A rather diverse group of links this week:

• A collection of UI design patterns: Great collection of screenshots of various webapps grouped by function. A handy reference when thinking about design.
• Yahoo! Query Language: This has apparently been out for a while but I came across it recently. Yahoo! lets you make SQL-like requests to web sites and web services and returns the results in JSON or XML. An extremely easy way to grab and process any information you need.
• Google’s Conent vs. Search advertising study: Ditto on the timing but this has some pretty interesting conclusions. Some take-aways are:
  • On average content advertising was found to be as cost-effective as search (when comparing CPAs)
  • Median advertiser had a 28% lower conversion rate on Content compared to search
  • Smaller advertisers (spending less than $1,138/mo) perform better on the Content Network than search when compared with larger advertisers (spending more than $6000/mo) – increase in % conversion coming from content (30% vs 10%).