You ask me for a hamburger….

Fotocopia de la cédula de identidad o del certificado o comprobante que acredite el número de expediente asignado por la Dirección Nacional de Migraciones, donde conste el carácter de la residencia.

La AFIP otorgará una clave única de identificación tributaria (C.U.I.T), que será asignada en función de la documentación mencionada en el párrafo anterior.

Los extranjeros deberán tramitar su documento cívico argentino y comunicar el número otorgado a esta Dirección General, mediante el formulario de declaración jurada N° 581, cuya presentación se efectuará dentro de los diez (10) días, de la obtención del respectivo documento, ante la dependencia en la que los aludidos sujetos se hallen inscriptos.

De tratarse de profesión desempeñada por graduado universitario deberá adicionar la fotocopia de la constancia de matriculación respectiva, o fotocopia del título habilitante, en el supuesto de no requerir matriculación para el ejercicio de la profesión.

Recuerde que deberá acreditarse la existencia y veracidad del domicilio fiscal denunciado.

• Resolución General N° 3890 Año 1994
• Resolución General N° 10 Año 1997

I just submitted the Cuil app to the App Store. This started as a side-project here at Cuil and quickly gained the support of the execs. After several major iterations, I settled on a UI, spent some time on the server side, and now have what I think is a really cool way to explore the web using the novel features of the Cuil search engine.

1. Track trending topics (current, daily, weekly)
2. Search the normal web and the realtime web
3. Explore a topic by category

I may be biased, but I’ve found that having an accessible list of trending topics tied to a major search engine very useful and handy to have while waiting for the train, heading out on the weekend, or checking in on the World Series. Anyway, lots more when I hear back from Apple!

Web 2.0

• USTREAM.tv  1,000,000 pieces of video-many live; space shuttle, political venues, games, etc.  Can we put up out own H.S. football games.  Started in 2007; military families connect with service personal
  • free log in; click “Broadcast Now”
  • other person/viewers:  log in and search for key word
  • FREE
  • classroom use:  teleconferencing, interviews, etc.  presentation skills for teleconferencing, lectures for absent or homebound students;
  • can record/save so available on USTREAM tv for watching later; privacy settings;
  • can do distance presentations with shared/passed control
  • bundle camera with books–buy at Walmart; other tools–chat, etc.
• Wordle.net
  • word clouds
• Bing.com MS new search engine
  • features?  famous pic of the day; hover over search results (orange dot) to preview…similar to_______?
  • image search—single page of results; can refine search by size, layout, style
  • video search–live preview on results page; limit video search; safe search on by default
  • news:  stories and maps of city
• Web 3.0:  What I’m looking for…
  • mapping services
  • opentable.com to make dinner reservations
• Google latitude
  • • track your phone
• Glympse.com
  • specified amount of time
  • notify others where I am
  • shoot a glympse on a timer…e.g. 30 minutes
  • send a weblink via text/e-mail
• ToonDoo.com
  • free log-in
  • create a cartoon…FREE
  • use stock background/characters or edit/create your own
  • Bald guy @ bottom allows the edit and creation of character
  • save/post/share online with unique weblink
• Cuil.com (gaelic for Knowledge)
  • search engine from former google employees
  • new layout
  • drill-down technology
  • hover over terms for preview
  • rated the top academic search engine
• Google.com
  • translates sentence/words but also entire website
• LiveMocha.com
  • learn a language
  • match you up with a user at the same level trying to learn each others language
  • match up with headsets or live webcam

have CENGAGE send the next 30 apps …

Here’s a bit more from the Bill Campbell interview. I posted the first excerpt in “Bill Campbell says hire Product Management first!“.

Michael Moe is the interviewer. This exchange takes place about 4:20 into the video.

Click the image above to open a window and view the full interview.

Michael Moe

So, what are the key metrics that you track when you’re working with a company. How do those metrics change as the company goes from being a startup, to an emerging company and as it gets larger? How rigourous are you with early stage companies?

