Review: Out of the gate, Cuil is ambitious but flawed
After not much fanfare but plenty of anticipation, a new search engine called Cuil has launched. In spite of all the noise about the founders’ pedigree and the company’s index size, the only thing that makes a search engine tick is the relevance of its results across several dimensions. I spent an hour testing the service last night and found it has made an ambitious and interesting start out of the gate.
When evaluating a… Continue Reading
Free phone service Nimbuzz offers “everything”
If you’re like me and split most of your “online time” between your smartphone, your computer’s chat client and your Facebook/LinkedIn page, Nimbuzz may be for you.
It’ll make all those communications smoother.
My Facebook friends sometimes leave me wall messages that I take forever to respond to. Now they can call me or chat with me directly via a widget embedded on my Facebook profile page. The Nimbuzz widget detects presence and shows if I’m online…. Continue Reading
Mobile app service says there’s still a market for WAP sites
Proteus, a Washington D.C. area mobile applications company recently launched Swift, a service that lets anyone easily create websites specifically geared towards mobile devices. Company president Guy Vidra recently spoke with us about the product’s launch.
There’s a pressing need to solve the current stalemate in the mobile web market. Most consumers don’t access the web on their mobile device, partly because the experience is poor; most websites don’t create a mobile-specific version because the low… Continue Reading
Microsoft-Yahoo: Notes about the logic behind it
Here are some of the other themes that emerged from the conference call this morning held by Microsoft, after it announced a bid to acquire Yahoo for $44.6 billion. (See our original story here, along with my cliff notes from the call).
– In response to an analyst’s question, Steve Ballmer mentioned that there are three constituencies on the web – advertisers, consumers and publishers. Microsoft’s aQuantive deal addressed the advertiser constituency and also brought a… Continue Reading
Search Wikia gets slammed, here’s our review
Search Wikia search engine has received mixed reviews, to say the least, since launching this morning.
We’ve covered some of its business and social aspects and an initial look when it first launched, but have since had more time to tinker with it.
The harsh reviews resulted in Search Wikia putting up a temporary disclaimer at its home page, http://search.wikia.com, conceding that the quality of its search results is poor (screenshot below). This was not the case… Continue Reading
Search Wikia launches: Will it threaten Google?
[Update: See our subsequent post here, which includes a deeper look, after Search Wikia gets slammed by other initial reviews]
Search Wikia, a new search engine site, has launched publicly after two weeks of private testing.
The search engine has been highly anticipated for its unique, open-source approach to search as well as its high profile founder, Jimmy Wales (pictured here), who has led online encyclopedia coverage).
We spoke with Wales under embargo last week about his plans.
This… Continue Reading
Wikia to launch new social search engine, more on Monday
Search Wikia, the highly anticipated search engine by Wikia, the for-profit company of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, will launch publicly on Monday. It is currently in private testing mode, and we’ll write more upon launch.
The huge success of Wikipedia in mobilizing humans makes this project particularly notable. It’s a fascinating alternative to Google’s computer-focused approach.
We’ve tested Grub, the service’s way of crawling the Internet’s web sites to collect data. Grub is a “distributed search crawler,”… Continue Reading
Hulu launches private beta, faces challenge
Updated
Hulu, the joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp to compete against YouTube, launched an expanded private testing mode last week. While the TV service, which launched its initial beta version earlier this fall, has won kudos for a clean interface, it faces big questions.
Hulu’s primary problem is that it doesn’t own any of the content on its site and is beholden to its content partners such as NBC and Fox.
Additionally, the same content is… Continue Reading