Anna Patterson says that the new search engine is more user friendly than Google and is more valuable than Google. Exact details are not available yet. Patterson also states that she intends to enter into competition with Google and does not intend to sell her new invention! Cool Cuil.

A group of individuals which consisted of Ms. Anna Patterson, Tom Costello (Anna Patterson's husband), Russell Power (former Google engineer) and Louis Monier (another former Google) had been experimenting with newer and better search engines for some time. Now they have found the ideal search engine and have obtained $33 million venture capital to launch her new search engine. This may sound like a lot of money but for ventures like this cost can be as high as $1 to $2 billion.

Is Cuil better than Google? This question begs an answer but I cannot answer it. The inventors of Cuil believe that it is at least three times better because its index is about three times larger than that of Google. Does index size indicate that it is better? Again I cannot answer this question. Only end users can answer this question. Google stopped quantifying its index breath about three years ago. So there in no objective way of knowing Google's current index breath. At that time, three years ago, Google's catalogue was 8.2 billion Web pages.

According to current reports Cuil's search index spans 120 billion Web pages. Yes, this is many times larger than Google's 8.2 billion Web pages. I am not sure if it translates into “better” performance and usability for the end user.

Google is not conceding defeat at this time. A statement released by Ms. Katie Watson, Google spokesperson said that Google believed that its index was the largest and that its quality was superior to that of Cuil's index. Cuil disputes this.

Cuil's promised advantage is that it will not retain information about user's search engines which Google does. Privacy watchdogs and many individuals resent this violation of privacy.

Cuil intends to upstage and displace Google with superior technology which goes into the actual content of a web page instead of just focusing on the page. Consequently Cuil's results will be presented in a magazine format instead a vertical stack of data about Web links. Cuil's results will display more photographs with sidebars which may be clicked to learn more about the specific data.

NOTE of CAUTION: Cuil is not the first new comer to challenge Google. Previous challengers include Teoma (this technology became the groundwork for Ask.com), Vivisimo, Snap, Mahalo and Powerset. Powerset was purchased by Microsoft Corporation earlier this month.

In my opinion this is the first time that Google has been challenged by a “general-purpose” search engine which has been created by its former employees. These ex-employees obviously had some inside knowledge and only they know the exact reasons for advancing a new search engine. Financial advantage is probably high on their priority list. There will be other challenges in the future because Google has more than 20 thousand employees.

Good Luck Cuil.

 

1. Get started the right way.

   Accurately describe your item. If it is new say so, if it is not also state that. An accurate description will ensure that the buyer knows what they are getting.

2. Have great keywords in your title.

   Look for an item just like yours in an eBay search. See what comes up. Using great keywords will get your item further up on the search listings. People can only purchase your item if they can find it.

3. Use pictures.

   Now that the gallery is free, there is no reason not to use pictures. A digital camera is all you need in order to take a really great photograph. This is what will tell your buyers about your product. Get this right and your item has a much better chance of selling.

4. Accurately list your shipping and handling charges.

   Buyers are turned off when listings are obviously padding their shipping. You are entitled to have the buyer pay for the actual shipping plus reasonable handling charges. Another option may be to have a buy it now option with free shipping. This marketing tool really works well.

5. Use an online payment service like PayPal.

   Many buyers do not want to bother with a check or money order. They want to make an online payment. PayPal is safe and you can start with a personal account and move up to a premier or business account at a later date. It is difficult to work from home on eBay without an online payment solution.

6. Promptly ship your items after you receive payment.

    A delay in shipping will result in unhappy buyers. This is very important. Make sure you list all shipping options. It is always a good idea to offer an expedited service as well as standard. Always ship your item with a form of delivery confirmation. Require insurance on fragile items.

7. Keep good communication with your buyer.

   Email them to let them know payment was received. Contact them to let them know their item has shipped. Send them a follow-up email to be sure they were happy with their purchase and ask them if you can put them on your email list.

8. Create an email listing of your customers, with their permission.

   Let them know when a similar item is for sale. For example if you sold a customer a Limoges box, let them know when you have similar items for sale. Developing a list of happy customers is a great way to get repeat business.

9. Stay informed.

   Use the eBay Forums and community links to stay on top of what is going on in the eBay community. You will know when specials are offered to buyers and when there are events. Workshops are a great way to learn more about eBay. The more you know the better you can run your business.

10. Know what is hot on eBay.

    Visit the What's Hot page daily. Make sure you know what is selling well in your category of items. Developing a niche market is important. You cannot cover every category. Choose an area of expertise. Write an FAQ or an informative article and post it to eBay. All of these tips will help keep you profitable.

Follow these 10 steps on how to work from home on eBay and your business will be off to a great start. It takes hard work to build any business. Building one on eBay can be rewarding and fun.