Bill responds:

The rigour that goes into the first product is the most important thing. Everybody talks about great companies. Great companies start with great products.  You can’t make chicken salad out of you know what.

This is a truism if there ever was one. How many great startups can you think of that had mediocre products?  People may not know the company well, if at all, but they hear about a product and the product (good or bad) defines the company.

Bill continues:

I’m a big believer that you really track the progress of the product. I go back and talk about Mike Homer and a Product Marketing* like person. What are we doing to make sure we have something that we can ship and release? Get it out into the market place.

Tracking that one single thing — what can we do? who is it for? how do we guide it? Getting great product into the market place would the single most important thing.

That would be the number one metric that I’d judge and boy you’d go a long time in your company before you stopped doing that.

* Bill Campbell equates Product Marketing and Product Management earlier in the interview. See Bill Campbell says hire Product Management first! for details.

While not technically a “metric”, Bill again focuses on making sure the thing that is being built is being built for the right people. Making sure an identified target audience (and set of valued usage scenarios) are front and center during this early phase.

This answer also support’s Bill’s earlier statement that Product Management skills are key at the very earliest stages and should be hired in right at the start IF those skills are not strong amongst the founders.

One final note

What’s most interesting about this answer from Campbell is that he doesn’t say great companies start with great people. That’s what a lot of people would say, but it’s not true. Great people can build great products which lead to great companies, but there are many well known examples of companies started by experience or knowledgeable people (e.g. Cuil and Cassat) that have failed to live up to expectations.  Once a company builds a great product (or service) that people use, that drives company growth, and ideally makes the company a leader in it’s market segment, can a great company emerge.

Saeed

This is old news, but what the hey.

Cuil.com is a search engine created by, amongst others, ex-Google workers, looking to create a revolutionary new search engine. They cited the most popular search website, Google, as using outdated technology.

As soon as you go onto Cuil, you can see the website uses a sleek, modern design:

Cuil

It also appears to partly base its simplicity off Google, which’s default homepage is also little more than a logo, a search bar and a few buttons. Cuil also includes a boast that it indexes over 12 billion websites – a bold claim, which has led to criticisms that the site is more interested in the quantity of searched sites, not the quality of search results.

I found that these criticisms are agreeable. I searched for a several things in both Cuil and Google, and Cuil’s results were far less fitting. For example, I tried “the year of elvis presley’s death”. For such a mundane question with such a single, findable answer, I’d expect to see it in the results without visiting websites. Google’s second result clearly said in the title:

Elvis Death – Elvis Presley Death – Elvis Presley Died 16 August 1977

Cuil? Nothing. Nowhere. I got conspiracy theories, Elvis CD box sets on sale, and two results on Michael Jackson. Incidentally, Ask Jeeves (yes, we, the UK, got Jeeves back), Yahoo! Search, and Microsoft’s Bing all managed to give me the precise date on the first page of results too.

So, Cuil looks pretty, but with so many other more competent search engines, it’s rather pointless. It’s fairly new, so I guess it has room for improvement, but I think Google is too popular for it to really get attention.

Visit Cuil

(39%)

Cuil, a company of ex-Googlers that developed a search engine of the same name, released a new streaming feature today that displays real-time search results in a box on the site. It’s intended to help you watch the conversation about your search term unfold on the web. You can pop the box out of the Cuil web page and move it to another place on your desktop. A dial at the bottom of the box lets you determine whether you’d like to see streamed search results from the last one, four or 12 hours or the past day. And on the right-hand side of the feature, there’s a “hotness meter” that measures the amount of chatter going on about your search term on the web.

Initially billed as a potential Google (s goog) killer, Cuil attracted gobs of media attention when it launched last year, yet quickly received criticism that its search capability was weaker than Google’s. The company has since faded from the limelight and has seen traffic to its search engine fall over the last year. Tapping into the real-time trend may help Cuil get out of its rut. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company received $33 million in funding from Madrone Capital Partners, Tugboat Ventures and Greylock Partners last year and has a valuation of $200 million.

