chrysler having a 4 point edge over Covisint.
5. The future
trends in B2C and B2B e-commerce.
Today, Internet has big impact in our society. Internet can help people to complete their job. In business area, there is a lot of advertisement for selling the goods in Internet, which is call e-commerce. There are 2 kind of e-commerce:
· B2B (Business to business): Wholesaling on the web
· B2C (Business to Customer): Retailing on the web
Other than a decreased in time and an increase in efficiency, there’s nothing much that could be predicted for future wholesaling. Wholesaling companies will definitely use the Internet as a communication hub, where they can have over the net conference with its customers. Business transactions will be 24/7 and with technology on the rise, it could well be that clients will be able to view their items online in a really specific manner, which will thus, decrease the transaction time by a lot.
We predict that retailing is going to be really different in the future. More emphasize will be given to Just-In-Time supply chain management rather than inventory stocking. A good example of this would be Dell.com, right after they receive their orders, they would configure and ship the computers/notebooks to its respective customers.
With this in mind, be aware that Dell does keep inventory but at a minimal level. What it does so well is that once the order is placed, parts will be shipped from different locations; for example, the monitor will be shipped from Alabama whilst the CPU will be shipped from California. So different locations are responsible for different parts, which would be able to make the company more efficient.
As a whole, we predict the Internet holds a lot of opportunity for business development for years to come because; it is a fact that the Internet is still very new (7 years) and still has a lot of potential.
One of the improvements that we see coming is in the communication aspect. Better connection will enable the world to communicate and conduct business transactions smoother. New applications will definitely see a leap in the current standard of business over the net whereby; customization will be one of the most important aspects in the business, enabling the clients themselves to customize specifically every single detail and then sending it over to the company to process it.
Another aspect that is bound to experience improvements is the safety level of the business transactions, more laws, tools and software will be available and imposed online to enable a safer and more secure business transaction.