The Joys of Google’s Search Suggestions feature…

Feb 12

MoggyGoogle, Internet, Random, Search Engine No Comments

Google has recently rolled out their new beta website, and in with it a more slick version of their search suggestion tool (where you start typing what you want to search for, and a list of the ‘most popular’ suggestions come up). The feature is pretty good, but also makes me laugh rather a lot as a result of some the funny results that come up! Check out these screenshots from my experiences!

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Have you tried Cuil yet?

Aug 15

MoggyGoogle, Internet, Search Engine, Technology, Website No Comments

Cuil, pronounced ‘cool’ (apparently..), is a new search engine, launched by ex-Google employees, in beta in late July this year.

You can try it out at: http://www.cuil.com/

Ok – you may think… “Oh dear, not another search engine… same on same on…”, but Cuil promises to be a little bit different from the standards of Google, Live Search and Yahoo!.

Firstly, Cuil owners claim that Cuil searches the web far more thoroughly than it’s competitors – 3 times more listings than Google and a whopping 10 times more than that of Microsoft and Live Search.

They also claim that internet searching should be more colorful, simple and easy to understand.

When you search for a term in Cuil you will be taken to a rather different results page. Instead of a standard webpage listing the results one by one, with the occasional duplicate result (which I find really annoying), you get a very pretty two column list of results with a (more or less) very relevant description of that page. If you like, you can even switch between looking at a 2-column or 3-column view.

What is really cool though is the “Explore by category” box which narrows your search relating to other sites. For example, if you search Cuil for “youtube”, On the right hand side you’ll see an interactive box that will link you to similar sites to Youtube, one example is Google Video. If you search Google, Cuil will even recognize common services to do with Google and tabs will appear at the top of the page to filter your search for that service. Google services include Google Search and Google Earth, for example.

Ok – my thoughts – I think Cuil is really great and looks great, but it isn’t popular or accessible as I would like a search engine to be – for example – I only ever really use Google or Yahoo because these are the two built into my Safari browser.