There are a number of Web sites and applications — two of the most well known examples being Twitter and Facebook — that offer very good, free services. And over time, as they grow larger, the quest begins to find a revenue model or models to turn the service into something that actually resembles a sustainable business.

The problem is that after the fact, trying to find and attach a revenue model onto something that people know and expect to be free is difficult. There may or may not be technical difficulties in doing this, but there will almost certainly be business and cultural difficulties in adding revenue models after the fact.

A lot of people like to cite Google as the model for a company that started out without any revenue models and then figured out an incredibly successful one later on. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be the next Google, but the story of Google’s revenue model success is not one that can be recreated simply by positive thinking and hard work. Ask the folks at Cuil about that one.

The conditions and circumstances, market opportunities and market needs may be totally different. There’s so much we don’t know about the market that leaving revenue generation to an afterthought is hardly good business strategy.

It’s great to tout 1,000,000 or 5,000,000 or even 100,000,000 “users” or “visitors”, but when they cost you money everyday instead of helping generate positive cash flow, more is not better. And this, after the fact thought process of figuring out revenue models, is problematic to say the least.

Instead, why don’t these companies consider revenue models right from the outset or very early into their startup process? Whether the revenue comes from users themselves, advertising, premium services, data collection and licensing or some other means, it’s very important to think this through upfront and act accordingly to understand and implement those models that make the most sense.

There are a number of benefits in thinking and working this way:

1. It requires you to actually segment your buyers and your users
2. It helps you understand who you are truly competing against
3. It reinforces the value proposition to your existing and potential users or buyers
4. It sets up a revenue-centric culture within your company
5. It’s the right thing to do

Let’s look at each one of these in more detail.

1. It requires you to segment your buyers and users

Who is the target customer? Now that’s a common question that gets asked all the time for virtually every product or service. Unfortunately, too many times the answer comes back as “everyone”, or “consumers”, or “anyone who needs our product”, or something equally vague and not very helpful.

It’s not always easy to know everyone who will find value in an offering, but it really helps to start with at least one or two target groups. Understanding who they are, what they need, and the value your offering delivers are key to defining a sustainable revenue model.

A lot of times people don’t do this for fear of missing or eliminating key groups of people, but if you can’t identify the kinds of people who might pay for your product or service, how can you decide how much value it is to them and how much to charge?

Keep in mind that users and buyers are not always one in the same. Taking Google’s search engine as an example, the users are the people conducting searches through the site. That service is free to them. The buyers are those organizations that buy pay-per-click (typically Adwords) advertising that is displayed in the search results.

The system of connecting searchers with ad buyers (i.e. targeted ad placement when people are searching for information), creates an incredibly efficient and scalable engine for revenue, and it must be noted, one that few companies have been able to emulate with as much success.

2. It helps you understand who you are truly competing against

There is competition for virtually every product or service. For some it’s very obvious, and direct competitors can be listed without thinking. For others it’s not so obvious, but incredibly important to identify. Why? Because the word “competitor” must be thought of as “other options for your target buyer to achieve the same or similar result”.

If you are going to charge for something, you need to know how your target buyer spends their money today (if they do at all) for similar results. Too often focus is simply put on very similar offerings in the market, and using those offerings as a basis for thinking about revenue models.

But if you truly put yourself in the context of your buyer, understand their options, and what final results or outcomes they want, your perspective can change significantly.

Southwest Airlines sees their competitors not only as other airlines, but also cars and intercity buses. Why? Because these are the most likely alternatives that their target customers (budget minded travelers) would look to in order to travel between cities. Keep in mind that a lot of SouthWest flights are short-haul routes.

Similarly, when Intuit introduced Quicken, they viewed their competition as not only other home accounting software packages (of which there were many), but also the pencil and paper, because that was also a common option for people who wanted to perform home finance calculations.  The outcome — balancing a checkbook or simple budgeting — can be achieved by computer as well as by hand.

