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Thursday, July 31, 2008

New Search Engine Cuil launched

Cuil (pronounced [kuːl], "cool") is a search engine that organizes web pages by content and displays relatively long entries along with thumbnail pictures for many results. It claims to have a larger index than any other search engine, with about 120 billion web pages. It went live on July 28, 2008.

Unlike other search engines Cuil's privacy policy states that it does not store records of users’ search activity or IP addresses.

Cuil is managed and developed largely by former employees of Google: Anna Patterson, Russell Power and Louis Monier. The CEO and co-founder, Tom Costello, has worked for IBM and others. The company raised $33 million from venture capital firms.

I tried searching few pages and liked few things

  • The concept of each entry with an image (seems to be better than dry Google results)
  • Auto complete while typing the search
  • Explore by category option
And the stuff that i did not like:
  • I am not happy with search results - while scrolling through results on cuil found same results repeating on each page.
  • No "cached" link?
  • No way of browsing similar pages
  • There is no advanced search / no help for advanced search - like if i want to search for PDF files only how to?

Try it: www.cuil.com

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Official Gmail Blog: Making security easier

Official Gmail Blog: Making security easier

Google has closed one of the big security risks associated with using its free hosted Gmail mail service. You can now select an option in your account preferences to make every session require an encrypted Web connection. Although this may make your Gmail slower as each time your mail connects to server and back it has encrypt and decrypt.

https for login

Gmail requires a secure connection for your login details, regardless of whether or not you start with the secure Gmail site address. However, when you start using the service, Google was taking you back to an unencrypted Web connection. The same was true when someone click on link form a different site. That was a big security risk as the messages would pass in the clear and unencrypted. This was making you vulnerable as someone could intercept your Google session token and have full access to your Gmail account. Although if you still type https in URL your connection was secure but user had to enter this ever time.

Google in its Gmail blog has released a new feature "a Browser Connection option at the bottom of its Settings > General view" that lets you select "Always use https," which is the protocol name for a URL that makes your browser start up a SSL/TLS encrypted connection with a Web server.

Another related feature: "Last account activity"
A related feature is "Last account activity" which provides you details of your las logins (access mode - browser or pop or mobile, ip address and time). So next time you are suspicious that someone is hacking your account check this. To see this option go to bottom of your mail page and click on Last account activity: .... Details

How to make Gmail open when I click on a "mailto" link?


Here a question from one of users

"I no longer use Outlook and use only my gmail (Google Apps Mail). Is there an add-in or other means that I can open my gMail account when I want to send an eMail to someone on the web?
In other words, the web page says: "click here to send a message to ...xxx" and when I click Outlook opens. I can see that MS would try to force me to use Outlook, or Outlook Express, but how can I change that to my gMail account?"

Here is how to do this using Google Talk



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Using Google Apps: Case Study

Jason Slator writes about using Google Apps in his technology blog. Here are few excerpts from posting:

"To gain a level of integration we have to rely on the gadgets/widgets on the start page and, whilst usable, this is where this sort of technology shows its infancy as some widgets are better integrated than others and business widgets are mixed in and available together with the leisure and social widgets."

"We still have to explore Google Web Pages, Sites and Chat but at the moment I can’t see much value in migrating to Google Mail as Exchange Server and Outlook are working well and OWA is our current preferred solution for offsite email access"

"The applications have the benefit of feeling familiar, if a little cluttered at times, but a little more integration and intuitiveness in use would make the system more appealing - for example a plug-in for Office for loading and saving documents. In an ideal world a combination of Google Apps and Office Live Workspace would be an ideal answer. However, we have to remember this is an early example of a platform in development and Google describe the platform well as “a bridge between our business and Google products” and not necessarily a replacement (not yet anyway)."

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