Technology

Old Jack is relatively computer savvy. That is a semi-folksy way of saying that I know my way around PCs, Macs, toasters, microwaves, new cars, digital watches and all sorts of other modern technological crap.

In simple terms, I know enough to be dangerous. I can make most of these things do what I want them to do, even if it means forcing the circle into the square hole. It is not elegant, but it is functional. And function is what brings us to our tale of three browsers.

A short while back the lords of the computer declared that it was time to bring my HP home to meet its maker and I was forced to migrate from Windows XP to Windows Vista. XP worked just fine, but Vista has some idiosyncrasies, or at least that is what it seems like to me.

Firefox has been my web browser of choice for a number of years now. On the whole I have been pleased with it. A short time before the old computer went to visit the great computer in the sky I downloaded Firefox 3. On XP it worked just fine, but on the new unit it has had a consistent glitch.

For some reason it has a habit of dying on me. I’ll try to load a page and it will just hang, the page never does load. Eventually you get the ever so pleasant message of “Firefox is already running, but not responding. To open a new window you must first close Firefox or restart your system.”

That just irritates me. Why, oh why does this happen. More importantly why can’t I control-alt-delete and use task manager to close it. Why do I need to restart the whole thing. In the days of dial-up I didn’t care if it took 15 minutes for the page to load, I was so damn happy to have the nifty net. But not now, instant is the word.

And so I switch to IE 7. On the whole I don’t really any major complaints with IE 7, other than I am a creature of habit so I prefer Firefox.

That is two browsers, time to bring in number three. A couple of weeks ago I downloaded Chrome, Google’s wacky offering. I can’t say that I am particularly impressed. It is not bad, but it is not outstanding.

Not to mention that I have been partially influenced by a few things that I have read that have bad mouthed Chrome and the data that Google is pulling from it. Truth is that between IE and Firefox I haven’t really had much need for Chrome, so I can’t say that I have spent a ton of time using it. Who knows, maybe one day I will change my mind.

Just to be thorough let me add that I think that Safari is terrible. Whenever I am forced to use a Mac I make a point of downloading Firefox as it seems that Safari just gets lost in the jungle that we call the web.

Unless you have been living in the land of the burning river or trapped beneath a heavy object you should be aware that Google has developed a web browser called Chrome. You can find reviews of it here and here.

Earlier today I downloaded a copy to play with. I’ll let you know what I think, just give me a few days to get a sense of things.

If you spend any time reading the news you have probably come across Cuil. It is among the many contenders that have been trying to oust Google from their throne as king of search engines. They do have some things going for them that others don’t.

Let’s take a quick look at what the media reports. Here is a blurb from CNN/Money:

“SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Anna Patterson’s last Internet search engine was so impressive that industry leader Google Inc. bought the technology in 2004 to upgrade its own system.

She believes her latest invention is even more valuable – only this time it’s not for sale.

Patterson instead intends to upstage Google, which she quit in 2006 to develop a more comprehensive and efficient way to scour the Internet.

The end result is Cuil, pronounced “cool.” Backed by $33 million in venture capital, the search engine plans to begin processing requests for the first time Monday.

Cuil had kept a low profile while Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers – Russell Power and Louis Monier – searched for better ways to search.

Now, it’s boasting time.

Web index: For starters, Cuil’s search index spans 120 billion Web pages.

Patterson believes that’s at least three times the size of Google’s index, although there is no way to know for certain. Google stopped publicly quantifying its index’s breadth nearly three years ago when the catalog spanned 8.2 billion Web pages.”

I suppose that you could say having Google purchase your technology gives you a certain cachet. But then again you could say that the purchase is also a way to stifle competition. For now I’ll take the former approach and say that Patterson knows what she is doing.

Rafe Needleman offers a review of Cuil here.

“What this means, in the real world, is that Cuil results are automatically categorized. When you search for a common name, for example, Cuil will give you a result page where results for different individuals with that name are groups under tabs. It will also break out sub-topics related to each name. In Cuil’s canned demo, if you search for “Harry,” there are different tabs for “Harry Potter” and “Prince Harry of Wales.” On the Harry Potter tab, you’ll get further sub-links devoted to actors, Gryffindor dorm-mates, etc. “We have a strong ontological commitment,” Costello told me, meaning that parsing search results into readable chunks is a very big part of the Cuil value proposition.

The service also displays images from Web results whenever possible. It all adds up to search results pages that are much more attractive, and useful, than Google’s.

Another potential advantage of the context-based search is that it allows Cuil searches to be more respectful of user privacy. Unlike Google, which simply has to track every single click to refine its index, Cuil’s context-based search does not. In practice, the distinction may be moot because Cuil will need to track clicks to see if their results are actually working for people, but it could serve as a marketable distinction.

Context-based indexing also presents a juicier target for search spammers, but as Costello says, “that’s a success problem.”

It’s one thing to have a nice interface and show users good results, but the size of the Web index that the engine has access to matters a lot as well. And this is where Cuil makes its boldest claim. Costello says that the engine is launching with 120 billion pages indexed, well over the 40 billion he says Google has (although see Google’s latest bluster about the company’s power at Web indexing). Costello also claims that Cuil’s Web crawler is three times faster than Google’s, although it wasn’t clear to me if he meant that is per search computer or for the entire system. Compared with Google’s globe-spanning data network of data centers, some literally set up near dams so they can tap hydro power more efficiently, Cuil’s two puny data centers hosting less than 2,000 PCs total will have to run pretty fast to outpace Google’s crawlers.”

I agree with assessments that say that it is going to be hard to unseat a behemoth like Google whose brand recognition is unmatched. However, nothing stays the same forever.

Part of what I enjoy about technology is how fast it can change. If companies don’t work hard to stay ahead of the curve and to provide value they will find themselves in serious trouble.

If Cuil delivers what they promise they have an excellent chance to become a serious player.