Cuil - Search Engine to rival Google?

Cuil.com search engine is all over the news after going public. The new search engine comes from the makers of Google search engine and claims to have a more powerful and cheaper indexing algorithm than Google. Which means it can index sites faster than Google and hence have a larger number of sites indexed in its engine.


The new search engine has a good concept of dividing search results into columns and showing more details. The results are also divided into categorize and includes pictures. But I still feel nothing beats the old Google.com. And plus I couldn't find my blog indexed there yet, and there were a lot more stuff I couldn't find there yet. Only time will tell how good is the new search engine, till then I will stay with Google but will surely try out the new Cuil once in a while.

Google finds 1 trillion URLs on the internet

I read an interesting post in Google's Official Blog, Google has found 1 trillion (thats one followed by 12 zeros) unique URLs on the internet. This number has grown from 1 billion in the year 2000.
It was just yesterday that I could finally Google my blog and around the same time Google finds 1 trillion sites on the web, maybe it could just be that my site is the 1 trillionth site in this world to get indexed [:P].

Google finds and index pages by following through links to reach other sites. It says that there are actually more than 1 trillion sites it has found but they are not unique and contain copies and so it cannot say the exact number of unique URLs out there. And not every 1 trillion pages get indexed, since many of the sites are similar to each other and represent auto generated content.

Googled Finally

After 3 weeks this blog can finally be googled. A few days back I submitted my site to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl/ and also a few other top search engines including Yahoo and Windows Live. I guess submitting your sites manually makes a difference when your site is still new and not linked in or out in any way.

The keyword tekxplorer blogspot returns 2 results, one mine and the other to feedjit.com - not sure how did it come up here.

2 weeks later - still searching

It's been 2 weeks now and still no sight of my site on Google's search engine.
I wanted to search in other search engines, so I googled and found these 2 sites:
dogpile and metacrawler which returned results from all the major search engines including Google, Yahoo, Live Search, Ask and more. metacrawler was better as it had more search options and filters. I tried searching but there were no results, obviously if the leader of search engine cannot find the chance of others showing up results were next to none.

I hope you like the new look of this blog, I need to do some customizing and meanwhile I will look for some way to submit my site to google's search engine.

Customizing my Template

I have changed the look of this blog by adding a new template. I have chosen this dark gray look with 3 columns for better use of space, and the wider format is much better than my earlier template (tic-tac) which looked as follows:


I also tried another one from the blogger.com's own selection, I liked this color:

But as you can see it isn't wide enough, so I thought to add this current dark gray one with 3 columns to be able to put more content on the right-hand side of the page.

I found my current template from BTemplates' site, they have a large collection of nice looking templates grouped into categories.

Can you hear my blog?

It's been a week since I had created this blog and it still hasn't showed up in Google's search results.
Which means as of now (July 14) there is still no who can search and read my blog (Who is listening to me, please leave a comment? :P).
I am going to submit my blog to some social catalogs - I will be reviewing them soon. Meanwhile I also got to find a nice template for this blog.

GPU Wars - AMD vs. Nvidia

I just was just reading some interesting news on the GPU market - AMD (or ATI before merging) is currently having a great time with the launch of the R700 series - HD4850 and HD 4870 graphic cards. The card offers great price and performance when compared to Nvidia.
This is causing Nvidia to lower the prices, competition is always good for the customers.
Nvidia are also having problems with their mobile GPU failing due to heat problems. And last week Nvidia's stocks took a huge dip of 30% adding more to Nvidia's problems.

Source: The Motley Fool

Seeking for Google crawlers

I had created my blog 2 days back and now I m waiting for the google crawlers to index my blog.
I am searching for my own blog using my URL - tekxplorer.blogspot.com, when the crawlers have done their job my URL will most certainly return results.

Right now the search term tekxplorer.blogspot.com returns no results. Even the word tekxplorer returns no results but gives a correction of a possible miss-spelling of the word explorer.
I doubled checked just to make sure that my blog's settings were set to allow google search engine to include my blog, there were no problems there, blogger allows by default.

