Aug
9
The Round-Up: Not so Cuil Edition
August 9, 2008
It’s old news now, but a new search engine was launched in the last few weeks. I have just recently had time to play with Cuil and have to admit, I am a little cuil on the new entry. Propped by stories about the search engine being designed by people from Google and IBM, and claims that it was better than Google I went in with pretty high expectations. Claims made in stories were that Cuil searched more sites than Google and did things in a different way. In reality, while the new engine just might search and index more pages, and might be different than Google, we all know that different does not mean better. And this is the case with Cuil. I did a number of tests — searches that I conduct on a regular basis. Product searches, trouble-shooting a problem with a computer, general information searches and travel searches. I was really disappointed in the results. Pretty much unusable.
Another promising green technology, a U.S. scientist has developed a new way of powering fuel cells that could make it practical for home owners to store solar energy and produce electricity to run lights and appliances at night.
No Beer Pong for the Wii.
Last month, construction was completed on a pilot project that ran fiber optic cables to 400 homes in Ottawa. Stringing fiber optic cables isn’t a big deal by itself—Verizon has been running fiber to millions of homes in the US—but the Ottawa project comes with a twist: rather than providing Internet access for a monthly fee, the company plans to sell the fiber strands outright to individual homeowners. This isn’t how we’re used to doing telecommunications infrastructure. Traditionally, a “last mile” copper loop, coax cable, or fiber strand has been owned by an incumbent telephone or cable company, and the customer has paid a monthly fee for telecom services. But, if the Ottawa experiment is a success, that could change.
Here is some Olympic folly courtesy of a restaurant in China that while preparing for English-speaking visitors, ran its name through an online translator. They then created a large sign displaying the English version of their name: “Translate Server Error.”
Tags: Community Stuff, Technology Stuff, Web Stuff
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