walk to TATE modern

Just had a stroll after lunch to TATE modern and Millenium bridge both are just behind the building where I work...for the interested one's my symbian address is SE1 0SU
Enjoy these snaps !

US recession has least impact on India !

Following my earlier post in india about recession in india ...here is one good reason why recession didn't effect India

Source

Sonia Gandhi should thank Finance Minister Chidambaram for resisting proposals to put part of India's foreign exchange reserves into a Sovereign Wealth Fund, which would buy equity shares in top global companies. Such a Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF)—an idea backed by eminent economists, the Prime Minister and the Planning Commission—would have suffered huge losses because of the collapse of global stock markets since January.

Neither Opposition politicians nor the public would have been satisfied by explanations that stock markets yield high long-term gains, notwithstanding short-term fluctuations. The Left Front would have accused Chidambaram of gambling away the country's precious assets in casino capitalism. Others would have accused top Congress politicians of having been bribed or arm-twisted into making dubious investments.

The government would have protested its innocence, and pointed out that the SWFs of many other countries—from China and Abu Dhabi to Singapore and Norway—had also suffered in the market slump. But Indians are quick to see scams when anything untoward happens. The reputation of politicians is so poor that many voters will believe accusations of manipulation and venality.

The US share price of Citibank, the world's biggest bank, plunged from $56 last year to a low point of $19 last week. Citibank was hit, along with many other top banks, by the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US. Now, investment experts will find much logic in all SWFs investing a bit in companies like Citibank, since it is the biggest bank in the world. Yet, had Chidambaram set up an SWF, and had it invested in Citibank, Opposition politicians would have screamed “scam” after the latest price crash. Marxists would have claimed that the US had arm-twisted India into investing in sinking banks as a price for the nuclear deal!

Now, there is indeed an economic case for a Sovereign Wealth Fund. Many countries with surplus forex reserves—mostly oil exporters, but also China and Singapore—have set up SWFs that invest in equities. The total assets of all SWFs are almost $3 trillion. India has experienced a huge inflow of dollars in recent years, raising its reserves to $ 290 billion, vastly in excess of any balance of payments needs.

In a seminal paper two years ago, economist Larry Summers, former US Treasury Secretary, made a strong case for developing countries to put excess reserves into stock markets. He argued that, for balance of payments security, a country's forex reserves should equal one year's short-term debt. As an abundant precaution, he assumed that countries would hold reserves of double that amount. Even after that, he calculated, 121 developing countries would have excess forex reserves of $2 trillion, equal to 19% of their combined GDP in 2004.

He further pointed out that these reserves yielded pathetically low yields when invested in short-term gilts—the traditional, safe practice. History showed that investment in equities would yield far more, despite short-term fluctuations. So, Summers proposed that all developing countries should put excess reserves into SWFs that would invest in shares. In India's case, he calculated that the additional yield from such an SWF would be 1 to 1.5% of GDP (or Rs 40,000-60,000 crore) per year.

This was by no means the only rationale for SWFs. Fast growth had made China a massive importer of raw materials, and so its government invested in commodity companies globally. Indeed, it gave massive sums in foreign aid as an additional sweetener to African commodity producers.

Many in India wanted to follow suit. Their aim was not simply to earn a higher yield on forex reserves, but to secure long-term sources of raw materials—oil, gas, coal, non-ferrous metals, even palm oil. The ONGC invested in several oil and gas ventures abroad. Tata, Birla and Sterlite invested in foreign mines for commercial reasons, unrelated to deploying excess forex reserves.

However, Chidambaram and RBI Governor Y V Reddy opposed any SWF for India. Reddy said SWFs were appropriate for countries with mineral windfalls (such as oil exporters), but not India. Indeed, India ran a modest current account deficit, and so needed to import dollars. Now, the world had flooded India with far more dollars than it could absorb, but this was not a structural surplus.

Chidambaram took refuge in a further technical argument. He said that SWFs made sense for countries with excess savings, reflected in a fiscal surplus. But India ran a large fiscal deficit.