Hidden Emoticons

Microsoft for some reason has not listed some emoticons which are coded into MSN. I think it's fairly obvious why the cigarette or handcuff emoticons are not listed but as for the others, I have no idea.

• (brb) - Be Right Back
  
• (ci) - Cigarette
  
• (%) - Handcuffs
  
• (h5) - High Five
  
• (tu) - Turtle
  
• (xx) - XBox
  
• (yn) - Fingers Crossed

Use MSN From a Public Computer

Many computers such as those at school do not have MSN installed for obvious reasons. Don't worry, now with this website you can continue to chat with this free browser version of MSN.

Web Messenger

Find out Who's Blocking You

I'm really surprised that more people do not know about this. Basically, this program checks if the person is actually online. You enter their name and if it says that the person is online, then they have blocked you. Alternatively, they may have just set their status to “Appear Offline” so don't get mad as soon as you see that they are online.

Blockchecker

Remove Tabs on the Left

If you've ever wanted to get rid of those annoying EBay tabs at the side of your MSN window which you never seem to use, Microsoft has coded in a feature for disabling these tabs. Go to Tools/Options/Tabs/Check Hide Tabs. They should now be gone and your MSN window will be looking cleaner than ever.

Hide Tabs

Alien Opera

An alien with his single eye in his mouth sing his heart out. Weird, peculiar, hypnotic, if you don't like opera, you will love this. The guys at Tokyoplastic give us a real Flash feast for the eyes. This is wickedly entertaining and beautifully original work.

Dad's At Work

Once you're on the site, click on "Watch this Movie" to see the animation. Written, animated and directed by Sakupen, this is a crazy insight in to the working life of Dad - perhaps from the overactive imagination of a small child. Dad loves his work and arrives in a superhero type frenzy of crazy activity, obliterating most things in his path as he strives to get to his desk. Mad, bad and dangerous!

Nose Pilot

The work of Alexandru Sacui, this is European style flash animation at its best. Choose from two languages (French or English) and you are away in to a strange alternative world where a slug can be your best friend and you have better watch out for the evil exploding robotic duck! A great way to while away your time!

Blockhead Ghostmas

A twisted animation from Michael Swain. The No 1 Guy has decided that Halloween is just a made up holiday and should be replaced by Ghostmas. What ensues is a lot of totally idiotic Flash mayhem, compounded by the disappearance of the No 1 Guy's Weevil. Strange, a little disturbing but superbly realized work!

Waterlollies

A fully realized story from the sublimely talented Adam Phillips, this Flash produced short feature will just blow you away completely. Bitey is a satyr like creature who loves to eat and tease the other creatures of the Brackenwood world. Hubristic to a letter, Bitey eventually gets his comeuppance. Your mind will boggle at the skills that have gone in to this fantastic, weird and beautifully animated short. Note - this is very graphic intensive - if you are on a low spec computer then click the link to YouTube and watch it there instead.

Spy Bar

Mattias Lindburg is another preposterously talented animator. This piece gives you directions to the mysterious place known as The Spy Bar - as if you are something of a secret agent yourself. Cool music and a visual treat that will make you wonder how on earth it was done.

Creep

If you love Radiohead then you will adore this acoustic version of their brilliant song “Creep”. Realized in Flash by Laith Bahrani, this is a slow build movie and eschews the usual bangs and whistles in favor of a quieter, more subtle nuance. If you have ever felt like throwing yourself out of the office window, watch this one!

Animator Vs. Animation

The little stick man takes his revenge after all those years of being beaten up, blown up and generally used and abused by Flash animators. Will the little guy escape or will the animator destroy him first? A wonderful short animation by the uber-talented Alan Becker.

Animator Vs. Animation II

The little stick guy is back! This time he escapes from his program and wreaks havoc on the Windows environment. Alan Becker is back with the sequel to his hugely popular Animator Vs. Animation - but makes the foolhardy mistake of making the little guy The Chosen One. Superbly created flash animation that you will want to watch again and again!

Hey, Hey, 16K

A look back at the games we used to play. If you remember Jetpac you will love this cheery little song! Deliberately unsophisticated looking but very clever animation from Rob Manuel, this will take you back to the days when you thought a gig was something you went to in order to watch a rock band!

Want more? Go here.

1. Bird on a Journey

A little bird flies on his way home to his lady, avoiding some pitfalls on the way. This brilliant animation combines drawing and photography to stunning effect, together with a weird and wonderful soundtrack.

2. Drum Machine

If you love oriental music - and drums - then you will love this animation. Seven Japanese drummers deliver the goods in this beautifully constructed piece of Flash. The skill and time that went in to this beggars belief!

