This giving up Google and Yahoo! for Lent stuff is hard.

Yesterday was my first full day at my computer since I started my sacrifice. I am not doing too well. I did 52 Google searches. I also did 28 searches on Ask and 5 on Live. Most of the Google searches were due to me using the imbedded search window in Camino. This weekend I am going to try to change out the default search engine from Google to Ask. Just like browsers, search share is all about distribution and not technology.

I did much better in staying away from Yahoo. I did not visit my.yahoo the entire day. Netvibes turns out to be a nice clean personalized portal. I have not decided if I like the fact I have to click twice instead of once to go to the actual Web page of my RSS feeds, but it works.

One thing Netvibes needs is a better module for stock quotes. The current module only presents a quote. When you expand the window for a particular stock it only shows a day chart. If you click on that it takes you out to finance.yahoo.com. There is no news notification on the stock module front door and one is badly needed. I think there is a real opportunity here for some company to improve this and had a nice conversation with my friends over at InvestorVillage about it.