The reaction to new search engine on the block Cuil hasn't been particularly encouraging to date, so I'm referencing a slightly more positive post. According to Aodhan Cullen of StatCounter the new search engine, established by former Google employees apparently, is outranking far older, and more established alternatives, such as AltaVista. Cuil, launched on Monday July 28th, could be a significant rival to Google. After just one ... Read full entry

NASA is 50 this year, but rather than being able to revel in the occasion, finds itself possibly having to fend off a challenge from, of all organisations, search engine giant Google. In a lecture at the beginning of this year, for instance, Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, exhorted NASA to engage more with the outside world by creating "open systems" that others ... Read full entry

Why the Google acquistion of Digg could lead to the popular social bookmarking site being... buried. If past indications are anything to go by, the Google credo appears to be "buy it then forget it". Goes hand-in-hand with their "do no evil" credo I guess. While Digg is a popular service is its current form, any site that doesn't evolve over time to keep the interaction fresh risks ... Read full entry

The Web Is For Four-year-olds I guess people who use Google to look up their own websites are too lazy to bookmark, or subscribe to, them? In the case of sites with longer URLs using Google to find them, thus saving time typing out the full address, could possibly rate as a productivity tip though? There are a large number of people who are completely at sea on the Internet and ... Read full entry

Google lays out plans for VisualRank image search While image recognition (of some sort) by search engines is already here, the technology is set to vastly improve with the arrival of Google's VisualRank, which will look for images based on searches for visual cues, rather than text, associated with an image. Over the years, image search has been a significant challenge for Google and others, like start-ups Polar Rose and ... Read full entry

Your Google page: brought to you by Rolf Harris I much preferred the Google logo of the day, but as long as it's not some sort of rendition of Stairway To Heaven, or a royal portrait, then I'm in. The 77-year-old Australian entertainer is among a number of artists to have allowed their work to be installed as a background - or "skin" - on Google's personalised home ... Read full entry

Well, yes, I'm sure Andrew and the Design is Kinky crew will be delighted with the above Google search result. It also explains why I can never find anything "off-beat" when I do Google searches anymore. Who set my Firefox Google searches to safe mode then? The search term (which I just spotted in my referrer stats ... Read full entry

Google's Cookie monster Google captures details of web surfers' search activities by way of cookies. DoubleClick, a worldwide advertising company captures details of the sites web surfers visit, once again with cookies. Google recently bought out DoubleClick. Once Google compares data from its cookies with the data from DoubleClick, they will know a lot about us. Is this a good thing? For most web surfers a cookie is something ... Read full entry

Girl Geek Dinners Sydney are holding their next dinner event on Thursday 17 April at Sydney's Cafe Jest. There are 2 amazing geek girls who are speaking on the night - UX guru Lindsay Ratcliffe from ThoughtWorks will speak about how designers and developers can collaborate to create the optimal user experience; and Google's Stephanie Hannon will discuss the development of Google's Geo products, ... Read full entry

How Google Applies Science to Search (Part 1) Some notes from Dr. Craig Nevill-Manning's presentation at this year's Webstock conference, as compiled by Kalena Jordan. It's quite a fascinating "peep under the hood" of the many and varied components of Google search, including ensuring the spellings of search terms are correct, and in the right context: As the popularity of the search engine grew, Google needed to be able ... Read full entry