Nano2Sol by Marc Boucher

It’s cool to be Cuil today. Cuil Inc. launched their new search alternative to Google today. Cuil pronounced Cool has received lot’s of press today and it helps when it’s in the right places. And if it we’re not for the fact that the principals have a history of producing value add to existing search products like Google search, then this roll out would be hardly noticed.

But the fact that they have a track record, worked at Google and are boasting that they have an index bigger than Google, is newsworthy. Cuil is led by Anna Patterson a former engineer at Google.  Along with her husband Tom Costello, a search expert in his right, Cuil aims to take on Google. No small feat.

But having a bigger index doesn’t mean you’re better. And only time will tell if they have what it takes to carve out a piece of the big search pie. They claim to be able to search across 120 billion web pages compared to an estimated 40 billion Google has. Google officially does not reveal how many pages it indexes but others sources suggest that they keep an index of around 60 billion pages. As well Google says that not all of the pages it crawls are indexed because many are duplicates. Working in this industry I can concur that there is a lot of duplicate content out there.

For Cuil to take some market share away from Google it will take more than the boasting of a bigger index. Reality is, with enough hardware and money a startup can build an index that is big, even huge as Cuil has. The test of whether Cuil can succeed will be if the public and business users find more relevant search results through Cuil. Being as big or fast as Google is not enough. You have to be able to change people’s search preferences. And that’s not easy.

What is noteworthy is that Cuil says they’ve developed a faster, better way to index pages and just as important use less hardware. Less hardware is important as the cost to index, store and serve up results can be prohibitive. The ongoing downward costs of hard drives, CPU’s etc. helps. However even though RAM prices have come down, the price of RAM still is one of the most expensive aspect of creating a searchable index.

In my initial tests of Cuil I was both pleased with the results and disappointed. Some common searches resulted in no results. I’ll attribute that to first day bugs. But I also found that sources like Wikipedia were heavily weighted, sometimes in favor of the actually site that I was looking for.

It’s public day 1 for Cuil and they have people’s attention. Let’s see if they can keep it and build some momentum. In the meantime I’ll give them a try and report back with my thoughts in the near future.

A little over a month ago I started a little experiment. I wanted to compare usage between our SpaceRef Brightcove video channel and our newly created SpaceRef YouTube channel. Up to that point SpaceRef had been using Brightcove exclusively as our video service provider.

The numbers should not have surprised me as YouTube has a tremendous lead over everyone else. But still I was. I uploaded a small selection of current videos to our SpaceRef YouTube channel that were also on our Brightcove channel and did absolutely no promotion for them. None. I didn’t link to them from SpaceRef or any of the sites on the SpaceRef network. What was the result? For the 1 month test run our YouTube channel had 29% more individual video views. That’s pretty impressive.

There are some difference though between the two services. I find that the Brightcove channel has a little better video quality. As well Brightcove has for some time allowed you to monetize your channel and it’s only recently that YouTube has integrated AdSense.

For the time being we’re going use both video channels and compare them as we go. I’ll report back in a few months on our progress.

I get daily reports on our Google AdSense channels as well Google Analytics for the SpaceRef network of sites. The last few days have seen some strange disconnect between the two. Google Analytics is reporting a surge in traffic, in particular to a couple of old stories.

Today it’s reporting that a particular story which is 4 1/2 years old has generated 21,000 pageviews. The referring traffic indicates it’s organic from Google and for a particular keyword phrase, “first laser”, which is coming in 14th and on page two of Google results for the phrase. Yet when I look at Google AdSense the channel data suggest that traffic does not exist.

So which is right and which is wrong? I’m leaning to a problem in reporting from Google Analytics. It’s only recently that for some of my larger sites I’ve switched over to Google Analytics and I’m wondering if I did the right thing?

I wonder how many other people are experiecing the same problem.

Recently I’ve went through an experience I would rather not repeat. I made an attempt to convert NASA Watch from our commercially licensed Movable Type 3.35, which it currently uses, to Wordpress 2.5 with results that did not please me.

For some time now I’ve been somewhat displeased with the lack of features I could easily add to Movable Type to enhance it. In so doing I forgot one important lesson, if it isn’t broken why mess with it. It was one thing to want additional features, it’s another to move over to another platform altogether. I wanted to move to Wordpress 2.5 because it offered a lot more features in an open source environment and because I thought it would save me time. Like so many other people I have a lot of projects on the go and my time has to be spread around each project.

After the conversion to Wordpress 2.5 failed I then tried to move NASA Watch to the new open source version of Movable Type 4.1 with results just as bad. And so here starts my tale of publishing woes.

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Unless Twitter has released how many users they have and I’m not aware of it, then how many users they have is really up for speculation. And there is a lot of speculation going on.

I’ve read that Twitterholic has guestimated about 12 million users while Twitdir has just over a million in their database. If you do as I did and accidentally click the Google search this site button from the Google Firefox toolbar while on your Twitter home page, you’ll get back 3,770,000 users.

I did some simple math based on when I joined and when a friend joined. He joined just about six months later than me. I joined in early May of 2007 and he joined in early December of 2007. According to Twitterholic I was user 5,870,022 while my friend was user 11,197,712. So in the six months between us there about 5 1/2 million new user accounts. That was in December of 2007, and we’re now just about May of 2008. So how many news users have they added in the last 5 months? Well you would have to figure at least another 5 million bringing the total to around 16 million. But remember this is based on Twitterholic data. How accurate is it really? I don’t know. And how does this mesh with the 3.7 million accounts Google has?

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