Searching for the "best search engine"...

A lot of abnormal activity has been happening with the search Engines for the past couple of days. Every one is trying to give Google a run for their money.

First, there was Cuil which was released with much fanfare. Much of the debate has been centralized around how Google is going to take on - for the first time - its own ex-employees. Three of Cuil's co-founders – Anna Patterson, Russell Power and Louis Monier – are former Google engineers, while CEO Tom Costello, Patterson's husband, has two prototype search engines to his credit. Patterson sold her specialized archival search engine to Google four years ago; and Monier is a former chief technology officer at AltaVista and helped build the search engine on eBay Inc.'s online auction site.

Cuil claims to have the largest index of webpages. At this moment of writing this post, the home page reads close to 121.617 billion pages. But Google beats it pants down when it comes to relevance and the number of results returned. For example, I did a quick search for arreosambar on the day it was launched and doesn't return any results at all. How come the largest index in the web ignored my blog? Fishy!

Although it is very easy to write it off, somewhere at the back of my mind I feel that this wouldn't become a damn squib.

Today afternoon I was reading an interesting article on a parody about Yuil, a mashup of Cuil's UI and Yahoo's BOSS, running on Google's App Engine. Boss opens up tremendous opportunities in this era of content aggregation and the possibilities alone are worth a separate post.

Just a few hours after the news, the site announces that Yuil is dead and you can get the same results with Yahoo!

However, the good thing is that the entry of Quil has brought in some interest in the Industry to take on Google. Any race is interesting only if there is interesting and when you have someone to compete with. I, for one believe that Microsoft has lost the battle long ago and and would not be able to catch up if it continues with the current trend.

I had twittered that I'm pretty impressed with Ballmer's email to All-Microsoft employees last week. The fact that they understand that they clearly trail Google in the search front and are trying to make amends - either by trying to acquiring Yahoo! or otherwise is highly appreciated. But, it is interesting to see how these words are translated into action.

These particular lines from the email caught my attention.

We'll introduce new approaches that move beyond a white page with 10 blue links to provide customers with a customized view of their world. This is a long-term battle for our company--and it's one we'll continue to fight with persistence and tenacity.

And, any guesses on how it has been put into action. See it for yourself! Presenting the new Live Search homepage...

This is a part of the new facelift that it has got today and it it definitely much more aesthetic and appealing. The new design features background images that will change frequently, augmented with what they call "hotspots." These interactive areas highlight parts of the image and help you explore search results related to the highlighted area. For example, they have you researching about Okavango Desert, Mosquitoes and Safari in Bostwana when you go to search something.

Ha, Ha! When will they learn that it is the content that should be given the preference over the User Experience?

Sorry Mr. Ballmer. If some one, gives me better results in a white page with blue links, I'm game for that rather than falling prey to your colors.

Update: A couple of readers have written/said to me that they are unable to see these images in the Live Search Homepage. As told in the MSDN blog link, the feature is available only for US users. A simple hack to get this feature would be to Click on your country displayed in the info bar on the top and Select United States (English) from the list. Alternatively, you can click on this link to go to the US page.

Until then, hail Google!