3. Online Shopping

Be patient with this one. At first glance it looks like just another website that offers you household goods to buy. But hold on a second - didn't that mug on special offer just fall over! That's just the beginning of the fun - a joy to watch!

4. Icon War

These desktop icons decide that they don't like each other any more. War breaks out! Who will be the ultimate winner as icon fights icon! Oh, the humanity! Extremely entertaining flash animation.

5. Kaleidoscope

This is an amazing pattern generating piece of flash animation. You can choose from lots of different varieties and the patterning effect follows your mouse around in a myriad of colors and shapes. Inspirational!

6. Silhouette Sounds

A single silhouette becomes several then becomes many, with each producing a different sound to produce a tune. Fantastic black and white animation is eye catching and very, very different!

7. Doorway

All the guy wants to do is get through the door! Unfortunately, there are lots of things that do not wish to grant him passage. Superb European style flash animation you will want to watch again and again.

8. Falling Dude

Superbly irritating but extremely watchable, this animation has a roughly drawn boy falling, and falling - oh, and then falling some more! You will love it!

9. Jackson Pollock

Ever seen a Jackson Pollock painting and thought "I can do that!" Well, here is your chance! Let your mouse do the walking as you produce works of art that the Saatchis will be after in no time at all!

Yahoo or Google?

Despite being omnipresent enough to become a verb in our present society (you never tell someone to “Yahoo” something when they want information on it), Yahoo is still more popular than Google and is in fact the most popular website on the internet. This seems very surprising but keep in mind Yahoo offers other features like online games that might explain the difference in traffic.

Facebook or MySpace?

MySpace, despite being maligned by so many people, is the 5th most popular website on the internet, barely edging out Facebook which is 6th.

Wikipedia or YouTube?

This one is no contest. Wikipedia is the 9th most popular website, YouTube is the 2nd.

Blogger or LiveJournal?

Another one that isn't even close: Blogger is the 12th most popular website, LiveJournal is the 69th.

Flickr, Photobucket, Fotolog, or ImageShack?

This one was very surprising to me! I've never heard of it, but Fotolog is by far the most popular. ImageShack is 34th, Flickr is 39th, Photobucket is 30th, while Fotolog is 13th.

RapidShare or MegaUpload?

When it comes to sharing files online, Rapidshare has a slight edge at 13th versus MegaUpload's 14th.

Mininova or The Pirate Bay?

The Pirate Bay is one of the most popular sites for Bittorrent tracking, but it ranks in at 128th, well behind Mininova's ranking of 53rd.

Adult Friendfinder or CraigsList?

As you might expect, Craigslist has the edge here, but what might surprise you is that the margin is quite small. Craigslist sits ranked 66th while Adult Friendfinder is 68th. The two websites are separated only by Google's Slovakian portal.

The particularly annoying thing though (imho) is that this entire process is quite manual: multiple clicks to save, multiple clicks to load, and if you've saved many bookmarks good luck ever finding the website link again. Now one could argue that you can use folders to help organize the bookmarks, but once again this is quite manual. I'm not sure about you but I personally do not want to spend the better part of my life telling a computer where it should put my links, so I can find them later. Why isn't this done automatically?

Fast forward to the present and there is an answer… in fact there are two answers that I've been able to come up with to alleviate this painful process. The first answer is that some terribly bright folks created a brilliant tool called “stumbleupon”. Stumble upon completely eliminates the need for you to create or maintain any bookmarks, in fact it does all this automatically.

If you have not tried it out I highly advise that you give it a shot and try it out at Stumbleupon. If you are familiar with Firefox addons than you can instead grab the stumbleupon addon here.

What exactly does stumbleupon do? As best I can tell it uses some form of alien technology to analyze exactly what you are thinking and then finds a site that you will be incredibly interested in. Ok… maybe not, but it does find out what you like / don't like based on whether you rank sites as good (thumbs up) or bad (thumbs down) while you stumble. After a while it will find sites that match your personality and interest. It's a fantastic way to surf… almost like having a tech buddy in your computer that does all the thinking for you. Sometimes he can be a bit perverted... but most of the time he can find some cool stuff 

Now stumbleupon is more of a push technology, that is it will tell you what you want to see. What if you still want to use some old fashioned bookmarks? With all of the processing power of today's computers there must be a better way to connect to sites… uh right?? The answer to this question is also yes, in fact I would say absofreakinglutely yes. The solution is actually quite simple and I have personally found that this mechanism saves me an immense amount of time. The concept is to save all websites that you normally go to on a daily basis into a single folder in your bookmarks. Then every day when you want to surf, go to the bookmarks folder and in firefox right click and choose “open all in tabs”. Then *voila* you will open up all of your websites at the same time… I usually open 30 websites at once wait ~30s until they all load and then click through them with alt-f4.

