Cuil.com (the Gaelic spelling of the word "cool") is a new search engine created by former Google employees and claims to index 120 billion Web pages. Now, I don't want to give the impression that once people leave the Googleplex, they suddenly become incapable of creating useful new products (handy-dandy FriendFeed comes to mind). Cuil looks really nice and has some useful features that I've only previously seen in specialty search engines like Krugle (think tabs). But if Cuil's primary feature is to be its search functionality, then I wonder if some tweaking is required.

Lots of new search engines have been trying to steal the crown from Google, many of them even promising "deep Web" results. I test these new engines with a simple narcissistic query...on my name Let's see some queries from Cuil and "the big 3 search engines":

• Cuil: http://www.cuil.com/search?q="chris+bellini"
• Google: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q="chris+bellini"
• Yahoo!: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p="chris+bellini"
• Microsoft Live Search: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q="chris+bellini"

Looking at each engines' first page of results, Cuil's are not at all close to what Google returns. Actually, Google and Yahoo are the only engines that return this very site of mine - you know, the one with the most content about me with my name all over it - as the top result. Cuil, along with Microsoft and Yahoo! seem to verge upon meta search, placing emphasis on my profile pages from social sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Digg. So while Cuil claims to index 120,000,000,000 pages, Google seems grab everything from my decade-old Usenet posts to my friends' websites.

That's not to say there isn't anything about Cuil that I like - nothing wrong with these snazzy features. So while it's still early in the game and Cuil is in its infancy, I think its best feature right now is the fact that it's yet another reason for Google to continue to improve its search product.

In the past, regular Gmail users are usually the first to see new features - weeks and sometimes months before those of us Google Apps users. So it was nice to see that I have 3396 MB available to me now. Google said it, and then they did it.

And unless you've spoken to me personally already today, that is all the Google-related news that I have. Thanks

I'm curious to know if a click-through is measured as a "read". Or is the simple task of scrolling through items in Google Reader, which automatically marks them as read for you as they leave your screen, the sole way to track what you've read? Social news sites like digg and Reddit are apparently high on my list. Their feeds typically contain a lot of new items throughout any given day, and most of the time contain only a story's headline with very little actual content, requiring me to click-through to get to the actual content. I wouldn't say I actually read too many of them. In the case of say, digg, I click-through to read maybe 2 or 3 a day after skipping the deluge of "Steve Jobs is teh awesome!!!" and "Bush does something stupid again" types of items. Contrast that with items from Coding Horror, The Daily WTF or Life Hacker. I actually read those feeds' items in their entirety in Google Reader. I don't have to click through anything; all of the content is right there. Which brings me to a pet peeve...I hate when feeds force you to click-through to read an entire item by including only a sentence or two in their feed. Arg! Lame! Now my train of thought has been derailed. Where was I? Oh yeah. If the trends keep up the way that Google Trends reports them, I'll be sporting a black mock turtle neck sweater and five o'clock shadow in no time

Now I don't want to comment on where Google is in the right or wrong and how their luck has taken a down-turn, since other bloggers have and will continue to do so. Although, I am a bit perplexed as to why Google didn't have backups for those deleted emails. I've read that Google has rolled their own file system and that it's apparently amazing, but I'm not sure any file system is rock solid enough to forgo disaster recovery plans for mission-critical applications and data.

At any rate, what I'd like to focus on are the two vulnerabilities, both of which have been fixed. Since Gmail is a web application, any update that Google makes to Gmail is automatically available to all users. Nobody has to go to the store to purchase new software, or download any patches or service packs. All users are using the latest version, complete with fixes for known problems. Also, it should be noted that the vulnerabilities were corrected in less than 24 hours since they were publicly announced.

http://video.google.com/nhl.html