Cuil ready for the Google Kill.

Everyone knows about Google, it is synonymous to search, and to Internet for many. Every week we techies hear about new ventures and acquisitions by Google, and the horizon is ever increasing. But, a husband-wife team from Stanford is trying to dent the giant’s domination, and that too aiming at the bull’s eye. Searching, which is the heart of Google's business.
Cuil is the new search engine which was unveiled earlier today (28th july), and unlike many other failed attempts by smaller and bigger companies to take down Google, Cuil looks fresh, genuine and original.
Cuil, (pronounced as cool), is fundamentally different from Google, be it the way it indexes results, shows results or navigates. Which is better is another question, that only time would answer. Initially when we hit the Cuil home page, you have a calm feeling with a black page and a very prominent search bar inviting you. But, as soon as you start typing you know Cuil is indeed very different. You get a drop down will autofill suggestions as you type a search string.
The Results page is the most innovative part, its built up into 3 parts, the bottom bar which has the Google like search page numbers, the top bar having the search box and category tabs (another innovation which we will explore more) and the content area, which unlike other search engines, shows the results in multiple columns, with images added wherever relevant. It gives the immediate feel of the each result. Also it has tabbed suggestion boxes,showing you related terms. All done in a neat Web 2.0 model, with limited loading time.
The key word for Cuil is categorizing, in the top bar, it shows various categories for results. when I searched for “Michael”, I got many tabbed categories like Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, George Michael, More..., helping me to close in onto what I am looking for. The results, by default show the All results tab, with entries from all categories. Along with the results we have a box of tabs called “Explore by category” which further categorizes the content. It is more easy and fun searching in Cuil rather than Google’s all in a bucket way of searching.
Cuil's About page says it indexes over 140 Million pages (Google’s index comes to around 40 million) and they are the world’s biggest search engine. And, they do not use the Google’s page rank kind of indexing, where popularity (in terms of clicks and links) is the earning points. Instead, Cuil goes by content of each page and categorizes it. But, how far this fetches us realistic results is a question in hand. For example searching “Codevalley” returned one of the popular articles from my site, indexed by some other RSS site, and my profile from various blog directories. But, it did not show the website www.thecodevalley.com in the top five search pages. Also the image shown along with the search results were sometimes totally unrelated to the actual result. Also, the search engine refused to show any results at all many times, even though second try yielded thousands of results for the same query. Still, the most severe drawback with Cuil is that there is no image search, or any other type of search for that mattter, other than the normal search.
The conclusion is that Cuil beats Google by a very big margin in terms of Presentation of the results, but the actual searching technique of Cuil is to be tested. But, Cuil is worth trying, as it makes searching more interesting and interactive.
Start Cuiling here
codevalley

Sorry for my absense.

Last two weeks, nothing much happened in the codevalley. I apologize for that. Busy schedule, trying new things and my new blog ventures, kept me away from codevalley. But, I have made adjustments in my schedules to make sure I deliver my daily byte of technology thru codevalley. So the codevalley is alive again. In the meanwhile, I will tell you about what was happening in the past weeks.
I started a new philosophy blog, Mating Life. Where I would preach what I learnt, are the ingredient for a peaceful and happy living. It is just launched and has one post, at the time of this write up. I am yet to get the domain registered.
Till then you can get it at http://matinglife.blogspot.com

My Last Theory web novel was in my head since I started it, and to get my adrenaline even more up, it had reasonably good traffic, until last week when I had a bad run. Traffic was scarce and I decided not to post the fourth chapter, until I get more readers. This week hopefully I will be posting the fourth chapter.
You can read it here http://thelasttheory.com

I decided to take part in the Moblin developer challenge and develop a software product for the same. I will explain to you more about moblin, in a short time, in my next blog post. Moblin is a Operating system based on ubuntu for mobile internet devices. The concept of my product, called Me! (Mobile Everything) is available at the blog, http://concept-me.blogspot.com

So that was it. 2 weeks passed on without codevalley. But, its turning on again, with more power, hopefully.

Protect against online Plagiarism with Copyscape

Copyscape is a search engine, with a little different purpose. It finds the web pages which has copies of your content. It is a very creative idea, where you type in the URL of your website or page whose content you want to check in internet. Once you hit the Go button, Copyscape will return the pages in internet which has parts your content. Parts of content means even small paragraphs or phrases of your content. Though Copyscape only finds the text duplicates and not other media like images or sounds, this itself is very useful. Consider, a person sits down and writes an online tutorial for some new tool, and hopes to earn small pennies with ads and banners. But, without his knowledge someone else might have been using this content to boost his own revenues, with the original content maker not even aware of this. This is where we can use Copyscape to detect the plagiarists.

The free and open version gives you only the top ten results, and you need to sign up for a premium account to get all the results. Also, for the premium crowd, copyscape provides tools like Copysentry, which will monitor your web content continuously and reports every new duplicate that sprout in the internet. Another premium tool is where you can copy-paste your offline content and check if it is there in internet. Already many lawsuits have been filed against plagiarists with the help of the Copyscape tool (according to Wikipedia), including the one by a small CSS tutorial Author, who sued Apple for copying his content.

How does it work? Copyscape uses Google APIs to do the job, along with their own proprietary algorithm to exactly pinpoint copies. The site owned by a company called Indigo Stream Technologies, Ltd. and was launched in 2004.

The low points being that it cannot detect other media plagiarism except textual content. Also, it cannot tell which is the original copy and which is the duplicate, and that most professional tools will cost you. Anyways, for bloggers and other people who use internet as a writing medium, Copyscape is a tool to bookmark. They also provide a banner to post in websites showing “Page protected by Copyscape, do not copy”.

Copyscape search page.

Copyscape Forum discussing on IP rights.

Codevalley

The Last Theory, my first novel

Sorry all for not posting anything for over a week. I was busy with publishing my maiden web novel, the Last Theory. It is a sci-fi sequel, where I will be posting one chapter a week, and depending upon reader comments and feedback I will take forward my story.
Last Theory is a scientific theory which I have been working on for the past few years. I thought I would put it down as a novel. Again, there I found the medium, Internet and "Blog" as very interesting, and that is how I am attempting to write a blog novel.
Hope I will get nice response to my novel as I am getting to this blog.
You can check out the novel here.
http://thelastheory.wordpress.com