Even though my audience consists of approximately 3 regular readers plus the people who searched for the Red-footed tortoise of South Africa, AKA Jabuti – I feel like I’m letting those 3.5 readers down by my recent lack of content. 

My excuse is the Higher School Certificate, the exams which mark the end of high school. I’m currently in the middle of these minor annoyances, which after I get the results back will confirm just how difficult my professional life is going to be. It’s all on a scale from 50-100, basically ranking how intelligent (ability to rote learn lots of pointless crap) you are. 

So, tomorrow – well, later today – I shall be sitting my 3 hour Mathematics exam. It is now nearly 3am and I have to congratulate my brain’s extraordinary ability to avoid work that needs to be done. 

In the 8.5 hours since 6pm when I resigned myself to begin my epic cram session, I have accomplished the following:

• Memorisation of most critical formulae needed for tomorrow’s test ( I don’t need to actually practice)
• Learnt to play the verse riff from Muse’s Bside, ‘The Groove’, which has been repeating an endless loop in my skull for days
• Read the summary of all characters with special abilities from the TV Show Heroes
• Watched about 150 videos from YouTube

For your fix of music – From the very talented Alyssa Hart, “Crazy – Gnarls Barkely Cover”

And for a mix of both categories, “Electric Stimulus To Face” from Daito Manabe

I would hazard a guess as to some of the reasons Cuil has not taken off in the competitive search business:

1. Wow, a huge index list? That’s nothing unless you can display results in an accurate and relevant list. Google has had 8 or so years to develop technologies like Page Rank, and it is innovations like this that place Google at the top of the pack when it comes to search.
2. Search is a critical technology which is required to use the Web. It demands efficiency, clarity. It is not a function which can be sold to people through a pretty Web 2.0 interface.
3. There are so many other superb Google web products (maps, image search, gmail etc) that all their popularity and success is boosted by each other. People are more likely to put all their eggs in one basket, especially when that basket is such a free, functional one. Additionally, people trust Google and it has a brand image in a very positive light.
4. Google’s search functionality and feature list – features of advanced search, like searching for specific file types, and from certain domains are excellent. These features are also available with commands like ‘filetype:xls’. You can type something like “time in california” or similar, when you can’t be bothered doing a time zone conversion, and Google will just tell you the answer! It’s the same with calculations. Along with suberb image search, scholar search and others, Google’s search feature set is not even worth comparing with Cuil’s.