However, these technical economic arguments pale besides the political ones. The stock market is seen by both Opposition politicians and the general public as a dodgy place full of crooked manipulators (remember Harshad Mehta and Ketan Parekh). Making money on the stock market is seen as risky, if not actually sinful. Indeed, the Left front has stymied attempts to put pension/provident fund money into Indian equities.

In these circumstances, Chidambaram has shown sound political judgement in refusing to set up an SWF. This might in the long run yield some financial gains. But it carries short-term risks, as has just been demonstrated by the slump in stock markets. So, it needs to be avoided in the run-up to the next general election.

Five Key Trends in Mobile Devices Through 2009

Source : Gartner

Gartner has identified five major trends that will impact the mobile device market through 2009, in areas ranging from partner “ecosystems” and competitive landscapes to innovations in device usability and interfaces. The trends include:

Established Vendors Consolidate and New Players Join the Fray. New device vendors, such as Apple and Garmin, are looking to differentiate themselves, while big-name vendors, such as Motorola, face pressure as market shares decline and design innovation becomes increasingly challenging. The lower cost of mobile phone reference designs and modules, as well as the appeal of such a large market, will attract more conventional consumer electronics companies to join the market.

Device Vendors Build Out Ecosystems. Pressure from operators to lower the price of devices will drive some established players to seek out new sources of revenue from content and services sold to end users. This trend is epitomised by Nokia with Ovi, Sony Ericsson with PlayNow and Apple with its iTunes store. This new market will bring changes in relationships between vendors, operators and content providers. Applications relevant to enterprises, such as location and navigation, will increasingly become available directly from device vendors that are integrating GPS into their products.

Devices Makers Will Focus on Removing Complexity for the User. Increasing device functionality and a need for differentiation will drive demand to simplify the user interface (UI) and service experience. As a consequence, mobile device vendors need to build up their UI competencies while retaining familiarity as well as considering how users can move horizontally across their devices’ applications, rather than simply vertically within them.

Mobile Devices Increasingly Become Lifestyle Statements. Style will play more of a role across the range of devices, driven not only by fashion trends but also by consumers’ desires to reinforce their lifestyle choices. Vendors need to have established platforms on which small changes to casings and colours can be made without impacting costs. They will also need to consider partnering with nonmobile companies and brands — such as consumer electronics, fashion or sports companies — to increase the lifestyle appeal and consumer reach of their products.

High-End Device Platforms Become “Field-Refreshable." As cellular technologies become part of increasingly expensive consumer devices, vendors must manage ongoing support, upgrades and enhancement of drives. Because many users will hold onto high-end devices longer, these platforms will need more life cycle management in the form of upgrades and enhancements. Some vendors are implementing these “field refreshes” that can be made to support new digital rights management (DRM) requirements, download bug fixes, or download new applications, wallpapers or skins to keep devices up-to-date.

Why india is better then China

Very nice article by Shashi Tharoor in TOI

In an April 20 column, I argued the case for Sino-Indian economic co-operation, suggesting the two countries had complementarities that could make such co-operation mutually beneficial (as some companies in both countries are already proving). I also dismissed any talk of comparing India to China, arguing that the two countries' systems are so different that we simply can't compete with China in the growth stakes. Lest some readers infer from this that i think China is superior to India in every respect, let me assure them that they are wrong.

Certainly, in absolute numbers, the Chinese are way ahead. Their export of electronic goods now tops $180 billion a year. One out of every three shoes exported in the world is made in China. They make 75% of the world's toys. Foreign direct investment is at the level of $70 billion a year (for comparison, India gets $15 billion). Shanghai alone has nearly 4,000 skyscrapers (more than all of India, and exceeding Los Angeles and Chicago combined). China has built an estimated 60,000 kilometers of expressways in less than two decades and will soon outstrip the total length of the US highway network. Per capita income has risen nearly 10-fold since 1978 to over $6,000 a head, and the number of people living in absolute poverty has dropped from 425 million two decades ago to 26 million today. The population is almost totally literate; life expectancy is reaching developed-country levels. This year, China is expected to overtake Germany to become the world's third largest economy, behind the US and Japan. It won't stay Number Three for long.

