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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Wednesday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week 07/30/2008 What’s so cuil
about still another search engine ? Presently
on the web we have well over 100
major search engines. And
what they all do is search for you – you type in the keywords
– and they return a
list of websites that might have what you’re looking for, and
that’s a very qualified “might have” as it’s known
that companies can actually buy key words, so that when a web surfer types in
a certain word, some companies will always come up first in the results. Currently on the political scene some
candidates had bought certain keywords – so that if you typed in
Hillary – you might actually be shown a website of a political opponent.
Some
search engines also used to show the number of web pages that they surfed,
but that seems to have fallen in the bit bucket, as the number of web pages
has increased now to over a trillion, and the number of hits you get back
from a typical search can take hours- days – weeks – months
– years – sifting through, and still you might not find any good
information. But this
week some ex-google employees started their own attempt to offer a better
search engine – than who else – google - and started off falling on their
faces – nothing cool about it. This new
search engine is spelled c-u-i-l but pronounced cool and is at
www.cuil.com Cuil is an old Irish word for
knowledge.
The site crashed from
curious web surfers, but now seems to be up again. It proudly shows on the
main screen that it is searching over 121 billion web pages. (Why does this
number make the Yellow arches at McDonald’s pop into my mind ?) Cuil quote
“searches more pages
on the Web than anyone else— Rather than rely on superficial popularity
metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and
relevance.” In that they dig at
Google’s way of measuring page popularity – the reference to
“superficial popularity metrics” and they also stress that “We
believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful
approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we
are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private.”
I don’t think most
web surfers really know or care much about if search engines are collecting
information about buying habits. Cuil’s interface is a simple fill in the
blank search bar, but it displays it’s results differently – in a
graphic 3 column format with each result in its own little window, which
might appeal to visual people - which shows when I do a Cuil search for KPBX:
Compared to
Google’s page – with its links to news – images –
maps – gmail and other google tools which I
use daily – Cuil is bare bones. In typical corporate hi-jinks
– if you go to google today and type in CUIL – the first hit is
an article that says Cuil is going to need a lot of love and nurturing from
users for it to have a chance against google, and those are qualities most
web surfers don’t express. So is Cuil really cool ? We’ll see ... |
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For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2008 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html PO Box 31522 Spokane, Wa 99223-1522 (509)624-7230 |
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