[Sankar]

There's another way to search for information on Google. How many of you guys know about the unofficial Google Shell?

Try it out

goosh.org - the unofficial google shell.

[Thad E Ginathom]

CUIL ---It's awful.

It does, however, seem to have got over one start-up problem of serving up pornographic pictures with everything.

It's a one-visit-and-forget site. They must have had some business plan in starting it up, but actually being a competing search engine, unless they are naive beyond belief, was surely not one of them

[JayD]

Post Deleted by the Team-BHP Support : Please take the effort of typing your posts out correctly. We would much appreciate your using full & proper english in posts, for the benefit of other forum users.

Please view our board rules carefully before proceeding any further.

[ph03n!x]

Google platform - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - this article gives a brief of the kind of infrastructure Google has grown with. They have around half a million servers

And this tells about Google itself: Google search - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This gives the complete boutique of Google's services: More Google products

So what is my point? What started as a small-time startup, that had its initial struggles and teething troubles, has blown into something even barons like Micro$oft get on the heel about.

The way they have planned their growth, and the way they have designed their services - they way they put technology to use - only earns them my respect and affinity - It is going to very very very very (i can keep adding more, but the Mods may whack me! ) difficult to wean people like me off Google if they continue doing what they are doing, and how they are doing it!

(My apologies if this seems like a Google-praiser's chant!)

[srijit]

Did you know that Google went to Yahoo and MS and asked them to buy them out in the very beginning? They refused and I'm sure they feel like idiots now
Google guys also took cost cutting to an extreme. Used commodity hardware, cardboard cabinets etc. Their architecture forced them to scale massively, and they are now the best at scalability. Plug and play computing.

I remember reading somewhere that nobody can beat Google at deployment of datacenters, not even the US Army. Their data centers are prepacked, and just need power and networking. Everything else can be remotely controlled.
Also remember seeing that if the US Army had that kind of deployment capability in Iraq, they could have gotten a live video feed from every soldier on the ground, process it and give instructions back in real-time.
(Dont know how accurate this is, and cant find the article where I read this in)

[nemo]

I don't know how many of you noticed but google.com was down yesterday evening for several minutes, the co.in was up however. That was the first time i saw the site down in the last 10 years(?)

[ph03n!x]

Originally Posted by nemo

I don't know how many of you noticed but google.com was down yesterday evening for several minutes, the co.in was up however. That was the first time i saw the site down in the last 10 years(?)

I am not sure about that - my toolbar searches gives out the results from the .com site - and i never faced a down-time. Can you tell the approx time when u noticed it being down?

Though this is , IMHO the chances of any part of Google being down is pretty much close to nil because of their infrastructure...

[speedzak]

Cuil is improving day by day.
My first experience at that site was very very disappointing. But yesterday, there were some good results I found after some random searches.

Also, read the 'about Cuil' section. People on top are some familiar names from famous search engines including Google.

[Thad E Ginathom]

It's one of those why bother? things.

Google already has competitors, particularly yahoo and MS, but I doubt that they even cross my mind other than rarely.

I don't like monopoly, and I don't like companies that want to own the world --- but people don't search any longer, they google.

Anything that is going to compete is going to have to be better from the start.

Cuil may be better than Google in a years time, but by then, how many of us will remember it even exists?

[flipsyde]

I think it still needs work, but come on cut them some slack. Team-BHP wasn't what it is today a few years ago. Its all about ever impending improvements.

As much as I love Google I am looking forward to see what Cuil can bring to us.

Cuil should keep in mind that they are a late entrant to the search engine market and have to work their way up the ladder. Its not enough being just as good as Google. They should be so much better to actually convince people to shift over.

Good luck Cuil.

[HPP]

Originally Posted by srijit

Did you know that Google went to Yahoo and MS and asked them to buy them out in the very beginning? They refused and I'm sure they feel like idiots now
Google guys also took cost cutting to an extreme. Used commodity hardware, cardboard cabinets etc. Their architecture forced them to scale massively, and they are now the best at scalability. Plug and play computing.

I remember reading somewhere that nobody can beat Google at deployment of datacenters, not even the US Army. Their data centers are prepacked, and just need power and networking. Everything else can be remotely controlled.
Also remember seeing that if the US Army had that kind of deployment capability in Iraq, they could have gotten a live video feed from every soldier on the ground, process it and give instructions back in real-time.
(Dont know how accurate this is, and cant find the article where I read this in)

Interesting rarely known fact is that Google is the #2 or 3(don't remember which) manufacturer of servers in the world.. and none are for sale.. try to keep up with that as a new search engine.