Against this, though, are a number of factors suggesting that not everything is rosy in China. Economic growth has occurred at breakneck speed, but that means some necks have been broken: the human cost of development has not been negligible (population displacement, farmers thrown off their lands, villages flooded by dams, mounting pollution, low-wage labour in appalling conditions, widening disparities between the rich and the poor, an absence of human rights and few checks on governmental abuses). The Chinese have seen great and rapid improvements in their Internet access, but Beijing employs some 40,000 'cyber-police' to monitor politically-undesirable activity on the Web.

Equally important, China's success has not just been China's; a disproportionate share of the benefit goes abroad, to the foreign companies who have set up factories in China. It has been estimated that of the $700 American price of a Chinese-made laptop, only $15 remains in China. Only four of the country's top 25 exporters are Chinese companies, according to Forbes magazine's Robyn Meredith, who adds that in practice, 'Made in China' really means 'Made by America (or Europe) in China'. The Chinese financial system also leaves much to be desired. Where India has been running sophisticated stock markets since the early 19th century — and Indians are so skilled at doing so that they got the Bombay stock market up and running within 24 hours of the 1992 bomb blasts — China is new at the game, and not particularly adept at it.

The financial information provided by China's companies, especially those in the large governmental sector, is notoriously unreliable, and standards of corporate governance are low. There are no world-class Chinese companies with sophisticated managers to match Tata or Wipro or Infosys. China's capital markets are weak and its banks inefficient: the Chinese banking system carried an estimated $911 billion in unrecoverable loans as of 2006, mainly to government firms. State-owned enterprises still account for half of China's economic assets. China has yet to master the art of channelling domestic savings into productive investments, which is why it has relied so extensively on foreign direct investment.

And the world has yet to develop any confidence in China's legal system (where a contract still means whatever the government says it means). In other words, it still lags behind India on the 'software' of development — not just technical brainpower or engineering know-how, but the systems it needs to operate a 21st century economy in an open and globalising world.

And then there's politics. Whatever you might say about India's sclerotic bureaucracy versus China's efficient one, our tangles of red tape versus their unfurled red carpet to foreign investors, our contentious and fractious political parties versus their smoothly-functioning top-down Communist hierarchy, there's one thing you've got to grant us: India has become an outstanding example of the management of diversity through pluralist democracy. Every Indian has been allowed to feel he or she has as much of a stake in the country, and as much of a chance to run it, as anyone else: after all, our last elections were won by an Italian woman of Roman Catholic heritage who made way for a Sikh to be sworn in as PM by a Muslim president, in a nation 81% Hindu.

And our largest state is being ruled by a Dalit woman, from a community once considered 'untouchable', who bids fair to rule the entire country if she can make the coalition arithmetic add up right after the next election. She wasn't promoted by the Brahmin elite in New Delhi; she rode to the top on the ballots of her political base. Contrast this with Beijing, where political freedom is unknown, leaders at all levels are handpicked from the top for their posts, and political heresy is met with swift punishment, house-arrest or worse. India's politics means its shock-absorbers are built into the system; it has endured major road-bumps without the vehicle ever breaking down.

In China's case, it is far from clear what would happen if the limousine of state actually encountered a serious pothole. The present system wasn't designed to cope with fundamental challenges to it except through repression. But every autocratic state in history has come to a point where repression was no longer enough. If that point is reached in China, all bets are off. The dragon could stumble where the elephant can always trundle on.

comments please :(((

I have more then 1000 visitors to my blog !! thanks for spending time to read my blogs
> 1000 visitors is certainly interesting news for me :))

Since i majorly post what interests me do you have any suggestion on what I could add or improve on ?... comments welcome

Personally I think i just comment on what is written by someoneelse so I wondering why be reactive rather take the lead and write your opinions ! just a thought

Would love to hear from you all

Keep the Spark

speech given by Chetan Bhagat.

Keep the Spark

Good Morning everyone and thank you for giving me this chance to speak to you. This day is about you. You, who have come to this college, leaving the comfort of your homes (or in some cases discomfort), to become something in your life. I am sure you are excited. There are few days in human life when one is truly elated. The first day in college is one of them. When you were getting ready today, you felt a tingling in your stomach. What would the auditorium be like, what would the teachers be like, who are my new classmates - there is so much to be curious about. I call this excitement, the spark within you that makes you feel truly alive today. Today I am going to talk about keeping the spark shining. Or to put it another way, how to be happy most, if not all the time.

