Cuil, a brand new search engine, launched recently, is pitched as the world’s latest, largest and fastest search engine.  At the time of launch itself, Cuil claims to have 120 billion pages or three times the volume of Google Index.

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. Read the full story

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Google has recently released a browser plug-in that lets you experience Google Earth inside a browser.

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.

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Google seems to be never resting. On Wednesday, the powerful company launched a set of brand new tools that will help users to build gadgets, that is small Web applications that can display data from the company’s online spreadsheet application.

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. Read the full story

Google is a wonderful tool as it is. But there is always room for improvement.

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.

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I have been using Gmail for about 3 years now and have been very happy with it.

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.

Googlefight is an innovative use of Google search. It is a simple brawl of words.

Load Googlefight and you’ll see two text boxes, one that reads Keyword#1 and the other Keyword#2. Enter any keywords you’d like into these text boxes, click ‘Make A Fight’, and you’ll see two stick figures punching and kicking each other.

When the dust settles a moment later, you’ll see a bar graph with two rising bars, one for each keyword string you typed, along with a number that indicates how many instances of your string Google found on the Web. The more common keyword combo, obviously, wins.

Googlefight has minimal system requirements. All you need is an internet connection and a browser with the free flash player installed.

The contenders for the fight are limited only by your imagination. It could be cheeseburgers vs. hamburgers or Teddy bears vs Godzilla.

Googlefight does have useful purposes too. For example, if you want to use a figure of speech but you’re not exactly sure about it, you can use Googlefight to double check the expression. So, if you’re not sure if it’s “feed a fever and starve a cold,” or “feed a cold and starve a fever,” you can use Googlefight to find out which one appears which one appears most often on the Web.

Visit Googlefight

I came across this search page inside the Google website that was specifically designed to search Microsoft-related sites.

Just check out http://www.google.com/microsoft.html

This page seems to be in existence as early as 2002. It is quite surprising to find a search page solely devoted to searching stuff related to a particular company. But if you consider the enormous amount of information available in Microsoft sites, the exclusive search page is probably justified.

Actually, the results shown are not limited to Microsoft website. It fetches pages from other sites also as long as the content is related to Microsoft. So the results are not the same as you would get using site:microsoft.com parameter in a search.