Using stumbleupon for good'ol surfing and the daily bookmarks has been a terrific time waster… er saver for me and I bet it will save you time as well. If you have any other ideas please respond below.

(btw the idea for the daily bookmark folder came from a brilliant addon called “morning coffee”: find it here. In fact I call my folder “Coffee” in tribute of this excellent addon)

1

This cool website allows you to browse through billions of archived websites. You can type in any URL and view the website when it was first created until now. Try it; put in Google and see what you get.

2

This website is very nice for those who like listening to music on their cell phone. The way it works is that nutise place shifts your music to any web-connected PC and many mobile, so you can take a copy if your iTunes library with you where ever you go.

3

You can pick a mood based on how you're feeling at the time and Mood Swings will find the appropriate websites associated with your mood. Sounds easy enough, go for it!

4

So lets say that you go to an electronic store and buy an item, but everyday you waist valuable time going to different websites, just to be sure that you got the best deal in town. Well fear no more, because this website tracks the price of items you bought online and notifies you in case of a price reduction.

5

The freedome to work where ever you might be. This nifty little app. lets you access your PC remotely, by using your cell phone or any other PC.

6

One of those amazing websites that allows you to bypass any blocked websites on the server. Great for work or school.

7

This great website lets you go around the registration harassment which a lot of websites tend to have. It instantly gives you a disposable login for any popular website that forces you to register.

8

Just from the name you can tell that it helps you send large files over the internet. Unlike your email, which only has a 5mb maximum capacity, this allows you to send up to 100 mb to any email address.

9

For all those bargain hunters out there, this website gives you a complete list of all the coupons out for major realtors and web merchants. All you have to do is cash in on the savings.

10

One of those interesting websites, which I am sure you are going to be using a lot is Flash Earth. It is more of an experimental application that uses the satellite imagery from many different sources, in order to give you a feel for the differences between all of them.

11

This is the best place to find the cheapest tickets available on the web, because it is the only website that provides special rates for South West Airlines and includes the special deals that are only found on the airline's website.

12

This website allows you to create secret blogs with your friends, just by using your cell phone. You can stay up to date with sms notification, follow up on your emails, and receive latest articles from favorite blogs/websites on your cell phone.

13

This is a web based photo editing tool. You have all the tools that the professionals have at their disposal, without having to run the application on your computer. A very nice program.

14

For those that need to have their emails on the go, this website auto-forwards your emails to your cell phone as text messages.

15

This website provides you with a temporary email addresses that expire within 10 minutes. For those nasty websites that ask for your email for verification, but just end up sending you a bunch of junk in the process.

16

This website has a ton of free games for your cell phone. Free registration.

17

Now if you have some extra money just laying around, I suggest that you put it to good use in the lending club. Basically it's a social lending website, where you borrow money from individuals and you end up paying them back with interest. In a savings account you could be lucky to make 2% off of your savings, but here you are likely to make up to 12% interest per loan. Crazy!

18

This website allows you to find the lowest online prices for any in store item in just seconds. Instantly check up on the deals for any product right from your cell phone.

19

This very helpful website lets you convert the pictures you have taken form you cell phone and turn them into well formatted PDFs.

20

Everyday, SoLow auctions off four different items. Anyone with a cell phone or a computer can be involved in the auctions by placing their bids. The user with the lowest unique bidwins the auction.

21

Use Telepixie to quickly schedule and receive daily wake up phone calls on your cell phone along with reminders and weather forecasts.

22

Using this website you can send free postal letters to anywhere in the US right from your computer.

23

With Froonz you would be able to place group calls and send messages to multiple people for free.

24

With Google STP you can forward anything you find on the internet to any mobile phone for free.

25

Very cool website where you can find definitions to slang words. A user based rating system makes this website the ultimate slang reference.

26

IQzone is very helpful in posting classified ads. You post your ad to a number of online and print classifieds directly from your cell phone.

27

With PodioBooks you can search and browse through a variety of totally free audio books that you can put on your iPod.

28

Jott is a simple way for leaving yourself notes and To Do's using your cell phones.

29

A very convenient phone directory system that lists direct human access numbers to support employees in hundreds of companies.

30

This website is great for those individuals that want to catch up on the current buzz on the web. The way it works is that it collects the most talked about URLs of the day and just puts them in one easy place to find. Now that's what I'm talking about.

31

For those curious souls that like to learn new things and have the urge to know everything there is, this is the place to go.

32

This website is for all of those iPhone users that are dying to know the latest news and updates for their super cool phone. This website provides the best information regarding any updates and hacks for the iPhone.