spammers keeping up with Cuil launch

I am amazed.

Today I received a piece of spam with the following subject line:

“Cuil - new google-ish search engine”

The contents was pretty obviously spam thought hat too was topical:

“Tens of thousands of US homes lost to sub-prime crisis monthly - will you be next **link hidden**”

Before ending with them saying that they use Opera’s revolutionary new email client - not sure thats a positive for Opera

On the bright side, Microsoft Outlook junked it

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

If you are anything like me, you are using Firefox and a multitude of addons. The downside to all this it turns out is that not only does Firefox become a huge memory hog (it is not unusual for Firefox to be using ~400MB of memory) it also becomes very slow.

The one thing I found which speeds up Firefox no end was disabling the Firebug plugin. I use it a lot when editing the layout of this blog but those are only for short bursts at a time so I can easily disable it.

As for the memory usage, well we shall see..

Cuil (pronounced Cool ) has launched their new search engine - and it is making ripples across the net because of its claims to have an index of over 120 billion web pages bigger than Google’s. Google doesn’t actually talk about how many web pages are in their index but it is thought to be a trillion web pages which obviously would make Cuil’s claim invalid. I cannot see Google releasing the info to prove them wrong and so nonetheless this has allowed them to make a splash.

The real test of how good the search technology is - ie how relevant the results are - seems to indicate that they are not there yet. For example searching for Switzerland on Google places the official site at number 2 (ignoring the paid link above the list). Cuil does not even mention it. A search for the Olympics gave the official website at number 1 for both (thoguh Google’s was below their news results) BUT amazingly with the Beijing Olympics just around the corner, Cuil did not even have the official site on their front page (they did have the 2012 Olympics in the UK though!). Google’s search had it in second place.

Interestingly doing some “ego” searching (where you search for your own name) came back with nothing the first 3 or 4 attempts as I tried different ways of searching under my name even though searching for “razorshine” came back with results which have my name on it. After about 20 minutes the original searches started to come back with results.

I do like the layout of the searches, the quirky results means that I am not switching now, but with it having some ex Senior Googlers on board it is worth keeping an eye on it.

By the way - there is no advertising on the site currently - a plus for some I am sure - though surely that can’t last forever

Update: It was just pointed out to me that the first result under “riaz kanani” (for boxedup.com/razorshine) has an image with “my success in scientology” on it. Very strange as I have no connection to scientology. It will be interesting to hear the response from Cuil on it.

I have been using Xobni for a while now - it integrates with Outlook and shows you your social network based on your emails. As per my post previously on Xobni, it isn’t the complete tool yet - I feel for it to stay as a long term addition to Outlook it really needs to add more productivity benefits which still aren’t there.

But it has added integration with LinkedIn now which means I can get info from LinkedIn on people I email and I can remove my LinkedIn addon for Outlook That is no detriment to LinkedIn really as Xobni still diverts me to LinkedIn’s website.

Overall though whilst its a nice addition, it isnt giving me much in the way of overall productivity gains. It does look nice and I get to know who I have sent over 2000 emails to..

Thinking about the internet and its makeup. Today, when you connect to the internet, whether it is from your phone or from your computer, it is given an IP address from whatever ISP you are connected to. If you travel somewhere and connect to the internet somewhere else using the exact same device it is given an entirely different IP address.

But what if it wasn’t? What if it was your own permanent address? Just like the address you live at, or your phone number. Suddenly whereever you are you could be reached over the global Internet.

I want to give this some more thought, but I started down this path due to the impending popularisation of IPv6 which will allow for further IP addresses (given to unique devices that connect to the Internet) to become available (compared to IPv4 which we use today).

Of course the Internet is not built this way - you can’t take IP addresses with you wherever you go - so the structure of the entire Internet would probably need to be altered to achieve this; I guess this makes it completely non feasible. But there is another way to get this same functionality without a fundamental change to the internet. Dynamic DNS - it has been around for ages, and used by geeks worldwide to alow their home Internet connections to act as Internet servers. The basic principle is that when a device connects to the internet, it connects to a known location online and identifies itself, effectively acting as a phone book. Using this system you, in effect, have a portable Internet connected identity similar to a portable IP address.

Why is this useful? Do we need every device to act as a server or be reachable? One possibility is that it could work as a form of authorisation or authentication tool - identifying centrally what 3rd party systems are allowed to know about an individual. Another obvious one is as a form of standardised Internet enabled communication device.

There must be more..