In both cases, clearly understanding their target users’ desired outcomes and their likely options helped the companies understand the value they could deliver and in Intuit’s case, a benchmark for the price they could charge.

3. It sets up a revenue-centric culture within your company

What do you call a business that doesn’t care about revenue? Answer: A hobby.

Employees in a business need to think and act for the benefit of the business. People are hired, culture is developed, processes are defined, decisions are made and systems are built that align with the objectives of the business. If the goals of the business (at least initially) do not involve revenue (in some form), the culture, decisions, processes, systems and people within the company will adapt to that.

And when at some point revenue becomes a priority, then changes, possibly significant ones, will have to be made to accommodate for that. Decisions, which were likely technology or user driven will need to start incorporating revenue and business considerations. Does your service or product have a licensing mechanism? Is it flexible enough to accommodate the business? What changes in the Engineering, Marketing or Finance teams are needed? Do you need to create a Sales team?

It sounds trivial, but it isn’t. Consider what happens when something as simple as a pricing change is required in an existing business. There are many existing internal AND external parties and processes that need to adapt to that change.

Now imagine the impact if that pricing change goes from “no pricing at all” to some form of pricing. New people would have to be hired, for example, in finance. New systems would have to be created to collect revenue and process it. New processes are needed to handle refunds, discounts, create financial reports etc. Decision making criteria need to change to focus on what can generate and sustain revenue. These are just some of the changes that would need to occur to create a culture in the company that is revenue centric.

Why not set up the company early on to manage and deal with these kinds of issues and possibly accelerate the process of generating revenue.

4. It reinforces the value proposition to your potential users or buyers

There is absolutely nothing wrong with providing a free service. If  the objective is to only have a free service and it can be funded then go ahead.

But most services are not created to be completely free forever. Even open source software, which originally was viewed as “free” has developed business and revenue models that leverage the value their customers derive from it. Redhat, Suse, MySQL and JBoss are all examples of very successful businesses founded on this so called “free” software model.

For any aspiring profitable business, there is a very clear need to identify upfront what is truly free (e.g downloading and using open source software) and what requires payment (e.g technical support for open source software). Not only does this delineate the difference between free and paid offerings but it also defines the relationship and expectations a customer or buyer will have with the company.

Flickr provides a good example of this in action. You can upload a fixed number of photos for free and share them with anyone, but for a large collection of pictures, there is a small  fee ($25 per year for a Pro account). Flickr commits to never deleting your photos, even if you fail to keep your paid account current. They’ll simply restrict your access to them.

So why is this important for customers/buyers? It positions the company very clearly as one that is in business to generate revenue, that will deliver a set of services or offerings that have some intrinsic value that costs actual money, and one that, if successful, will be around in a few years time to continue delivering the service that is being paid for.

I like free stuff as much as the next guy, but if I’m going to commit my time and effort to using someone’s services, I’d like to know that they’ll be around so I can continue to use them. Now, there are plenty of companies that charge for their services that go belly up, but that is not new to the Internet. That’s a simple fact of life for any business. But I’m sure you’d agree that it’s more likely that a company that DOES charge money for their service or has a very clear and scalable revenue model will be likely be around longer than one that doesn’t.

5. It’s the right thing to do

Why are most businesses started? To make money? Well more bluntly, to make money for the founders and investors in the company. If that is the case, then it’s Business Basics 101 that understanding the market, potential customers, their buying needs, budgets, willingness to pay etc. are all critical to any form of business planning. So, why not start right and do some homework upfront?

It used to be the case that the investment to build a product was significant, typically involving manufacturing processes, sourcing from suppliers, warehouse and delivery expenses and logistics etc. But the combination of mature software development tools and the Web as the distribution medium has created an environment where creating and distributing the “product” is simple and rather inexpensive. In fact, identifying buyers, buyer needs, budgets etc. is likely harder than creating the product. So what do many people do? They build something and see “what sticks”.

