New cuil (pronounced cool) search engine is a Google hot trend

So, here’s a (maybe) cool hot trend for today, there’s a new search engine in town… I even got a referral earlier from them for 9/11 Truth (a category which I’ve neglected lately, mostly putting things which could go in there in either Zeitgeist or Sibel Edmonds) though I doubt I would have noticed cuil particularly this morning without their hot trendiness

Hot Trends (USA)

Jul 28, 2008
1. cuil
2. cuil.com
13. new search engine
16. www.cuil.com
31. cuil inc
60. cuil search
63. kuil

I managed to get one search to go through with results (and one without), but the page loads pretty slowly at the moment, no doubt due to high traffic volume. I like their privacy policy

when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on this later). Your search history is your business, not ours.

More precisely:

Logs
We do not keep logs of our users’ search activity.

So far, I wasn’t exactly impressed with the actual search results, however. I’ll give them a fair chance to get things going, though. I’m all for competition for Google. And search engine privacy, did I mention privacy already? Yeah, that too. Polymeta still gets the lion’s share of my searches, though.

TechCrunch compared some search results for G and C and posted results here

and even TechCrunch’s online/offline status post on cuil makes tailrank news….

Cuiling Cuil may or may not be cuil, but with only 121,578 results so far (none that I saw were about a search engine) it’s not likely to “break the internet”, at least not today- like googling google is supposed to.

Cuiling cuil doesn't break the internet quite yet, unlike googling Google is supposed to

Results 1 – 10 of about 2,720,000,000 for google

 Then again, it’s a few hours old vs. going on a decade for Google.

Polymeta searching cuil

ETA:
now performing even better on the hot trends list, as follows:
1. cuil
2. new search engine
3. cuil.com
11. kuil
17. www.cuil.com
26. cuil inc
28. kool
30. cool
37. ciul
47. cuil search
52. cool.com

impressive buzz…

and one more update for the top of the hour… the trend seems to have peaked last hour, but the creative misspellings continue to pile up.
2. cuil
6. cuil.com
13. kuil
16. www.cuil.com
18. cull search
24. ciul
33. cool search
47. cool.com
56. cuil inc
58. kool
67. cuil wiki
87. quil
89. guil

ETA: for awhile now, polymeta has included cuil’s search results within its offerings. Just one more reason for me to like polymeta and probably not bother much with keeping up with cuil… even though they do show up as a result in their own search engine now.

Happy Fourth of July, Kathy Etchingham (and Jimi Hendrix) searchers

I’m actually quite impressed by the number of hits my blog is getting from people searching for Kathy Etchingham (who as readers will no doubt be aware was Jimi Hendrix’s long time girlfriend- middle name Mary, as in The Wind Cries Mary). The post I made mentioning her doesn’t show up very high in Google, but nonetheless I get some traffic fairly regularly from it. Think about that for a second… she’s not notable enough (so far) to merit her own wikipedia page, he’s been dead for close to 40 years now, she was his girlfriend for awhile and now people come to my blog seeking to learn more about her. Amazing how bread and circuses so often overshadow important information, isn’t it? I think we must all be in a collective state of denial about how hot the water in the pot is getting…

Thanks for stopping by my blog, though. Not to disappoint you Kathy Etchingham seekers entirely, here’s a little Fourth of July weekend music for you… Jimi @ Woodstock. I think you know probably the tune. Star Spangled Banner. Yes indeed. Dunno what happened to the land of the free and the home of the brave, though. Somehow it just doesn’t ring very true for me anymore. Not to belittle the sacrifices others continue to make in the name of that flag, but I think our Constitution has been well and truly shredded…
“If crime fighters fight crime, and firefighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight?” George Carlin, RIP

Wikia search and Wordle

They say (whoever they are) you should stick to a single topic per post, but I don’t always follow the rules. Sometimes things relate enough in my mind that I make a post into a related links post, other times it just occurs to me that a couple of things I’ve run across recently I should make a note of, but I can’t see a really good reason for two notes when one will suffice. This post is an example of the latter case. First up, Wikia search:

Somebody landed on my blog using Wikia search, which I’d never seen before. So, curious, I paid it a visit.