Originally Posted by nemo

I don't know how many of you noticed but google.com was down yesterday evening for several minutes, the co.in was up however. That was the first time i saw the site down in the last 10 years(?)

"Google" being down is pretty much impossible, however a specific server that you randomly pinged being down.. more likely.

Originally Posted by ph03n!x

I am not sure about that - my toolbar searches gives out the results from the .com site - and i never faced a down-time. Can you tell the approx time when u noticed it being down?

Though this is , IMHO the chances of any part of Google being down is pretty much close to nil because of their infrastructure...

Exactly

Originally Posted by speedzak

Cuil is improving day by day.
My first experience at that site was very very disappointing. But yesterday, there were some good results I found after some random searches.

Also, read the 'about Cuil' section. People on top are some familiar names from famous search engines including Google.

I am quoting myself(below) from another thread in regards to the founders of this new search engine being "ex googlers"..

Originally Posted by HPP

You are one of the few. Since they went live recently, the word among the US auto forums is most don't like it. The results are fairly poor.

Also, the fact that they were ex Google employees actually does nothing for their product as a search engine. The reason being, they have zero right to use any code or algorithms that belong to Google. If they used/borrowed any technology, idea or code from Google.. that would be the end of them, as Google is watching closely with their attorney's waiting to pounce.

Thus, for them to be any different then any other start up search engine.. they would have had to invent(for lack of better words) a better algorithm then all others already out there(not likely). Not to mention they do not have the feature base that Google or Yahoo does.

Anyways, using "Ex Googlers" just shows the weakness in their actual products ability to stand on it's own merit.

Back to the topic at hand, yeah, this is just another awesome FREE feature Google continues to offer the world.

And so it seems your guys' feelings are in line with everyone else regarding this new venture..

[GTO]

Originally Posted by HPP

try to keep up with that as a new search engine.

Well, I don't think too much of CUIL but the need for additional servers will only come with growth, isn't it? I don't think they are quite there yet. If & when they are, servers are rather simple to get right and should be the least of their worries.

[HPP]

Originally Posted by GTO

Well, I don't think too much of CUIL but the need for additional servers will only come with growth, isn't it? I don't think they are quite there yet. If & when they are, servers are rather simple to get right and should be the least of their worries.

True, but location of servers, and server technology has a play in speed of results etc as well(Although those are secondary to the actual quality of results). So in a sense you are right, but the ability to have mass amounts of servers strategically placed throughout the world definitely helps the user experience.. As technology keeps changing, only the BIG dogs can afford to keep up with the latest ways of serving ads and latest ways of storing etc.. So there is more to servers(data farms) then just being a simple place to store info.

Recently I was at a Google office and they had a server rack(term used loosely because I've NEVER seen anything like it!), it was insane. My friends who work in data centers etc, and the stuff I've seen elsewhere don't even live in the same universe as the "outdated" stuff Google is playing with. I'm sure it has a role in how good they are, and what they are able to offer.

[Thad E Ginathom]

I think they work on the priorities of cheap to buy, cheap to build, cheap to run, reliable...

I've usually bought branded PCs, and people have always told me how much money I could save building my own. Google just scales that up. Way, way up; don't they have more computers than anyone else in the world?

[srijit]

Originally Posted by GTO

Well, I don't think too much of CUIL but the need for additional servers will only come with growth, isn't it? I don't think they are quite there yet. If & when they are, servers are rather simple to get right and should be the least of their worries.

Unless they are using a super efficient algorithm, they need masses of storage space, bandwith and CPU power, even before they begin.

Storage space = for storing data crawled obviously
bandwidth = to crawl through the millions of pages so that they get as big an index as Google has
CPU power = to parse the massive amount of crawled data and create the index that has to be stored in the storage space.

They have to be scalable at the beginning itself, otherwise it wont work. Google was lucky that they were growing along with the internet and also pushing the internet along. They were always in front of the curve and they were damn lucky.

As a small example, if I were to start a site as popular as TBHP and if I start to get traffic like TBHP does from day 1, then I should not be running on a shared hosting server. That is what a Google competitior, especially a hyped one like Cuil should expect. They should expect HEAVY traffic at the beginning and they should have provided good relevant results. If not, then most people will not bother going back to check it again.