While there is benefit to this approach, it should not be done without forethought to the business aspects that will underlie the offering. Both product definition and business planning need to be done together and up front. Just as iterations are needed to get the product right, iterations will likely be needed to get the business working well. Both product and business strategy need to evolve together, and as knowledge is gained and changes needed, then those changes can be made in tandem.

And while people will hold up the few successful companies, like Google, as their models for achieving success, it’s telling that they willfully ignore the myriad of companies that tried the same “we’ll figure out the revenue model later” approach and utterly failed.

Saeed

O Cuil foi um novo sistema de busca, criado por ex-funcionários do Google, que causou o maior burburinho e chamou a maior atenção, recebendo centenas de visitas em pouco tempo. No entanto, ele se tornou só mais um entre tantos serviços de busca [eu mesmo tinha me esquecido dele].

Leia Também: Seria o Cuil o “novo exterminador do Google” ?

Mas agora o sistema implementou outra qualidade [quando surgiu, ele dizia ter o maior índice de busca da internet], a busca em tempo real. Tipo um Twitter, só que com resultados atualizados de notícias. Os resultados aparecem em uma barra na direita da tela, mostrando a quantidade de resultados, e ao ser clicada, exibe uma popup como essa:

E ainda é possível arrastar a popup e fixá-la no desktop, pra acompanhar os resultados, como um widget de RSS. No entanto, isso não deverá ser o suficiente para fazer o Cuil derrubar o Google ou refrear o crescimento iminente do Bing.

[via Mashable!]

Siga pelo RSS:

I found this at the BBC and I hesitate to even mention it as it is usually just old news by time it hits an actual media outlet but….I didn’t actually know this so you can laugh at me in the comment section. Google while they have been crushing everyone in the search department still has had a number of competitors try and knock them down a peg. Cuil and the Microsoft one are the first ones that jump to mind.

Google has quietly rolled out new algorithms. They promise to be faster more accurate and better realtime results. This should help blogs, tweets and the like. When you are posting on a subject that is relevant to a search you will be higher up on the list than older content.

One last final note I wanted to say nice logo to Google for the Perseid Meteor Shower.

One year ago, the search engine Cuil exploded on the launchpad. Hyped as a “Google-killer,” the site stumbled as its servers crashed and its algorithms spat out irrelevant search results.

Now, the Menlo Park, CA, startup hopes to stage a comeback in part by being the first search engine to pass search queries through users’ social networks to generate socially enhanced search results as a companion to regular ones. If, for example, a user searches for the band Green Day–and if she has allowed Cuil to access her Facebook account or any other social networking account–she’ll see a special box on the results page, showing those in her network who like Green Day and similar bands. The feature is expected to go live by the end of August.

“We are trying to leverage the information found on users social networks to enhance search results. This is similar to what Amazon or eBay already does: ‘People who bought this book, also liked this one,’ ” says Seval Oz Ozveren, Cuil’s vice president of finance and business development. “I think there has been a lot of buzz about this whole idea of social search, but nobody has actually done it to date.”

Of course, many social-networking sites already let users search within their networks. And other search engines are trying to expand into social networks. A search company called Worio, for example, offers a Facebook application that generates recommended Web links, akin to search results, based on analyses of the news feeds and other information from a user’s social network. If several of your friends live in or are talking about Miami, for example, Worio might provide Miami-centric links. The Cuil foray will be different: it will present the social network search returns aside the general ones.

It’s far from clear whether Cuil stands much chance of killing off any competitors with its move into social search, says Dan Weld, a computer scientist and search researcher at the University of Washington. However, he says, it’s well established that websites tied to trusted members of people’s social networks are more likely to be seen as particularly relevant.

“Statistics show that people, especially young people, are much, much more likely to click on a URL if they see it in a blog or Tweet from someone they trust. This clearly has a big impact on Web marketing and is leading a number of companies to develop tools to track and target these social influencers,” he says. “But whether it will really jive with search isn’t as clear to me.”

