thelump.net

This Week in Lumps
#58 [29/07 - 04/08]

· There isn’t a month that goes by where I don’t read or hear a news story about a new search engine, bigger and better than the last, aiming to do wonders. Much like browsers, there’s so much people expect from them, and even if they do tick every boxes, critics still pick faults, and lament about how it could, or should, be better.

Speaking of critics, Even I picked up a dirty habit early on in writing this blog by picking search engines apart, listing all their faults, and eventually, summarising by saying it was like comparing Slough to Sydney, that everything that isn’t Google just isn’t that good. Back in week 5 it was Ask.com, and then in week 20 it was Yahoo Search, even when I tried to go 2 days without Google, I struggled along with a few search engines with left a lot to be desired. It begs the question; who is brave enough to stand in front of Google’s headlights?

That particular rabbit is called Cuil (pronounced ‘cool’). It went live on the 28th of July, and has adopted a selling point of indexing roughly 120 billion web pages, more than any other search engine. Behind the Cuil team are some familiar faces to searching the web: Anna Patterson, Louis Monier and Russell Power are all ex-Google employees, and it seems they’re not afraid to list them as rivals at such an early age. From their about page, they introduce themselves with a bold and brash front:

“The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.”

So quick to strike the first blow, I thought Cuil would relish the challenge to face off against some older, more established names on the block, and, as I’ve pitted Ask against Google, and then 15 weeks later Yahoo against Ask, it’s only fair that Yahoo are first in line against the fresh faced challengers. I’ve already wheeled out the dusty TWiL search engine, so lets begin:

Basic Information Searching
So, the Olympics are just around the corner. What if I decided at the last minute I wanted to visit for a week or so? Unlikely as it sounds, and as unlikely as I am to get anything decent on such short notice, I’m prepared to log onto the Internet and see if I can find any hotels within a decent walking distance of the action.

The search will be done on ‘Hotels in the Chaoyang District of Beijing’: this particular area being home to the Workers Stadium, so I can catch the football and other sports being held there. The stadiums been standing since 1959, so I expect it to be reasonably popular, and hotels within the area should be advertised accordingly.
Newbies first, and what’s noticeable straight away is the all black layout with the blue/grey logo- Minimalistic, simple, yet maybe a little too unimaginative. Once you type in what you’re looking for, and click to search, it moves from a tidy, easy-on-the-eye setup to what can only be described as a grid-like results page, squeezing every possible space on the screen full of results. Take nothing away from the quality of results it returned however, as its offered me a few pages of information, prices and pictures, but I’m slightly weary about the lack of well known branded Travel Agents filling up the first page – some of the first few links look about as trustworthy as a stranger holding sweets by a school gate. Speed isn’t much of an issue – I hear that the initial response from critics after day one was that everything was “dial-up slow”, but this seems to have improved.
Despite it looking sleek and respectable, and day I say, 2.0ish, I still seem to prefer the Yahoo! layout. No thrills, no pretentiousness, just type and search, simple. The quality of results appears to match Cuils efforts, leaving me thinking that tourism in Beijing isn’t as cornered towards a western market as you’d think. Despite this, Yahoo gets the nod just above
Cuil, as 985,000 returned results seems to overpower a meagre 166. For a company branding itself on how many pages it returns, that’s not a good start. More on that later though.

Advanced Picture Searching

This is the test where I take a well-established album from an established artist, and test how well the search engines brings back the artwork. Radioheads ‘OK Computer’ and Mogwai’s ‘Fear Satan’ were the first tested, as they were both celebrating their 10th birthdays at the time, so instead lets go 10 years earlier than that and pick an album soon to be 20 years old – Metallica’s ‘…And Justice for All‘. Tricky one this, because its the last four words of the United States Pledge of Allegiance,  and also a classic film starring Al Pacino.
First up is Yahoo, who much like Google’s search page, have a tab specifically for images, and the album artwork arrives 2nd on the list – shame there are a lot of other random images Yahoo deemed worthy enough to be returned as well, give or take a few referencing the film, its not a bad effort considering.
Cuil on the other hand, disappoint. As far as I can see, there’s no tab, or area, or page for images. Cuils results just seem to be based on text results. The ‘explore’ box on the right hand side gives the first mention of Metallica, but simply confuses the search by duplicating the text I’m already searching on, whereas all the other pages returned mention things from Gay rights to pro-abortion websites. Not one mention of the oath, the film or the album, let alone the artwork. Poor.

News Articles
Currently fronting the BBC Sport news page is cricket related: Kevin Pietersen has become the new England captain, taking over from Michael Vaughan. Time to find out which one of the search engines can bring me a worthy page giving me this headline first.
Cuil, much like with its images, doesn’t have a news search tab, or page. Typing “Kevin Pietersen” “England captain” into its text bar returned a decent number of results, none of which were helpful, relevant, or in fact, interesting.
It’s a different story from Yahoo, whose results for exactly the same string of text returned a much better set of results, but first and foremost asked me if I’d prefer to go to the ‘news’ section to find out more – it’s clever enough to realise how many news stories have appeared over the last 12 hours on this, and has won my vote on this round, when really, Cuil didn’t really put up much of a fight.

The Lump Popularity Test
Time for a little bit of ego rubbing, as I see if either search engine has this site well listed under the searches “thelump” and “this week in lumps”.
Last time I attempted this test with Yahoo, it faired well, and this time both results better than before. Either search brings back a decent amount of pages which one way or another will guide the user to this blog directly. The search on ‘thelump’ even returned my feed link, and with 2 clicks could find itself on your RSS feed. The latter search did return one or two obscure websites unrelated to either myself or the blog, but are easily avoided if you know what you’re looking for in the first place.
A shame then, that Cuil once again has fallen flat on its face; searching ‘thelump’ brings back one too many irrelevant sites for my liking, whereas ‘this week in lumps’ is even worse- only one link that could constitute a direct link, and even that was vague and obscure.

