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.

Today on the Official Google Blog, Google announced the soft launch of Ad Manager an online service that will host and manage your online ad sales. And it’s free.

The service is in Beta mode right now and open by invitation only. The service provides publishers the ability sell, schedule, deliver and measure their directly-sold and network-based ad inventor. You can integrate Google AdSense and other ad networks as well.

From a small business perspective this offers a hassle free quick way to start selling your own inventory at the rates you want and maximizing your ad profits. If you have unsold inventory you can allow Google to compete for that inventory with other ad networks you specify and whoever provides the highest bid gets the inventory. And with the acquisition of DoubleClick you’ ll see Google eventually trying to fill that space with either AdSense or DoubleClick, that is of course if they don’t get outbid by another network. This is good situation for any publisher to be in. You sell as much inventory on your as you can, that way you get the highest cost per thousand ads (CPM) or allow Google to sell it for you knowing they or the other networks will take their cut and dilute your CPM.

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People are lazy. They don’t bookmark sites they’re interested in and so on a continuous basis they type the sites name in a Google search field and search for the address. And voila Google serves up the address. But what they’re really interested in is some information from that site. Google calls this phenomena “teleporting”.

Based on this phenomena Google has introduced “search within a site” feature to their search engine results. So for certain queries you’ll be presented with a second search box that searches just that site. This is pretty cool, but there’s more to it than that. Below is an example. Say for some reason you wanted to search the New York Times but didn’t have the address, fire up Google and it’s the first result. But also notice the search box offered.

And now do your search within the ’search nytimes.com’ field and get results only from the New York times site. Experienced users have known you could do this for some time. What’s new is two things; first the ability to have that search box show on the Google search results page and second you will notice that targeted sponsored links show up on the right of this second search creating what John Battelle calls the “second click”. The second click offers publishers highly targeted ad space and Google ultimately more revenue.

What are your thoughts on this new feature?

Google like all the big players needs huge data centers positioned around the world to handle the vast amounts of data they collect. In the March issue of Harper’s Magazine, author Ginger Strand gives her take on Google’s energy consumption needs and provides a sneak peek at Google’s, used to be secret, super cloud computing data center in The Dalles, Orgegon. Included is the blueprint to Google The Dalles data center.

“Velcroed together, stacked in racks, and lined up in back-to-back rows, the servers require a half-watt in cooling for every watt they use in processing, and Google leads the field in squeezing more servers into less space. Based on projected industry standard of 500 watts per square foot in 2011, the Dalles plant can be expected to demand about 103 megawatts of electricity - enough to npower 82,000 homes, or a city the size of Tacoma, Washington.”

With these type of energy needs it’s no wonder Google is investing big time in renewable energy and plans on being a leader in the field. The author it appears is not convinced of Google’s good intentions when it comes to clean energy. You be the judge.

Greg Linden has an excellent post about MapReduce and how some database gurus view at as “a giant step backwards”. Personally I don’t buy it and we’re implementing something similar for Hyperix. Here’s an excerpt of what Greg had to say.

“The comments on the post are enjoyable and useful. Many rightfully point out that it might not be fair to compare a system like MapReduce to a full database. DeWitt and Stonebraker do partially address this, though, by not just limiting their criticism to GFS, but also going after BigTable.

The most compelling part of the post for me is their argument that some algorithms require random access to data, something that is not well supported by GFS, and it is not always easy or efficient to restructure those algorithms primarily to do sequential scans.“