I guess it shouldn't take more than a week, or do I have to attract the crawlers in some way? Will wait and see for now.

Firefox users are the most secure

According to a research done by The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Google and IBM to analyze the web browser preference and behavior of its users found that Firefox users kept their browsers the most up-to-date and hence were the most secure.

The study found that less than 60% of people use up-to-date, fully patched Web browsers.
Firefox users were far and away the most likely to use the latest version, with more than 80% running an updated browser on any given day.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer users ranked last in terms of safe browsing. Between January 2007 and June 2008, less than 50% of IE users were running the most secure browser version during the same time period.

One of the main reason for Firefox users to be more up-to-date is that it has an easy auto-update functionality when compared to other browsers like IE.

But IE still has a lead on the market share of browsers, the current market share of the browsers surveyed are as follows:
Internet Explorer - 1.1 billion users - 78.3%
Firefox - 227 million users - 16.1%
Safari - 48 million users - 3.4%
Opera - 11 million users - 0.8%

Source: ChannelWeb

Sitemeter counter review

I chose to use SiteMeter for my blog since I have used it before and I think its one of the best free counters out there.
As a blogger I need a good counter which should basically give information about the number of visitors, from where they are coming, when they are coming and how they are coming. Apart from these there are many other details which are not very important for bloggers like me, these include information such as which pages your visitors have viewed and in what order, technical information including OS, browser, resolution, etc.

SiteMeter provides the following information:
Geographical location - country, city including a world map showing the visitors by a dot.
Virtual location - IP address but the last octet is masked for privacy
Visit time - the time they came to your site
Visit length - how long were they on your site
Entry pages - the first page that they landed on
Exit pags - the last page that they browsed
Referrals - from where did they come in, whether a search engine, bookmark or a link
Out clicks - which linked they clicked out from your site

All this is represented in a good readable format. All the above details can either be viewed in a single page for a visitor or each detail separately for all visitors. There are bar graphs which show the number of visitors for the last 24 hours, 7 days, last 30 days and last 12 months. There are also pie charts showing the geographical location breakdown and other visitor information.
The site also offers traffic prediction based on your statistics.

The only main disadvantage is the limit in the log size. The details can only be viewed for the last 100 visitors. And the counter styles are limited though they can be customized. But there is no option of invisible counter in the free version, the site requires you to show atleast their logo if not the counter.

The manager section of the site offers settings for the site-name, address, counter style and time-zone. There is an option to ignore your visits from being counted either by IP or a cookie. The privacy level also lets you control the visibility of your statistics.

Sitemeter offers a good free counter which is great for bloggers or site owners who do not have many visitors and just need to track where, when and how visitors are coming to their site.

Getting started - Search for Blogging tools

My second post
I chose to blog on Blogger (same as blogspot.com) which is owned by Google. www.blogger.com or www.blogspot.com takes you to the same page from where bloggers login to manage their blogs. www.blogspot.com is the actual domain which your blog name gets prefixed to, like yourblogname.blogspot.com

This site offers ready templates which are not very attractive and do not have many choices one might expect. Many templates are very familiar since many bloggers use them. My template is very common and widely used, I think it will do for now will change to some better one or may create a custom template later.

I need many blogging tools such as social bookmarks, counters for keeping a track of my visitors and other social catalogs to find bloggers with similar interests. I will start by looking for some good free counters.

My first post!

Hello World!.. the first words a programmer speaks when he learns to talk with computers, also my first words on this blog.
Today is July 5th.. according to wikipedia today is the 186th day of the year, 179 more days to reach the end of this year, just a little over the middle of the year 2008.

It took me some time to find a good name for my blog. I was looking for something to go with the word technology followed by a noun, but a lot of them were taken, finally I settled for TekXplorer (short for Technology Explorer).

What is this blog about? Its basically a general blog about my interests in technology - anything about the latest hardware, gadgets, software, programming, news and random stuff from around the web.

Signing off for now!.. more in my next post

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