Erik Turnquist

Cuil is a new search engine that went live today. Its goal is to provide more search results with greater accuracy than existing search engines such as Google. Currently it indexes over 120 billion web pages, which is substantially lower than Google’s claim of 1 Trillion unique web pages. Cuil was founded by former Google employees Anna Patterson, Russel Power, Louis Monier, and former IBM employee Tom Costello.

Cuil has some positive qualities, but currently it is not polished enough to replace my preferred search engine, Google.

Pros

• UI: I tend to like darker screen user interfaces than most people, so I especially liked the contrasting black, dark, blue, and white elements. Actually, it fits nicely with the theme of my blog. Overall, the look and feel seems uncluttered, which is largely due to the multi-column view search results. This seems to prevents excessive scrolling when browsing the results.
• Search Categories: When searching for “Seattle”, it divided the search into suggestions that were common for this search. Results included “Seattle Culture”, “Landmarks in Seattle”, etc. Below each category were listed search terms that fit into these categories.

Cons

• Search Results: Several searches that I often do, returned results that were not useful to me. Typing in my own name, “Erik Turnquist”, did not return my website, nor ericturnquist.com which always occurs when searching google. When searching for “Soccer wiki”, “Digg wiki”, “California wiki”, or even “California wikipedia”, did not return a single search result that had Wikipedia. This is highly personal, but searches I do often proved to return useless results. 
• Load Times: Page load times were far too long. Using Webkit r35417, searching for “Apple” took 8.20 seconds, compared to Google’s 355 milliseconds.

Although Cuil is currently having scaling and relevancy issues, I assume that many of those problems will be worked out over time. Conclusion: stick with Google.

We have all heard of web streaming music services such as last.fm and Pandora, but I recently had the opportunity to use a desktop streaming music software called Spotify and was amazed.

Spotify, the company, was founded by entrepreneurs Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon and has its headquarters in Luxembourg. Spotify, the software, has been in beta for a little over a year, and gone through a number of revisions in the process. Currently, it offers an iTunes like interface for both playing music and searching through their extensive collection of songs. Songs are organized into playlists simply by dragging them from the Spotify music library. Playing a song is as simple as double clicking on it. Finding a song involves typing the title, artist, etc. into the search bar and then browsing through the search results.

Several areas of the product I especially enjoyed were:

Buffer Time

While using Spotify there was none. None while playing songs that had been streamed previously. None while playing obscure Seattle bands. It was incredible. Even my local music library takes longer to start playing songs when the hard drive has to spin up. I continued to test this with as many songs as I could and was not able to make it pause before a song started playing.

Overall Speed

Spotify offers clients for Windows and Mac OS X (could not find information about Linux). Everything in the interface was responsive. Search results were returned incredibly fast. Spotify felt solid and lightweight while being feature rich.

Library Size

The Spotify library had all of the popular music that I expected it to have, but it also included artists which many main stream stores have difficulty supplying content from.

Although I had the experience of playing with the Spotify beta, there were no ads in the version I was using. In the future, and for the final release ads will be added to the product, but they will be done in a non-instrusive manner outline here.

Although I am not a part of the beta, I was able to get a glimpse at software that I believe could change the streaming music market and possibly change the way I listen to music. While online, being able to play any song you want to, anytime, at no cost is extremely hard to resist.

Special thanks to Erik Hammar for showing me this software.