Cuil (pronounced “cool”) is supposed to be the hot new search engine on the block, created by ex-Google engineers. Let me tell you right now, it sucks – so far at least. Just search anything, anything at all, look at the results, and you’ll see what I mean. A search for “Leland.info” returns a bunch of old stale links, which by the way have nothing to do with this site. I honestly hope they can improve though. I like the idea of ranking pages based on content relevancy only, and not “superficial” factors like incoming links.
Matt Cutts recently announced that toolbar PageRanks were to be updated. I honestly don’t get what the big deal is with PageRank. Webmasters go absolutely crazy over it.
There is a big difference between toolbar PageRank and “internal” PageRank. Toolbar PageRank is public data, updated once every few months or so. Internal PageRank, used by Google themselves, is constantly updated. This is a floating point number (such as 5.234234). Mere mortals like me can’t see that.
A number from 0 (the worst) to 10 (godly) is assigned to a page according to the quantity and quality of links pointing to that page.
It’s just one of many factors that go into ranking pages in Google. Shouldn’t webmasters be more concerned about the daily fluctuations of Google’s search results than a (mostly) meaningless number that’s pushed out every 3-4 months?
It seems like just yesterday I upgraded to 2.5.1 (even though it was over a month ago). There’s not really much difference. A few things I noticed right after upgrading:
- Word count on the write menu
- “Bubble” for outdated plugins
It was a relatively painless upgrade for this blog, especially since I don’t have that many plugins that I’d have to keep up with too.
Stop the presses, this just in: Gmail, a popular free webmail service, has a black dot located in the top left corner of the page. What could this dot be? It seems the general consensus is that it is an iframe, with a border. More to come as this breaking news story develops.
Just take a look at this web 2.0 map of the world, which features exactly 1001 logos from various web 2.0 websites. Obviously there are a few repeats, but still – there’s a good number of sites in that map. I have to admit it’s pretty cool, and a lot of effort was obviously put into it.