With $33 million in venture backing, Cuil was founded by Stanford computer scientist Tom Costello and a pair of Google alumni: Anna Patterson and Russell Power. Its core claim is that it searches more pages on the Web than anyone else–three times as many as Google. However, this hasn’t yet translated into comparable popularity.

To further distinguish itself, Cuil has recently begun offering other kinds of special categories of search returns along with the main ones. In March it introduced a “timeline”–a box on the right side of the page with search returns expressed by relevant date. A search for “Great Depression,” for example, brings up a box listing events of the late 1920s and 1930s–from various acts of Congress to the rise of Nazism–culled from pages that include dates. (Google has a prototype of a timeline search tool that can be customized; it produces temporally arranged links to news stories, from Wikipedia content or other sources.)

In June, Cuil also launched a “mapline”–search returns arranged on a map, and not just for obviously geographical searches like “pizzerias in Palo Alto.” For example, the “Great Depression” search produces pins on a world map; mousing over these pins (most of which are in North America) yields links to sites that, for example, describe Depression-era crop failures in Saskatchewan and 1930s public-works projects in Oregon.

But the question remains whether any of this will help resuscitate Cuil. According to the analytical firm Compete, shortly after its launch on July 28, 2008, Cuil had 2 million visitors–a figure that cratered to 130,000 by February and has stayed flat since then. However, Ozveren strongly disputes those numbers. She says Cuil’s traffic has been doubling every six weeks since February, though she declined to provide alternative numbers.

Explaining the disparity, Ozveren says that Compete does not accurately track “hover-over” activity–previewing a result without clicking through. Hover-over activity represents a growing share of Cuil’s traffic, she says. Also, when Cuil launched, it was the only search engine that didn’t track and store the Internet protocol addresses of its users’ computers. Ozveren argues that Cuil users may therefore be more privacy-minded than most, and therefore less likely to install Compete’s website-tracking toolbar.

Still, the numbers are far worse than the hype suggested was possible just one year ago. The foray into social search is one way Cuil is trying to recover.

Búsqueda social: Más allá de los resultados de búsqueda generales (mostrados en gris), Cuil proporciona una serie de resultados provenientes de las redes sociales del usuario (en la caja arriba a la derecha); al hacer clic en una de las caras se pueden ver los detalles (caja azul). Fuente: Cuil

El “asesino de Google” del año pasado tiene previsto volver y utilizar las búsquedas sociales.

Fue hace un año cuando el motor de búsqueda Cuil fue lanzado hizo su primera aparición con fuerza. Apodado como el “asesino de Google,” el sitio se acabó cayendo cuando sus servidores se colgaron y sus algoritmos empezaron a ofrecer resultados de búsqueda irrelevantes.

En la actualidad, la startup con sede en Menlo Park, California, espera poder orquestar una vuelta al escenario debido a que, en parte, será el primer motor que pase las peticiones de búsqueda a través de las redes sociales de los usuarios para generar resultados enriquecidos a nivel social como acompañamiento de los resultados normales. Si, por ejemplo, un usuario busca la banda Green Day—y si le ha dado permiso a Cuil para acceder su cuenta de Facebook o cualquier otra cuenta en una red social—verá en pantalla una caja especial al lado de los resultados, mostrando a aquellas personas en su red a la que les gusta Green Day u otra banda similar. Esta característica se espera que empiece a funcionar a finales de agosto.

“Estamos intentado utilizar la información localizada en las redes sociales de los usuarios para así mejorar los resultados de búsqueda. Esto es parecido a lo que Amazon o eBay hacen en la actualidad: ‘A la gente que compró este libro, también le gusto este otro,’ ” afirma Seval Oz Ozveren, vicepresidente de desarrollo financiero y de negocios en Cuil. “Creo que se habla mucho acerca de esta idea de la búsqueda social, pero nadie ha hecho realmente nada al respecto hasta la fecha.”