Where do these sparks start? I think we are born with them. My 3-year old twin boys have a million sparks. A little Spiderman toy can make them jump on the bed. They get thrills from creaky swings in the park. A story from daddy gets them excited. They do a daily countdown for birthday party – several months in advance – just for the day they
will cut their own birthday cake.

I see students like you, and I still see some sparks.. But when I see older people, the spark is difficult to find.. That means as we age, the spark fades. People whose spark has faded too much are dull, dejected, aimless and bitter. Remember Kareena in the first half of Jab We Met vs the second half? That is what happens when the spark is
lost. So how to save the spark?

Imagine the spark to be a lamp’s flame. The first aspect is nurturing - to give your spark the fuel, continuously. The second is to guard against storms.

To nurture, always have goals. It is human nature to strive, improve and achieve full potential. In fact, that is success. It is what is possible for you. It isn’t any external measure - a certain cost to company pay package, a particular car or house.

Most of us are from middle class families. To us, having material landmarks is success and rightly so. When you have grown up where money constraints force everyday choices, financial freedom is a big achievement.

But it isn’t the purpose of life. If that was the case, Mr Ambani would not show up for work. Shah Rukh Khan would stay at home and not dance anymore. Steve Jobs won’t be working hard to make a better iPhone, as he sold Pixar for billions of dollars already. Why do they do it? What makes them come to work everyday?

They do it because it makes them happy. They do it because it makes them feel alive. Just getting better from current levels feels good. If you study hard, you can improve your rank. If you make an effort to interact with people, you will do better in interviews. If you practice, your cricket will get better. You may also know that you cannot become Tendulkar, yet. But you can get to the next level. Striving for that next level is important.

Nature designed with a random set of genes and circumstances in which we were born. To be happy, we have to accept it and make the most of nature’s design. Are you? Goals will help you do that.

I must add, don’t just have career or academic goals. Set goals to give you a balanced, successful life. I use the word balanced before successful. Balanced means ensuring your health, relationships, mental peace are all in good order.

There is no point of getting a promotion on the day of your breakup. There is no fun in driving a car if your back hurts. Shopping is not enjoyable if your mind is full of tensions.

You must have read some quotes - Life is a tough race, it is a marathon or whatever.. No, from what I have seen so far, life is one of those races in nursery school. Where you have to run with a marble in a spoon kept in your mouth. If the marble falls, there is no point coming first. Same with life, where health and relationships are the marble. Your striving is only worth it if there is harmony in your life. Else, you may achieve the success, but this spark, this feeling
of being excited and alive, will start to die.

One last thing about nurturing the spark - don’t take life seriously. One of my yoga teachers used to make students laugh during classes. One student asked him if these jokes would take away something from the yoga practice. The teacher said - don’t be serious, be sincere. This quote has defined my work ever since. Whether its my writing, my job, my relationships or any of my goals. I get thousands of opinions on my writing everyday. There is heaps of praise, there is intense criticism. If I take it all seriously, how will I write? Or rather, how will I live? Life is not to be taken seriously, as we are really
temporary here. We are like a pre-paid card with limited validity. If we are lucky, we may last another 50 years. And 50 years is just 2,500 weekends. Do we really need to get so worked up? It’s ok, bunk a few classes, goof up a few interviews, fall in love. We are people, not programmed devices.

I’ve told you three things - reasonable goals, balance and not taking it too seriously that will nurture the spark. However, there are four storms in life that will threaten to completely put out the flame. These must be guarded against. These are disappointment, frustration, unfairness and loneliness of purpose.

Disappointment will come when your effort does not give you the expected return. If things don’t go as planned or if you face failure. Failure is extremely difficult to handle, but those that do come out stronger. What did this failure teach me? is the question you will need to ask. You will feel miserable. You will want to quit, like I wanted to when nine publishers rejected my first book. Some IITians kill themselves over low grades – how silly is that? But that is how much failure can hurt you.

