Cuil has been founded by the husband-wife duo of Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson. Originally called Cuill (Irish for knowledge), pronounced as cool, has now been named Cuil. Summary of Cuil’s features as claimed by Cuil: • Biggest Internet search engine—Cuil has indexed 120 billion Web pages, 3x more than any other search engine • Organized results—Cuil’s magazine-style layout separates results by subject and allows further search by concept or category • Different results—Unlike other search engines, Cuil ranks results by the content on each page, not its popularity • Complete privacy protection—Cuil does not keep any personally identifiable information on users or their search histories Cuil does have some interesting feature to offer. A search for dogs, for example, will return category results for “water dogs,” “crossbreed”, “cocker spaniel” and so on. Some of these related terms do not include the term “dog”. Similarly by clicking on New York, one would get tabbed results for recommended refinements like New York Times, New York City, New York Yankees and so on. Cuil works to understand how words are related to get more relevant results and it tries to categorize and file a web page, even if the category name doesn’t appear on the site.

Will Cuil overtake Google? Though Cuil has the potential to compete with Google, in it’s present form, it lacks certain important features that we have become used to in Google, like the advanced search for one. In Google, you can create queries to search by file types, restrict your search to a particular website and stuff like that.  Cuil lacks any kind of advance search at present. But, Cuil will probably come up with similar or even better features in the future. Anyway, you can expect some good competition in the coming days. Remember, it took Google quite some time to surpass Alta Vista and Yahoo in the search wars.

If you are a Gmail user, you might already know that there are no folders in Gmails. Instead of folders, you organize them by labels. Even all the built-in views like inbox, sent mail, draft, trash etc are also labels.

The new plugin is accompanied by an API that web developers can use to easily incorporate Google Earth into their applications which can then be embedded in web pages. The Google Earth API is a free beta service, available for any web site that is free to consumers.

Paul Rademacher, Technical Lead, Google Earth Browser Plug-in says -

Driven by an extensive JavaScript API, you can control the camera; create lines, markers, and polygons; import 3D models from the web and overlay them anywhere on the planet. In fact, you can even overlay your content over different planets, stars, and galaxies by toggling Sky mode, letting you build 3D Google Sky mashups. You can also enable 3D buildings with a single line of JavaScript, attach JavaScript callbacks to mouse events, fetch KML data from the web, and more. Our goal is to open up the entire core of Google Earth to developers in the hopes that you’ll build the next great geo-based 3D application, and change (yet again) how we view the world.

This version of the plugin supports the following browsers:

• IE 6.0+
• IE 7.0+
• Firefox 2.x or 2.0x (Firefox 3.0 support coming soon)
• Netscape 7.1+
• Mozilla 1.4+
• Flock 1.0+

Download Google Earth plug-in

I was particularly interested to see how well the Google engine translates English to Hindi. So I tried translating a few proverbs from English to Hindi. I must say, the results weren’t very impressive, but were interesting.

Click on the image to view a larger image

As you can see most of the translations are gibberish and don’t make much sense. Of course, if you already know the English phrase that has been translated, you can pick bits and pieces of meaning from the translated version. But if seen in isolation, it would be hard for anybody to make sense of it. In fact, you could actually make a good game out of it. You could translate an English phrase (proverbs would be perfect) into Hindi in Google and then show just the translated version to your friends and ask them to ‘guess’ the English phrase. Whoever guesses the correct, wins.

But then it turns out that it isn’t all bad. I was surprised with how Google translated the second proverb, viz, ‘A bird in hand is worth two in the bush’. What Google has done is, instead of actually translating the proverb, it has returned a proverb in Hindi that virtually means the same. That’s wonderful.

I also tried translating a Hindi phrase to English. While the result wasn’t perfect, Google had done a really good job as you can see from the image below.

Click on the image to view a larger image

Basically the problem appears to be that presently the Google engine translates the words literally, without giving much consideration to the context.

The purpose of this post is not to find fault with the Google engine. I do understand that even to do what it does now, requires highly advanced technology, especially since Hindi is a language with an entirely different script from English. It’s just that in it’s present form, the translation may not be of much use to people. It could probably work well for translating individual words in English. Hopefully, over time the accuracy of the translations will improve to an extent that they can be practically useful.

Before I finish this post here is a link to read this very post in Hindi (obviously translated by Google). Enjoy.

Google offers its new Gadgets-in-Docs and Visualization API as a platform in which any interested person could build an application for displaying spreadsheet data on a table, chart, or on any other area with a Web page. Practically, Google’s interest is to allow people to expand the use of Google spreadsheets, which are part of the Google Docs product that includes also online word processing and presentation applications.

According to Google, the recently launched service can be used also by persons that are not developers, who can find a gadget by opening up a Google spreadsheet, then clicking on the chart icon and eventually clicking on “gadget.” In the end, the small application can be customized in order to fit the data on a spreadsheet and then published to the user’s iGoogle personalized home page or on any other web page.

On the other hand, developers can use the Visualization API to create, share and reuse visualizations written by the developer community. Google said that the Visualization API provided developers with a common application programming interface in order to access structured data sources, such as Google spreadsheets.

Source: enews 2.0

Google is constantly experimenting with new ideas and features targeted towards improving the users’ search experience.

Here is a brief look at some of the experiments presently on.

Alternate views for search results

View on a timeline: See the search results sorted based on time. You can also limit the results to a particular time frame.

View on a map: Needless to say the results are displayed in relation to Google map.

Infoview: In this view you can focus on the terms that are most important to you like dates, measurements, locations and images.

