Cuil vs Google – the battle grows stronger

Just a few hours ago, Cuil was launched, and it has already created a fuss in the market. I just saw the reports on Techcrunch about the arrival of Cuil, and i decided to have some of my own observation.

Privacy

Cuil says that “We do not keep logs of our users’ search activity.”. Well, this is something i loved. I don’t want the Magic-Mirror-On-The-wall to keep remembering all of my search information. That might be useful for Engineers over the Googleplex, but from my point of view, i certainly don’t feel benefited from it.

Cookies

Every website uses cookies to store relevant information about visitors. What differentiates them, is in the way they consider which information is “relevant”. Cuil is concerned, with only the safe search and typing suggestions. While google is more interested in my time, date of use, and also stores cookies to last till the year 2032 (may be i am wrong, i don;t remember it exactly, but it is in this range only).

Search Results

While Google uses the right sidebar for ads, Cuil uses it to further refine the search, on various basis. I looked for India, and found a beautiful page. While a google search for same, is often a bit boring.

The UI of cuil is much better and easy to explore than that of Google. It offers top tabs also, alongwith a sliding sidebar.

Well, i use Google Service to post this blog, and another Google service to upload images over here, but we are talking about SEARCH here.

I think, Cuil is going to be a tough competitior of Google.

Funniest Google pic

Today morning, i was viewing a website, that did not changed it’s URL for the search results. I mean if you view the first search result page, or the last the URL was the same. I was a bit uncomfortable, and tried to see the Google’s URL for search results. And it changes accordingly.
However, i did some changes in the URL and i got this funny pic. The fact that makes this pic funnier is the Google logo at the bottom. The O is misplaced, and hangs at the bottom.
How can this happen. We all know there is a relation between the result page and the number and style of O that appears in the Gooooogle, but having an O dropped out from the name is quite funny.
All i did was to change the start parameter to 10,000. And then i got a message saying that ,”Sorry, Google does not serve more than 1,000 results for any query. You asked for results starting from 1,000,000.”. It means the designer had probably expected this kind of query, and hence this error message.
Now i tried to play a bit more, i changed the start parameter to a negative value say -99 and i got the search page 1, for that. Even i changed it to alphabetic value and the start page was visible. So, they are doing a validation for these values, then why leave behind the values greater than 1,000. And even more, leaving apart the O 🙂

Have a look yourself and enjoy.

Here is a better and enlarged view of the image.

More of orkut into google search result

Google added orkut profile links to it’s search results quite a long time back. But now, it seems to go one step further, by improving it and adding the mutual friend, and possible friends if you search for an organization.

Here is a screenshot taken from my account. I just searched for my organization name, and i got new friends out here. And yes, frankly, i did not knew them 🙂

Kool enough.

However, interesting fact is that these results were shown only when i used the Google India and not when i tried these searches on Google.com. So, it can be said that these searches are terrority specific. They know that Orkut is the leading social networking website in countries like India and Brazil, and hence the results. Too accurate to miss.

The result of integration of orkut into google search is getting day by day. Hope one day, we will be able to find Kumbh ke bichde hue bhai over google 🙂

Google adds orkut profile in search results

Finally, the Google search does result in orkut profile information. This setting has been present in Orkut settings tab, since long time. But no result was displayed in the Google search. However, recently Google has added the Orkut profile URL as a result in search.
This makes sure that in order to view the profile you must have a orkut profile and the privacy settings of the owner are appreciated.
Currently only SandBox profiles are listed, but very soon, the normal profiles will also be listed.

As you can see above, this is the google search results for the keyword Pranav Prakash. In the last result is my sandbox orkut profile.

Similarly, this is the google search results for the keyword Aakash Bapna. In the last result is sandbox orkut profile.