Por supuesto, hay muchas redes sociales que ya permiten a sus usuarios hacer búsquedas dentro de sus redes. Y también existen otros motores de búsqueda que están intentando expandirse hacia las redes sociales. Una compañía de búsquedas llamada Worio, por ejemplo, ofrece una aplicación de Facebook que genera recomendaciones de vínculos web, de forma similar a los resultados de búsqueda, basándose en el análisis de las noticias y otro tipo de información procedente de la red social del usuario. Si varios de tus amigos viven en Miami o hablan de esa ciudad, por ejemplo, Worio puede proveer vínculos locales de Miami. El tipo de incursión de Cuil en este campo será diferente: ofrecerá los resultados relativos a las redes sociales de forma paralela a los resultados generales.

No está para nada claro si Cuil tiene muchas probabilidades de acabar con cualquier tipo de competidor sólo por el mero hecho de incluir las búsquedas sociales, afirma Dan Weld, científico informático e investigador de búsquedas en la Universidad de Washington. Sin embargo, afirma, es un hecho establecido que las páginas web asociadas a usuarios de confianza dentro de las redes sociales de la gente tienen un mayor grado de probabilidades de ser consideradas como webs de relevancia.

“Las estadísticas muestran que la gente, especialmente la gente joven, está mucho más dispuesta a hacer clic en una URL si la ven en un blog o en un Tweet de alguien en quien confíen. Esto tiene un claro impacto en el marketing por internet y está llevando a una serie de compañías a desarrollar herramientas para hacer un seguimiento de estos usuarios tan influyentes a nivel social, y enfocar las estrategias de marketing hacia ellos,” afirma. “Sin embargo, algo que no tengo del todo claro es que todo esto vaya a servir de ayuda a las búsquedas.”

Fuente: Technology Reviews, article 634

“A mente parecia crescer vertiginoso procurando por medidas para o abismo do tempo”, disse o cientista do século 18. John Playfair, recordando o momento em que ele aprendeu da longa história da Terra. Em 2005, o Google calculou que a internet continha cerca de 5 milhões de terabytes de dados,  equivalente 4,5 milhões de viagens da Terra em torno do sol.

Existem formas mais simples para apreciar a verdadeira escala da Internet. Estimativas recentes sugerem que bem mais de 1 bilhão de pessoas dependem de computadores para acesso à Internet (ver gráficos do tráfego da internet em 2002, 2004, 2006 e 2008). Mas também existem milhões de outras pessoas que utilizam telefones celulares para visitar ciberespaço, tornando-as como uma grande parte da comunidade on-line.

A Internet é muito grande, isso é inquestionável. Em Julho de 2008, foram introduzidas para Cuil.com, faturado pelos seus criadores como “o maior motor de busca do mundo” um índice impressionante de 120 bilhões de páginas, mas pouco antes de seu lançamento o Google anunciou que os seus sistemas tinha registado um trilhão de páginas exclusivas (ver Internet censo de 2007 e 2008).

Isto pode representar uma fração do que está lá fora. Algumas estimativas sugerem que pode haver centenas de vezes mais informação armazenada na Internet do que o Google ou Cuil tem medida indexados.

Uma coisa é certa: a Internet e o seu conteúdo continuará a crescer rapidamente. De acordo com o Google, vários milhares de milhões de páginas da web são adicionados diariamente. E no minuto que acabar de ler, o total pulou cerca de 700.000.

Via News Cientists

Nach einem durchwachsenen Jahr und einigen Änderungen will die Suchmaschine cuil.com neu durchstarten und dabei seinen Nutzern als erster Suchmaschinen-Anbieter weltweit ermöglichen, Suchanfragen quer durch alle Social-Networking-Plattformen wie Facebook oder Twitter durchzuführen, berichtet heute pressetext.de.

cuil selbst ist jedenfalls stolz darauf, mehrere Sprachen zu unterstützen, darunter selbstverständlich auch Deutsch, was sie in ihrem cuil-blog (zu finden unter about us) deutlich zum Ausdruck bringen:

“Haben sie das gesehen? Cuil ist jetzt in sieben Sprachen, eingeschlossen Französisch, Spanisch, Italiener, Deutsch, Portugiesisch und Türkisch. Als allemal, wir Willkommen ihrer Rückkopplung.”

