John Lawlor

A new search engine was launched today with the intention to rival Google as the search engine of choice on the Web. Cuil (apparently it means “wisdom” in Irish) boasts that is searches three times as many pages as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.  Cuil indexes pages based on their content and relevance, rather than on popularity metrics.

I did a short test with it this morning against Google and found that I got significantly different results; I am not sure whether they were better or not, but some obvious ones that showed in Google did not show early in Cuil. Nevertheless, the presentation of search results, with some summary text and images, is very attractive and I liked it. I am certainly going to give it a try.

One important differentiator with Cuil is its privacy policy, which states that the search engine does “not collect any personally identifiable information, period.” They don’t keep logs and don’t store cookies. As concerns about privacy on the Internet grow, this is welcome; if it lasts, of course.

I intend to use Cuil to see if I will shift from Google. Check it out!

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I am developing a strong interest in open source software and have discovered many excellent products over the last few months. I intend to write about them in the blog and hope that people will also share their knowledge by leaving comments here. I am particularly interested in successful deployments in higher education – not just Moodle, though!

Obviously, Wordpress (link opens in new window) is one of the first and the best – gotta get that plug in for the facilitators of this part of my website!

I use several open source products and, apart from very specialised uses, it seems there is almost no need to buy software at all now, whether for the individual or the enterprise.  Individuals or small business, in particular, probably have no real need to buy software at all.

Excellent tools and services are available for blogging; wikis; calendaring; customer relationship management (CRM); office applications (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, imaging, database management), web hosting, etc.

More to follow over the next while.

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