Keyword suggestions
As you type your search, Google’s technology provides alternative suggestions to your queries in real time. This feature is also available on Google Labs as Google Suggest.

Keyboard shortcuts
This feature lets you navigate search results using keyboard shortcuts, so you can quit reaching for the mouse every time you want to move up and down the results list.

Two others, namely, the Left-hand search navigation and the Right-hand contextual search navigation, add contextual menus with items related to your results to the left or right side of the page when you conduct deeper topical searches.

You can actually try using these features at Google Experimental and probably suggest new ideas too.

Exporting the contacts to .csv

Let’s see how to export the contacts in some of the most common email programs.

In Outlook 2003 and 2007, select File > Import and Export > Export to a file, click Next, select Comma Separated Values (Windows) as the output format, and click Next twice. Name the file, and browse to the folder you want to store it in. Click Next > Finish.

In Outlook Express, choose File > Export > Address Book, select Text File (Comma Separated Values) as the output format, click the Export button, and save the file in a convenient place.

If you use Mozilla Thunderbird, open the address book, click Tools > Export, and select Comma Seperated(*.csv) from the drop-down menu, prior to choosing a folder to save the file in.

Importing the contacts into Gmail

To import the .csv file into Gmail, click the Contacts link on the left side of Gmail’s main screen. Select Import at the top right, and choose Browse in the Import Contacts dialog box.Navigate to and select your .csv file, Choose Open, and click Import Contacts. Click Close to see your contacts imported into Gmail. Click All Contacts above your addresses, if necessary to see all your contacts.

Here is what you need to do. Open your Gmail account and click Settings-Accounts. In the ‘Get mail from other accounts‘ section, click Add another mail account. Enter the email address of the account you want to add, and click Next Step.

Enter your username, password and POP3 server. If you want to continue to access the account through a mail client or through the ISP’s own Web interface, in addition to picking up and sending mail in your Gmail account, check Leave a copy of retrieved message on the server. This allows you to read the mail in Gmail, but the mail will remain on the ISP’s server so that you can download it with your standard mail program or read it through the account’s own Web interface. On the other hand, if you plan on accessing the mail for the address only through your Gmail account, you can leave the box unchecked.

Next, check Always use a secure connection (SSL) when retrieving mail to keep mail snoops at bay. In some instances a POP3 account may not work with an SSL connection: if that is the case, you will have to leave this box unchecked.

If you want all of your incoming messages from the account to carry a label, such as the name of the account, select Label incoming messages. In Gmail, a label works much as a folder does. You can view all mail that carries the same label by clicking the label. Gmail automatically creates a label for the address of the new account. You can select a different label or create a new one by choosing the appropriate entry from the drop-down list. Another option is to have messages bypass your inbox and go straight to your Gmail archive. This would be a good choice if you want to use Gmail primarily for searching through mail. When you’ve made all your selections, click Add Account.

You can compose mail in Gmail and have it appear to the recipient as if it were from the account you just added. When a message appears asking whether you want to create a custom From address, click Yes and follow the instructions.

Gmail will check your account, and any mail sent to either address will appear in your Gmail inbox. To stop Gmail from checking the mail, click Settings-Accounts and choose delete next to the account.

Until now.

During the last one week I have experienced something strange with Gmail. On 3 occasions, I was automatically logged out of Gmail and when I tried to log in again I was greeted by the following message.

The message reads:

Our system indicates unusual usage of your account. In order to protect Gmail users from potentially harmful use of Gmail, this account has been disabled for up to 24 hours.

If you are using any third party software that interacts with your Google Mail account, please disable it or adjust it so that its use complies with the Google Mail Terms of Use. If you feel that you have been using your Google Mail account according to the Terms of Use or otherwise normally, please contact us using this form to report this problem.

I am sure I did nothing that could be called ‘Unusual Usage’ unless checking your mail 10 to 20 times a day can be called unusual. I tried to login a couple of times but the same result.
I was really scared to read the part that says ‘this account has been disabled for up to 24 hours.’ I was expecting some important mails and I just couldn’t wait for 24 hrs.

Fortunately, when I tried after 10 mins, I was able to login and things were back to normal.

I tried looking up the problem on the web (using Google, what else?) and it looks like I am not the only one who has had the problem. A lot of people are grumbling about it in recent times.

I hope Google sets right the problem soon. I wouldn’t want to risk not being able to check my mails when I want to.

Egogoogling - To search for one’s own name in Google. It is also known as autogoogling or egosurfing.

Google Algos - A short-hand for “Google’s algorithms,” meaning the technical specifics of how Google ranks its result pages (the details of which are only know to those who work in Google).

Google cache - Google makes a copy of every website and allows searchers to view these copies (unless the webmaster prevents this with the “robots.txt” file, or so-called meta-tags).

Googlebomb - A link campaign trying to discredit a group, company or person. Repeated links with the same link text are used to connect a negative Google search to a certain web page.

Googlebot - This software program crawls (or “spiders”) the web for content. The content is indexed and later appears in Google search results.

Googlebowling - A rumored black-hat methodology to hurt a competitor’s website through a link campaign.

Googledance - Noticeable updates to the structure of the Google result rankings.

Googlejuice - The popularity that makes a web page appear high in Google search results. For example, “to give someone Googlejuice” can mean a link to someone (because a link to another page increases its value in the eyes of Google). A site which has “a lot of Googlejuice” is usually a web page with a high PageRank.

Googleplex - The Mountain View headquarters of Google Inc.

Googler - An employee of Google Inc. (a Noogler on the other hand is a new Google employee, and a Xoogler is an Ex-Google employee).

Googlosophy - The science of all things Google.