Here’s a quote from their about page…

Our Principles
Wikia Search has four organizational principles: Transparency, Community, Privacy, and Quality

which they go on to describe in detail. Here’s a quote from their Crawl the Web page

Wikia Search uses a distributed web service called “Grub” to crawl the web. Grub was started back in 2000 with the mission of using a team of volunteers from around the world to crawl every website, every day, in order to build the most up-to-date search results possible. To further this goal and the goals of the Search Wikia project, Wikia acquired Grub from LookSmart in July of 2007. Like all other code used on Wikia Search, Grub is available under the BSD License.

Users are developing a “whitelist“, described as follows:

This is a list of sites that the community considers to be prime “must have” sites for the first crawl of the web. We are aiming for around 35 million URLs in the first index, which is of course very small (more to come soon of course!). This is a list of URLs (and notes about each of them) that should evolve to be a generally accepted consensus of a good starting point of sites that should be deep crawled and included.

So, basically it looks like it is a search engine which falls somewhere between stumbleupon, digg and wikipedia… an interesting idea, if nothing else. Perhaps a valuable new search engine at some stage…

Wordle- Beautiful Word Clouds
I ran across this colorful tag cloud forming site through (wouldn’t you know it) tag surfing on wordpress. Pretty cool results, I think.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Tips on finding information using search engines

Sure, there are no doubt classes you can take to learn this type of information. But this post is for those of us who haven’t taken them, didn’t pay attention when we were taking them and/or need a refresher. I’ll share a few tips which I use and perhaps others will leave helpful comments. Hopefully, these tips will help you improve the results you get when searching, and help you find what you are looking for more quickly and easily.

1.) Google isn’t everything-
Sure, it’s the best single non meta search engine around. But limiting oneself to that, when one can easily use a metasearch engine which improves on Google (I know of one so far, polymeta.com) is like tying one hand behind your back while searching. You may find that you don’t always agree with Google’s “relevance” for certain topics. Also, the other search engines pick up on things that Google misses, even outside of “certain topics”.

2.) tips for common words-
search engines are apparently now including common words which they used to neglect such as the, and, etc. However, most of the time when one is looking for such common words in a search one is looking for a specific phrase “this and that” “the little mermaid”, etc. so why not use quotes if one is going to include the very common words. Sure, you can find lots of results for a search of- and not or the – but will the most relevant results specific to what you are actually looking for pop up first?

Only two of the top ten results for searching (not in quotes) “and not or the” relate to Boolean searching or Boolean operators. In this case, if that is what one is searching for, one actually gets improved results by leaving off the extraneous the. On the other hand, searching the string (AND NOT OR the) (no quotes or parentheses) returns completely different results which are even less relevant to Boolean logic. Sometimes, it’s still better to leave out those common words, in other words, despite the fact that search engines will now search them.

3.) parentheses really help, but can be too specific-
Let’s take an example using a fairly common name, say Bob Jones, for example. Depending on the search engine you are using, putting quotes around “Bob Jones” will cut your results at least in half and sometimes by considerably more. The downside to this is that you’ll be missing out on anything which puts Bob’s last name first. Or calls him Robert or Mr. Or Bob A. Jones. Or Bob Arthur Jones. You get the idea. But if you are looking for someone very specific, you can include all of those possibilities. You just need to string them together with a whole lot of ORs. Which in this case will leave you with far too many results to be useful, but with a less common name can be helpful.
Quotation marks can also be especially helpful when one is searching for either a quoted passage or for a word pair or phrase- “now then” say, for example. Getting too specific on a not quite correctly remembered quote, on the other hand won’t be helpful or quick. So, use quotes, but know their limitations. Putting quotes around a single word, on the other hand, doesn’t do a whole lot. Yes, people do arrive at my blog via things like city “maps” of the wheel of time (hint- try searching “wheel of time” maps and/or look here) OR “kill the messenger” and “edmunds”, but I doubt the single words in quotes are helping much.

