Formidable Google competitor launches — Cuil

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Cuil (pronounced “cool”) has just launched today, and looks like it might be the first search engine in a while to give Google some competition.  The main thing Cuil promotes is the size of it’s index — 120 billion pages, compared to the estimated 40 billion pages in Google’s index.

However, we’re not sure what to make of the “larger” index.  For almost any search query, Google returns more results.  If Cuil had a bigger index, wouldn’t it have more results for common words?  For example, a search for “horse” on Cuil produces 128,400,000 results, while the same query on Google produces 322,000,000 results.

Cuil also seems to be having some issues with multi-word queries, but I’m sure those bugs will work themselves out.  As TechCrunch said

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, “Cuil is only an hour old at this point, Google has had a decade to perfect their search engine.”

Big search engine news coming next week?

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TechCrunch has just hinted at a major search engine announcement next week.  In this post, we read the following:

Google also says “But we’re proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine.”

That may be true today, but it probably won’t be true next week (check back here then). Google knows that as well as we do, and that’s why they posted this today.

Big news from Microsoft?  Yahoo?  Someone else?  What do you think it might be?

Over a trillion pages on the web — how many are yours?

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Google has just announced that they are watching over a trillion (1,000,000,000,000) pages on the web now, which is more than double the number of stars in our galaxy!

The Official Google Blog has details and some history.  Any way you look at it, that’s quite an impressive number.  That leads to the next question — how many of those trillion pages are yours?  Based on a “site:” search on Google (like this one

), I’d say I’ve got about 500,000 pages in their index.  I know I’ve got more pages out there, but that’s all that they’re showing.  I would assume that their index has far fewer than a trillion pages, but they’ve not released numbers for that in quite a while.  How many do you have in there?

WordPress app now available for the iPhone

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As first revealed on Mobileography, the WordPress app for the iPhone is now available in iTunes!  This is a slick little (free) app that makes it easy to write/edit posts and your WordPress blog.  This works with WordPress.com blogs or any self-hosted blog that is version 2.5.1 or higher.

My only complaint so far is that there are no comment tools in there.  I’m often having to clean up comments on the road, and a better way to do that would be nice.  That being said, this is a superb little app and I’m sure it’ll only get better with time.  Go get it and you’ll see what I mean.

Google’s Virtual World launches, and it’s Lively

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I agree with Google Maps Mania on this — I’m quite disappointed that it’s not built on top of Google Earth.  However, it’s certainly a unique creation.  Google has just launched Lively.

It’s essentially Second Life, but with a million different worlds.  You create a “room”, then embed it on your site.  People can hop into your room and play around.  It’s certainly an interesting idea.

Below is a video with a bit more info, and here are a list of the most popular rooms so far, or go check out GEH Island.

A cool little WordPress tip — upload an image from a URL

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I always thought there were two options for adding an image to a WordPress post:

  1. Upload it through the image manager.
  2. Enter a URL and “hotlink” it from there.

It turns out there’s a third, as described by wp-fun

— upload and crunch directly from the net.  When you click on “choose files to upload”, just paste a URL in that box.  WordPress will pull the image from that URL, crunch it, and upload it to your server!

As an example, take this image from the Digital Earth Blog.  Rather than save it to my hard drive and then upload it to my blog, I can do it in one step.  Voila!

Between that trick and the excellent Fancy Zoom plug-in, you can add a pretty nice image to your post in just a few seconds.

Please note that this trick apparently doesn’t work on Macs, because they don’t have a filepath box.  For the rest of you, enjoy it!

Mickey

The best baseball players are measured by RAF

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I’ve long felt that RAF is the best measure of a baseball player.  RAF?  Yep, Runs Accounted For.  It’s a stat I made up years ago and used for softball stats.

It’s a very simple formula, with a very powerful result. It’s simply:

[runs]+[RBIs]-[HRs]

This tells you how many runs that each player has had a direct part in, either by knocking it in or scoring it themselves.  If the entire purpose of baseball is to score more runs, doesn’t it make sense to give credit to those that do it the best?

The reason we subtract HR from the total is so we don’t count a run twice.  For example, if the Phillies win a game 1-0 on a Ryan Howard HR, he would have both a Run and and RBI.  We can’t give him a RAF of 2 for the game (“He accounted for 2 runs in the 1-0 win…”), so we subtract the HR total.  This gives us the exact number of runs that a player has directly affected.

Using this system, Jose Reyes of the Mets is the current MLB leader. Of the 379 runs that the team has scored, Reyes has accounted for 124 of them (34 RBI + 99 R – 9 HR).  That’s astounding!  Most of the list is stacked with RBI leaders, as it should be.  If you drive in a lot of runs, you’re obviously doing a good thing.

Here is the current top 15:

1 – Jose Reyes (NYM) — 124 (34 RBI, 99 R, 9 HR)
2 – Lance Berkman (HOU) — 118 (68/72/22)
3 – Josh Hamilton (TEX) — 113 (80/52/19)
4 – Ian Kinsler (TEX) — 109 (50/72/13)
5 – Chase Utley (PHI) — 102 (65/60/23)
6 – Carlos Beltran (NYM) — 100 (54/58/12)
7 – Ryan Howard (PHI) — 99 (68/51/20)
8 – Adrian Gonzalez (SDG) — 98 (68/51/21)
9 — David Wright (NYM) — 97 (64/48/15)
10 — Nate McLouth (PIT) — 96 (52/59/15)
11 — Justin Morneau (MIN) — 95 (63/44/12)
11 — Aramis Ramirez (CHC) — 95 (55/54/14)
13 — Mark Teixeira (ATL) — 93 (62/47/16)
13 — Michael Young (TEX) — 93 (43/57/7)
13 — Carlos Quentin (CHW) — 93 (61/51/19)

We could always take it a step further and make it a percent of their team’s total runs.  For example, Jose Reyes would have a RAF % of .327 (his 124 RAF / Mets total of 379 runs).  However, this would skew the system toward good players on weak teams, rather than just focusing on who the best players are.  Sometimes simple is better.

There you have it.  RAF — the new measure of MLB players.

Google to start indexing Flash content

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As reported on the Official Google Blog, Google has just launched their “Flash indexing algorithm”, which means that data buried in Flash applications on your site can now be seen by Google!

In terms of SEO, you’ll still be far better off using normal, well-written HTML instead of Flash, but this will certainly help.  Google will at least know what’s in your Flash files and help to rank your page based somewhat on that.

If any of you have Flash-heavy sites, keep an eye on your traffic from Google and see what it does over the next few weeks.  Let us know in the comments if you notice a gain in traffic from them, or if things hold pretty steady.