But it’s life. If challenges could always be overcome, they would cease to be a challenge. And remember - if you are failing at
something, that means you are at your limit or potential. And that’s where you want to be.

Disappointment’s cousin is frustration, the second storm. Have you ever been frustrated? It happens when things are stuck. This is especially relevant in India. From traffic jams to getting that job you deserve, sometimes things take so long that you don’t know if you chose the right goal. After books, I set the goal of writing for Bollywood, as I thought they needed writers. I am called extremely lucky, but it took me five years to get close to a release.

Frustration saps excitement, and turns your initial energy into something negative, making you a bitter person. How did I deal with it? A realistic assessment of the time involved – movies take a long time to make even though they are watched quickly, seeking a certain enjoyment in the process rather than the end result – at least I was learning how to write scripts , having a side plan – I had my third book to write and even something as simple as pleasurable distractions
in your life - friends, food, travel can help you overcome it. Remember, nothing is to be taken seriously. Frustration is a sign somewhere, you took it too seriously.

Unfairness - this is hardest to deal with, but unfortunately that is how our country works. People with connections, rich dads, beautiful faces, pedigree find it easier to make it – not just in Bollywood, but everywhere. And sometimes it is just plain luck. There are so few opportunities in India, so many stars need to be aligned for you to make it happen. Merit and hard work is not always linked to achievement in the short term, but the long term correlation is high, and ultimately things do work out. But realize, there will be some people luckier than you.

In fact, to have an opportunity to go to college and understand this speech in English means you are pretty darn lucky by Indian standards. Let’s be grateful for what we have and get the strength to accept what we don’t. I have so much love from my readers that other writers cannot even imagine it. However, I don’t get literary praise. It’s ok.
I don’t look like Aishwarya Rai, but I have two boys who I think are more beautiful than her. It’s ok. Don’t let unfairness kill your spark..

Finally, the last point that can kill your spark is isolation. As you grow older you will realize you are unique. When you are little, all kids want Ice cream and Spiderman. As you grow older to college, you still are a lot like your friends. But ten years later and you realize you are unique. What you want, what you believe in, what makes you feel, may be different from even the people closest to you. This can create conflict as your goals may not match with others. . And you may
drop some of them. Basketball captains in college invariably stop playing basketball by the time they have their second child. They give up something that meant so much to them. They do it for their family. But in doing that, the spark dies. Never, ever make that compromise. Love yourself first, and then others.

There you go. I’ve told you the four thunderstorms - disappointment, frustration, unfairness and isolation. You cannot avoid them, as like the monsoon they will come into your life at regular intervals. You just need to keep the raincoat handy to not let the spark die.

I welcome you again to the most wonderful years of your life. If someone gave me the choice to go back in time, I will surely choose college. But I also hope that ten years later as well, you eyes will shine the same way as they do today. That you will Keep the Spark alive, not only through college, but through the next 2,500 weekends. And I hope not just you, but my whole country will keep that spark alive, as we really need it now more than any moment in history. And there is something cool about saying - I come from the land of billion sparks.

Why Understanding Principles Is Essential in Coaching Others.

very nice article .. it may be applied to all spheres of discussion in life

http://www.netobjectives.com/blogs/why-understanding-principles-is-essential-in-coaching-others

Posted August 1st, 2008 by alshall

• Coaching
• Lean-Agile

Whenever I attempt to coach others, I have to acknowledge two things:

1. People will only do what's in their best interest
2. You can only get people to change their mind if it makes them right to do so

(Take a look at Joe Caruso’s excellent book, The Power of Losing Control, for more about this).

These strongly inform my beliefs about how to help people learn new approaches. I am often asked how to get other people to learn about Agile or Scrum methods. It can feel frustrating when you feel that the team should be doing something differently from the way it is currently being done… how do you get them to change?

In this blog, I discuss my approach and why understanding the principles underlying the practices is so important.

Look at the concerns behind the approaches

Imagine you are in a situation where someone is doing something you don't agree with. The first tack is often to look at what they are doing rather than what concerns they are really trying to address. That is not effective. I suggest that, almost always, the concerns they have are right but the solutions they have for addressing those concerns are wrong.