4.) Asking a search engine a specific question (or attempting to engage it in conversation) as one would a human being isn’t always the best approach. I’ll give you a specific example or two here:
I got two hits to this blog for the phrase (searched without quotes) “can i be fired for bebo comment” yesterday. I don’t know anything about bebo. If I had to guess, I’d say the answer is yes, depending on what one writes, who one works for, etc. But, I’d never written about or even read about Deena Pawson, who was indeed fired for writing Bebo comments “work sux” and working until midnight was “gay like the management”. Nonetheless, I ranked pretty well (second page) for that search because (I think) my blog has the word can in the title and I have a Bebo category for this blog. Admittedly, the single entry (so far) in that category is pretty relevant to the overall question; nonetheless it doesn’t address the fairly specific specific question asked, except perhaps in general terms- what you post on social networking sites can indeed get you fired, fined, suspended or be used in a court case against you.

Second example on search engine queries- (which just goes to show you, searchers may know something I don’t)
(no quotes) “how popular relatively is the movie zeit(geist)” (I’m assuming they finished the word zeitgeist). Personally, I’d have tried something like this: (“Zeitgeist the movie” popularity). Or (popularity Zeitgeist movie) or maybe (popular Zeitgeist movie). None of these return my blog on the front page, however, unlike the first query. And I think I did, to some degree give a fair answer to that question. And so far, I haven’t seen too many other places in the relevant results which do.
Peter Joseph’s site itself gave a figure of 70,000+/- views per day a few months back. Some say it claims the title of the most watched internet movie ever, though it’s a bit difficult to verify that claim, what with google censorship and all…

Anyway, I may add a few more search tips here when/as I think of them. Got some good ones of your own? Feel free to share them in a comment.

Peter Scheer- The Great Firewall

Peter Scheer wrote an interesting article awhile back called The Great Firewall, talking about the internet censorship in China. Parts of particular interest to me were what search engine terms were deemed verboten and the types of sites outside of China which get blocked, so I’ll quote those passages below.

A milestone of sorts was passed in the first quarter of this year when China blew past the United States to become the biggest internet market in the world. At 225 million users, and still growing at double-digit rates, China’s internet is a business opportunity so grand and irresistible that it can blind normally circumspect people to the moral compromises that cooperation with Chinese government authorities inevitably entails.

I experienced this first-hand when, about a year ago, I made inquiries at the China offices of a number of American law firms to ask for help in comparing internet search results for searches performed inside China–within the “Great Firewall” of government censorship, as it is called–with the same searches performed from locations outside China (and therefore outside the firewall). The law firms demurred, explaining, with commendable candor at least, that they could not risk being observed submitting to Google and Yahoo search terms like “Tiananmen Square” or “Falun Gong”.

Mind you, these were American-trained litigators, the kind of lawyers who barely flinch in the face of a grand jury subpoena, and who spend their careers pushing back against the demands of government authorities. While usually immune to intimidation, they nonetheless feared the repercussions to themselves, their firms, and their clients from the mere act of typing a few search terms into an internet-connected computer. So seductive are the business opportunities in China that the risk of losing them transforms even hardened litigators into wimps.

and the type of sites (which no doubt include this blog) which get blocked…

Websites based outside China, meanwhile, are subject to blocking by the Great Firewall based not on their content, but on their capacity to create, inside China, large, voluntary online communities that are independent of the government. These include nearly all blogging services, wikipedia and wiki platforms generally (wikileaks included), social networking websites and peer-to-peer technologies of all kinds, including photo-sharing and video-sharing businesses. In other words, the full panoply of internet 2.0 technologies.

Websites commanding vast audiences for user-generated content are seen by authorities as a grave threat. The Chinese government’s worst nightmare, after all, is a lone and anonymous Tibetan uploading to YouTube grainy cellphone videos of rioting police.

What this boils down to IMO, is that there is probably currently little that bloggers like myself can do to pass along to the Chinese the hazards of consumerism from a western perspective. Considering the worldwide environmental impact which China is having as it becomes increasingly consumer oriented, this is indeed unfortunate. Also unfortunate is the lack of potential for the Chinese to share information with each other through blogging and social networking.