I don’t really think a summary is needed, but needs must when the devil drives. Cuil is really weak, and that’s putting it nicely. Yes, it does have its good features- it never stores personally identifiable information or search histories, but it doesn’t need to, since nobody will be using it. It’s already stumbled to a halt on this weeks Diggnation, as Kevin and Alex point out, much like I’ve done here, just how weak the returned results are. Which begs the question; why would a company saying that it can “return 3x more pages than Google” rely on that as a marketing pitch when they know full well just how poor the results are? Surely someone in the company would have noticed during testing? In fact, when they pitched this idea to potential stakeholders, did not one of them point out that, yes, Google returns a hefty amount of pages, but what’s great about this is not quantity, but quality. A quick look at the facts show why people prefer this: Google performed 82% of searches in the UK last month according to Nielsen Online, compared with 5% for Yahoo!, 4% for Microsoft’s Windows Live Search, and 3% for Ask.com. From this test, and previous ones I’ve done, it goes to show that anything that starts parading around declaring itself a “Google killer” is doomed from the start.

Time.com weren’t impressed either, saying:

“Cuil has a distinctive, if old-fashioned, approach to indexing websites. Instead of ranking them based on popularity, as Google does, it focuses on the content of each page. That may make sense in theory — after all, the most popular restaurants, for example, rarely serve the best food — but it is precisely the model that Google broke away from in order to give users more relevant results.”

In what started off as a review about Cuil, it soon turned into an entry about how well Yahoo search has improved since I last used it. Maybe, though, that’s not the case at all, maybe Cuil was so bad it’s done a good job of making a search engine I once described as “a big pain in the rear” look competent. I may suggest they use that as their marketing slogan until they pull themselves together.

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· No real introduction needed for this next topic, and definitely a lump that will be repeated again in the future, as I’m adding new stuff every week almost. Here are 6 fantastic RSS feeds which I enjoy reading in my Google Reader when I get the chance. A list of great websites, hilarious comics, and great sources of information and nonsense, starting with:

The Art of Manliness – “a blog dedicated to uncovering the lost art of being a man.” Including topics like How to correctly fold a pocket square, and how to give the best best mans speech. Perfect blog for those gentlemen who spend anything over an hour getting ready for a night out.

Savage Chickens – A daily cartoon starring chickens drawn onto a post-it note. Enough said.

Overheard… – The Overheard blog series are very popular, and the one that started it all off- Overheard in New York has given birth to many spin-offs, including …at the Beach, in the Office, and …Everywhere. It’s so popular because it does exactly what it says on the tin – people who have overheard random, bemusing conversations send them in for everyone else to laugh at, although they tend to be conversations which aren’t too dissimilar from our own, especially those you’d rather other people hadn’t heard anyway.

Totally Looks Like – Everyone and their mum has heard about Lolcats, and the blog version icanhascheezburger is stupidly popular, however, the team behind icanhas… have a few other blogs which luckily aren’t as talked about, one of them being Totally Looks Like, a simply idea done fantastically well- Take celebrities, and find their look-a-likes, and post them for the world to see. You’d expect a few awful ones, but I’ve been subscribed for a fortnight now, and they’re very well done indeed.

Garfield Minus Garfield – 2008’s biggest internet hit, and surprisingly a hit from Ireland – Garfield minus Garfield is an Internet comic, where each strip consists of an episode from the comic strip Garfield, from which all characters except Garfield’s owner, Jon Arbuckle, have been removed through image editing. What remains is a fascinating yet bleak look into the ‘Jon’ character, where he comes across as a depressed, lonely, cold, psycotic man, who talks to himself and spends a lot of the time complaining about how bad his life is. Inspired.

Worst Email Ever – Similar to Overheard…, but in email form. Been quiet for a few months, hopefully nothing terminal has occured. Includes some emails from those who should have thought about what they were typing before actually sending it. Even a spelling and grammar check wouldn’t hurt now and then.

Another 6 will appear sometime in the next month or so.

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· A quick, final lump for you all, regarding Net Neutrality. For those of you who may not know what that is, I’ll use savetheinternet.com to assist you:

“When we log onto the Internet, we take a lot for granted. We assume we’ll be able to access any Web site we want, whenever we want, at the fastest speed, whether it’s a corporate or mom-and-pop site. We assume that we can use any service we like — watching online video, listening to podcasts, sending instant messages — anytime we choose.

What makes all these assumptions possible is Network Neutrality.”

An interesting read if you have the time, and although the “historic” Comcast decision only affects the States, this kind of deal has its shockwaves that will put off any European company from trying the same thing. To avoid a tiered structure from being put in place, I urge everyone to watch this video for a better understanding, and support Net Neutrality before it’s too late.

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That was the week in lumps, a week in which: O2 may soon lose the exclusive iPhone contract, although since it burns legs, they may not mind, the oldest joke in the world is about farting, Scrabulous died, but was soon reborn as Wordscraper, whilst the new Scrabble facebook app was on the receiving end of some hacking, here’s ten things you might be interested in reading about regarding t’internet, and silence please, for the funniest picture I have ever seen, ever.

and without linking to a blog full of lies, lets clear this up – Johnny Depp will not be playing the Riddler in the next Batman film, nor will Philip Seymour Hoffman play the Penguin, the same as Gloria Hunniford wont be playing the Black mask, nor will Frank Carson be cast as Catwoman. Rediculous lies, and proof that some blogs exist just to get a few extra hits a month to try and boost adsense income. You wont find that kind of nonsense here.

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