There’s been a lot in the news this week (so far) about a new search engine called Cuil. Apparently it’s a well-funded start-up of educational types and former Google employees who are looking to do better than Google itself. That’s a tough mountain to mount, given that Cuil wants to unseat a company whose name is a verb that describes what Cuil offers: search.

Cuil does not offer the many ancillary services/products provided by Google, such as image searches, local searches, map searches, online word processors, and email accounts. What Cuil focuses on is just search. It claims to do a better job of offering more relevant search results by ranking pages’ content and relevance, rather than inbound links – what Cuil refers to as “superficial popularity metrics”, and which Google uses as at least par of its search algorithm known as PageRank.

According to their home page (as of right now) Cuil also says that they have managed to index 121,617,892,992 web pages, compared to Google’s reported 40 billion.

That’s all well and good, but none of that provides an answer to the most basic question that defines how well a search engine works: does it give me what I am looking for?

To that end, I ran a few searches and got mixed results. Searching for Jonathan Schellack did not return this web site. The search returned 17,986 results, but only showed me a subset of that on three pages. Where are the rest, I wonder? In none of the visible results was www.schellack.net/jonathan.

Searching for yourself on the web may be the first thing we self-absorbed people do, but how about the things I search for on a daily basis (I promise I don’t search for myself that often). So I tried out a search for something I had used Google for several days earlier. I entered “sql cumulative returns” to try and find some examples of SQL statements or scripts that would show me cumulative, aggregate information about some data sets I was using. My first search returned entirely disappointing results:

Thankfully, refreshing the page gave me better success, actually giving me some information on the second try. Unfortunately, though, the search engine only gave me results that used the word “returns” as a verb, and I had been looking for that word used as a noun. Altogether, the results we not as useful as what I had found on Google.

When I attempted to tell Cuil to give me results with the phrase “cumulative results”, I got nothing (literally). The page was empty of results, though it told me there were plenty out there:

Trying to search for a less obscure and nerdy topic gave me even worse results. I’m considering picking up an iPhone this weekend when my AT&T contract comes up for renewal (more on that later). Of course, I’m hesitant to buy any technology product that I’ll be locked into using for the next two years, so I searched for “iPhone 3G issues“. All but one of the results on the first page from Cuil were from the same, spammy-looking web site. None of them were relevant:

Cuil presents search results in a different and potentially very useful format – and I love not having to scroll down to view my results – but the fledgling search engine still has a ways to go before I’ll consider using it every day.

So my daughter and I get my wife an Eee PC for my wife’s birthday a few month’s back, and the little laptop has been working fairly well ever since. The space bar doesn’t work all that well, and typing got a good bit easier when I picked up a $10 keyboard off of NewEgg, but otherwise, the little 9-incher has worked well for your basic web browsing, email-checking, etc. (technically, it’s an 8.9 in. screen, but who’s counting).

The small laptop worked great up until I decided to run the included Asus Update program to install a newer version of the computer’s BIOS (version 0704). After that, the wireless internet just stopped working. The operating system couldn’t even find the wireless network adapter – as if the wireless hardware had never existed. I search through the Windows Device Manager looking for it, and to see if there were any errors, but as far as Windows was concerned, the built-in WiFi wasn’t there.

Finally, I booted into the BIOS (that was what had changed, after all) by rebooting the computer and immediately pressing the F2 key when the computer first began to start up. That took me to the blue BIOS screen, at which point I found that the WiFi – as well as the web cam – had been disabled. Since that was at a more base level than even the operating system, this explained why Windows didn’t think the wireless card was there. So I enabled the wireless (and the web cam), restarted the computer, and all is well now.

I wanted to share the experience, though, in case any other Eee PC owners run into the same sort of problem. I had scoured the forums and Google in search of a solution, but didn’t find anything that sounded like what we were experiencing. Hopefully that means the little laptops are working just perfectly for everyone else out there.

So I just upgraded WordPress to version 2.6.

Outside of one issue that I resolved (I had to delete my cookies in FireFox 3 to be able to get back into the admin part of the site), things are looking good. Additionally, in the top-right corner of my admin screen, there is now (essentially) a turbo button (really it’s a link).

The turbo button allows you to download Google Gears, which allows you to download some or all of your web applications onto your desktop. I figured, hey, why not! It’s not supposed to really give WordPress new functionality, but it should speed things up, at least according to the release page.

We’ll find out! I downloaded and installed Gears, restarted my web browser, and then used the Turbo link, which proceeded to download several hundreds things (I dunno what), over the course of about a minute. The admin pages do look, now, to load a bit snappier. Hopefully I’ll be blogging in lightening speed from here on out!

Desk Party at the Office

Yeah…it’s a Monday.