Dad: Stop playing in the dirt.
Kid: I'm just playing with rocks.
Dad: Rocks are just big dirt.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Monday, July 28, 2008
Call of Cuilthulhu
I'm going to add to the dog pile already on top of cuil.com.
"cool" dot com wants to be the next Google, but it's not even the next Mahalo. Putting aside the performance problems and outages, the search results are mostly useless. My experience, and those that I have read, indicate that Cuil's "120 billion" (insert Dr. Evil pinky here) index results are a gross over-evaluation.
A typical search result for a person will include:
You won't find any "top level" results like, oh, the person's web site. If you seach for "John Smith" you will not get johnsmith.com, even if there is one and it's a very popular site.
The same goes for organizations. I searched for my college marching band: The California Aggie Marching Band-uh from UC Davis in California. There is only one and that's a pretty unique search string. Did it find http://camb.ucdavis.edu? Nope. It found some of the sub pages, along with a random picture that has nothing to do with the band. Plus it found some other crap that is very tangental to the band.
The image thumbnails that cuil inserts into the search results are all hosted by cuil (that's polite) but there is no way to tell where they came from, and that's bad. If someone does a cuil search on you, and your LinkedIn page comes up with someone else's picture next to it, that's bad. But worse is if YOUR picture comes up next to some one else, say a criminal, whose police blotter is the first search result. I can see the lawsuits now!
Try cuil yourself (if it's up) on something close to you and see how it works for you. I'm sure it works for some things, but how can we have any confidence in this service if the results are so suspect?
"cool" dot com wants to be the next Google, but it's not even the next Mahalo. Putting aside the performance problems and outages, the search results are mostly useless. My experience, and those that I have read, indicate that Cuil's "120 billion" (insert Dr. Evil pinky here) index results are a gross over-evaluation.
A typical search result for a person will include:
- LinkedIn page, just one, and there will be a picture, probably of someone else.
- Blog postings, comments, and other junk pulled from RSS feeds.
You won't find any "top level" results like, oh, the person's web site. If you seach for "John Smith" you will not get johnsmith.com, even if there is one and it's a very popular site.
The same goes for organizations. I searched for my college marching band: The California Aggie Marching Band-uh from UC Davis in California. There is only one and that's a pretty unique search string. Did it find http://camb.ucdavis.edu? Nope. It found some of the sub pages, along with a random picture that has nothing to do with the band. Plus it found some other crap that is very tangental to the band.
The image thumbnails that cuil inserts into the search results are all hosted by cuil (that's polite) but there is no way to tell where they came from, and that's bad. If someone does a cuil search on you, and your LinkedIn page comes up with someone else's picture next to it, that's bad. But worse is if YOUR picture comes up next to some one else, say a criminal, whose police blotter is the first search result. I can see the lawsuits now!
Try cuil yourself (if it's up) on something close to you and see how it works for you. I'm sure it works for some things, but how can we have any confidence in this service if the results are so suspect?
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Star Wars Nightmares
My five year old daughter has been getting into Star Wars lately. So far, we've watched the following:
Yes, the Ewoks movie. Nightmare inducing movies: Psycho, Jaws, Friday the 13th, Saw and now the Ewoks Movie.
Rest assured that she will never see the Star Wars Christmas special.
- Star Wars: Episode IV, A New Hope
- Star Wars: Episode V, The Empire Strikes Back
- Star Wars: Episode VI, The Return of the Jedi
- Star Wars: Ewoks
- Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace
- Star Wars: Episode II, Attack of the Clones
- Star Wars: The Clone Wars
- Star Wars: Episode III, Revenge of the Sith
Yes, the Ewoks movie. Nightmare inducing movies: Psycho, Jaws, Friday the 13th, Saw and now the Ewoks Movie.
Rest assured that she will never see the Star Wars Christmas special.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Appending the Snausage
Have you ever heard a phrase that you didn't understand? It's annoying when people use the latest hip phrase, or meme, in conversation and expect everyone to know what it means. I used to see this all of the time back at Sun. Usually someone takes a three letter acronym (TLA) and turns it into a verb. "Let's MRP that later." (MRP = Medium Range Planning).
Lately I heard Tim Bray is the term refactor the ape. Tim's a smart guy, but I have no idea what that means.
Today I want to make up my own new phrase.
It means, creating your own useless phrase that no one understands.
Use it today! Confuse a friend!
Lately I heard Tim Bray is the term refactor the ape. Tim's a smart guy, but I have no idea what that means.
Today I want to make up my own new phrase.
"Appending the Snausage"
It means, creating your own useless phrase that no one understands.
Use it today! Confuse a friend!
Thursday, July 10, 2008
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