4 posts tagged “google”

Doing some online political ranting and need a quick quote from some politician to bolster your point? Check out Google's InQuotes for all your political quotation needs. Cool and handy little application.

I guess we're going to have a debate tonight after all, too. I'm looking forward to checking it out. This political posturing over the economy is really quite ridiculous and I hope we have a chance to hear extensively from both candidates on their understanding of the economy, what they plan to do to fix it, and all the foreign policy issues that were originally slated to be the focus of this debate.

I heard a radio program the other evening while driving featuring a college professor who'd written a book whose thesis was basically that the internet enhances intellectual laziness. He went on to state that kids these days would have trouble writing long form essays such as law school applications (he didn't mention that having fewer lawyers would be a good thing for the country, but I digress), and that students now are complaining if a teacher assigns a 500 page book, because they are too used to reading short info-snacks online and too used to LOL style shorthand communication.

This filled me with a boiling anger. I bet this gentleman can't really figure out how to use the internet, gets frustrated, and rails against it. It always annoys me when "old model" people sound off like this. Technological innovation has, of course, always changed the world and the way we live, and the internet is the best effort of this yet.

Check out Google CEO ERIC Schmidt on Jim Cramer's "Mad Money" sounding off on this in smarter, more succinct fashion than I can.

Google alum Anna Patterson, who wrote an index of 30 billion web pages that became a template for Google and after which she spent 4 years there, rolled out a new search engine no Monday called Cuil (pronounced "Cool" or "Kewl" if you prefer) with a team of former Googlers. The New York Times offered some information about it, then subsequently editorialized it as "building a car company to show off a new transmission" on the Bits blog.

I've taken a spin around Cuil, and my initial reaction is that it looks very Facebook-y, and it's result lists are much more media intensive than a Google search, showing little photos with a paragraphy blurb of text for each result. Given that, it would seem to me that perhaps Cuil wants to establish a foothold in the web space for younger users where more refinement of specified topics seems to be the trend. If so, though, why are they indexing the whole web? Will they roll out new media specific festures to try and nicheify? Or are they just hoping to dump the company to a larger player because they built this search engine so cheaply? Perhaps that is the likliest outcome and objective here.

I liked the search engine well enough, and certainly think because of the uniqueness of its layout, it could serve as a better second option to Google than any of the would be competitiors like ask and yahoo. I might use it a bit - guess it depends how much time I spend on the 'net.

I'm psyched to learn that Google has released an IPhone specific version of talk. I've been using Meebo heretofore, but would bet my bottom dollar this Google product is gonna be superior, and will likely allow me to sign in to Gchat and AIM together, which I do while using Gmail at my desk, and which Meebo doesn't allow.