For example, suppose someone says, "Look, we need to do this design up-front to make sure that we have an architecture that works." They are taking a waterfall-ish approach. As an Agile person, you might be so taken aback by this approach that you miss what their real concerns are. Now, in this case, what is wrong and what is right? Look at the concern being expressed:

• Solution: Create a good architecture that works.
• Concern: Don't want to re-write code/architecture

What do you do?

You could tell them that their approach is wrong; but this will likely put them on the defensive. And that is not a good place for a constructive dialog! Instead, start by looking at their concern. If you cannot deduce it (and even if you can), you can always just ask. In this case, I'm pretty sure they are afraid they will lose time re-working the architecture if they don't get it right up-front. In other words, they want to be efficient. Or, perhaps they are concerned it will take too long to make changes to their code if they get the architecture wrong. In either case, they are concerned that the efficiency of development is not be compromised.

Well, I am concerned about this, too! I can agree with them. But I have a completely different solution.

The question is "why do I have a different solution?" The answer is because I am operating from a different set of beliefs. And these different beliefs result in a different set of practices that address the same concern.

Beliefs lead to practices

Discussing beliefs can be difficult because people often don't challenge them. Rather, they just assume they are true or act as if they are. Trying to change someone's beliefs directly is often difficult because it feels like an attack on them personally.

Working from the two principles I mentioned at the start of this blog, if I can get them to learn something that throws their belief into question for themselves, they may change their beliefs on their own... and thereby change their practices.

It works. But first, you have to understand what those beliefs are. And that is hard.

Discern the belief system

When someone does something I don't agree with, I start by asking myself,

What belief system would have someone think these practices are best when I believe those practices are not right?

In the example above, my first question would be, "What does this person believe that has them think that designing an architecture up front will work?" I can imagine many options. First, they believe that it's possible to do design up-front. Second, they believe that architectures cannot be designed to change over time. Those are probably good assumptions.

An even better approach would be to ask. This follows another good rule: Assume Nothing!

Another approach is to look at what they are focusing on. Beliefs are often informed by what people are looking at… what they assume to be true and real. That informs what they believe works.

Leading to change

You have several options available to you to help change behavior. Contrast the things someone is looking at and ignoring with the things you look at and ignore. Ask which things tend to be more predictive. This can be an objective conversation. You both are just trying to learn.

If you've observed enough evidence about how things behave, you may be able to state a principle about how what you are looking at affects the things you want to change. In my manufacturing case, the principle would be that minimizing delays will lower cost and improve quality. What's powerful about this is that you can talk to the person and they can see from their own experience how this belief system makes sense. They start realizing that looking at something different from what they previously looked at will be more effective. They have changed their belief system based on their experience by your having had them shift what they are to look at. True, they have to change their minds into looking at something differently (or at different things), but they adopt the new belief because they believe it now and it is consistent with what they are looking at. They are smarter than they were – not dumber. It is not a right Vs wrong thing anymore, but a making both people smarter. They have actually convinced themselves (OK, so you helped). By the way, if it turns out your belief system was wrong, then you learn something – which is also good.

My suggestion is to learn which beliefs are useful to have and which ones aren't. Discover what your associates (clients) believe. See what principles they follow that support those beliefs. See what principles you know would question those beliefs. And then, have a conversation with them about it. In essence, you look at the concerns they have (which are likely good) then deduce the beliefs that they must have to follow the practices they are suggesting. Find principles that throw these beliefs into question if your experience is that they are wrong. If you are right, your associate may learn something. If you are wrong, then you may learn something.

It's a win-win.

Alan Shalloway

Professor Randy Pausch is no more

CMU Professor Randy Pausch of “the last lecture” fame is no more. He died of cancer on July 25, 2008.

On September 18, 2007, Professor Randy surprised everyone in CMU by giving a talk with an unusual title “The Last Lecture – Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”.

If you haven’t seen the video, you can see it here

http://randygoruk.wordpress.com/2008/07/29/leadership-development-2/

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5700431505846055184&q=randy+pausch&ei=240QSPHLHpzA4ALSpqGnBA

Quoting from his personal experiences he related to the career goals and personal goals of students during their formative years. It was such a touching, inspirational and thought provoking talk that millions of students watched his lecture that became the top video in YouTube video sharing service.