- ohne Kommentar -

Vielleicht möchten sie die neue Suchmaschine cuil ausprobieren. Sie wurde von früheren Google-Mitarbeitern geschaffen.

Unrelated to anything, there’s a new player in the search game – cuil. Cuil is an old Irish word for “Knowledge” and according to their website:

The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

I’ve started using it – its pretty interesting and gets good search results. Check it out. I doubt they’ll give google a run for the money just b/c of google’s ubiquity and integration with so many other tools. At the same time, as tech continues to evolve and search remains an integral part of that, Cuil may carve out a niche amongst certain searchers and researchers.

What do you think?

Non, il n’y a pas que Google dans la vie, enfin sur le net. J’ai déjà parlé du tout nouveau moteur de Microsoft, Bing, qui connaît un démarrage assez remarquable. En l’espace de quelques jours, je viens d’apprendre l’existence de nouveaux moteurs de recherche qui obéissent chacun à leur logique. Plus que d’essayer de concurrencer un jour Google, ces moteurs représentent des alternatives intéressantes selon ce que l’on cherche.

• un article des Echos daté du 23 juin sur les moteurs de recherche, “A la poursuite de Google”, recense une bonne dizaine de moteurs différents. Je retiens pour ma part Topsy, un moteur de recherche sur Twitter qui met en avant les tweets (les messages) les plus souvent repris sur Twitter ou plus exactement les liens vers les articles les plus souvent cités. Pour chercher sur Twitter, vous avez aussi bien entendu Twitter Search, qui vous affiche les tweets comportant les mots de la requête, le plus récent en tête.
• Autre moteur cité dans l’article des Echos, Quintura, qui propose un nuage de tags pour affiner sa recherche. Sympa, mais sur les quelques mots testés je ne l’ai pas trouvé réellement pertinent et complet et puis on s’éloigne un peu vite parfois du ou des premiers mots cherchés.
• e-Guides.fr, autre moteur de recherche découvert grâce à l’Atelier numérique sur BFM. “Suivez les eGuides” présente les résultats classés, hiérarchisés et enrichis avec des références à l’actualité, des suggestions professionnelles, des images et vidéos ainsi que les blogs en rapport avec la recherche. Je dois encore tester le moteur, ma première impression est que pour certaines requêtes la différence entre Google et eGuides n’est pas vraiment évidente.
• Le meilleur pour la fin : j’ai découvert (grâce au billet de Jean-Marie Gall), et immédiatement adopté, Twootles. Twootles vous permet de chercher en simultané sur Google et Twitter, vous avez ainsi sur une même page la base de référence avec Google et les dernières actus et autres liens pertinents avec Twitter.
• Et puisque je parle des moteurs de recherche, je m’interroge sur le devenir de Cuil, le moteur lancé l’été dernier et qui, à l’époque avait fait pas mal de buzz. On n’en entend plus guère parler sur la toile. Personnellement, je suis retournée le tester et c’est vrai qu’il ne m’a pas vraiment convaincu.

Proving that hype will only get you so far–without substance–Cuil is going from “Google killer” to “Google beggar.”
According to IBD, the start-up is turning to the search engine that it vowed to topple–asking Google to provide ads on Cuil’s pages.

“That is what we are going to do,” said Tom Costello, Cuil’s chief executive. “We are negotiating with the obvious people, Google and Yahoo, and we are going to decide which is going to be the better fit.”

I understand the need to make money. After all, at some point Cuil will burn through the $33 million funding it raised, but publicly admitting you’re going cap in hand to Google? Weren’t you supposed to have decapitated them and left them for dead by now?

To be fair, Cuil has stated that its strategy was to not place ads on its search results until such time as it had built enough traffic.

“We have had no ads until now because we are building traffic,” Costello said. “You don’t want to put up ads unless you have enough traffic.”

Smart move. Let’s see how that’s working out for ya:

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