He was just 47; has 3 small children. The positive way in which he took life as it unfolds – cancer of pancreas and with just months of life left – is a lesson for all human beings.

Cuil - long on marketing, short on effectiveness

in my previous post it was an description of the new search engine...latest reviews suggest cuil is not that good !

Cuil - long on marketing, short on effectiveness

Cuil - long on marketing, short on effectiveness
By philipbradley on Search engines
(from http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2008/07/cuil---long-on-marketing-short-on-effectiveness.html)
'Cuil' is pronounced 'cool' or more likely 'kewl'. It's never a good sign when you have to start by telling people this, but at least it's not gone down the double 'o' route. Cuil has been around in stealth mode for a while, but it's exploded onto the general public scene in the last few days with a blaze of (unwarranted) publicity. It's making great claims, and some people are talking about it as the latest Google killer. I've played around with it for a while, so lets take a look at some of the features and functions.
It indexes 120 billion pages. I think that I'm supposed to be impressed by that, but I think we left the macho posturing of 'We index more than you' behind a long time ago. It is interesting to note that Google released their little note last week about being aware of a trillion webpages - they didn't actually say that they indexed that many, just that they knew about it. Even if it's the largest index that simply means that there's even more pages that I'm not going to look at, with the whole long tail business. Having said that, having run a few test searches against Google, Big G still comes out with more results. So, the size of the index doesn't mean a great deal to me. However one could argue that if Cuil does have a bigger index it behoves it to use that effectively. This brings me onto my second point, one of functionality.
I'm quite frankly astonished that there is no indication on the site of search functionality. As regular readers know - one of my hobby horses is help pages or cheat sheets. Google's pretty good on this, with examples, cheat sheets and so on. Cuil has *nothing*. They are expecting their users to either whack in a few words and thats it, or they're so confident of getting good results they think they don't need to provide help. However, I've got to play around and see what Boolean operators work, proximity, what file formats are searched, does it limit by country or language, can I limit by time/date - I have no idea. I'm going to have to waste MY time trying to do THEIR work for them, and quite simply it's not going to happen that quickly. So, functionality is limited to heavens knows what and there's no advanced search function. Which, if the index is as big as they say it is, is pretty poor.
The display of results is a little different, in that it's in magazine style. This isn't unique - Silobreaker for example takes that approach as well, and Exalead allows for different displays of results. Users can choose if they want 2 or 3 columns. We're expected to guess which is the relevant result - is it in the top left hand corner? The top 3 results? Who can say - it's just part of the Cuil guessing game. There are two further search/display options. The first are a series of tabs across the top of the page to focus on particular categories. Great in concept but poor in execution. A search for 'Everton' for example brings me up tabs for Everton FC and Everton Football. Quite what the difference between them is I'm not entirely sure, and I'm not going to waste time getting into a guessing game. The other option is an explore by category approach. Cuil gives us the option of exploring Premiership teams, and of the teams they list in this section 80% are not IN the Premiership. This is not right - it's not even wrong! It's hopelessly inept, and quite frankly inexcusable. This does not give me any kind of trust in their system at all.
It gets worse. Next to a lot of the results entries are images. These apparently relate directly to the result but they don't. I ran a search for me (the way you do) and up popped a link to my Flickr collection. Sensible and good so far - except that the image shown isn't one of my images! I have no idea where this image comes from and have no way of finding out. Disgraceful. This isn't a single error - it happens time and time again - images do NOT relate to the pages that are returned. Total shambles.
Cuil is hot on the concept of privacy - to the extent that they don't keep any kind of information on who is searching for what. No problem with this, but it does mean that they've tied themselves into a system where they're not going to be able to offer personalisation, and given that this is going to be an increasingly hot topic in the future means that they're sidelining themselves from the start.
I hope that Cuil improves - the more, and better the engines, the more we'll all benefit. However, this is so ineffectual that it's not going to be competing with Google - ever. If people are looking for the elusive Google Killer they'd better get used to the idea that it's not going to be this one. If you're looking for an alternative to the major players - Exalead is still (in my opinion) your best bet.