I just added a search plugin to my site. Unless you use Firefox 3 and noticed the small blue highlight on the arrow, it’s fairly difficult to notice, but for those who - like me - make good use of that box, it’s a nice thing to have.

Let’s start with the easy bit: the addition to the header. (more…)

The new search engine Cuil looks great. It’s created by a number of ex-Google engineers, and returns search results in kind of a more newspaper style.

It’s intriguing that it seems to search as many, or more, pages than Google already. It looks rather cute, and even has its own “add to firefox” plugin (in Firefox 3, drop down the list of search engines and at the bottom you’ll see “add ‘Cuil’” on the list.)

Did a search on my own name and found what I expected - the British ambassador to Qatar and the editor of Motor Boat Monthly - and it looks pretty clever. I note that esotechnica doesn’t find this blog, but references to it. Well, maybe they’ve still got some crawling left to do, after all.

Well, that’s the view this lunchtime. Back to work…

Cor blimey guv’nor, there was I, mindin’ me own blogness and suddenly I sees traffic from search engines for the term “file hippo update checker”.  Well, thinks I, that were quick, I only posted that today.  Turns out I’m on front page of that Google thing when you search for “file hippo update checker”.

Anyway, I’ll drop the Dick Van Dyke accent Cockney for a moment and just express my surprise at how quick search engines have become.  Only two ago I remember Google, Yahoo and the like would put in a disclaimer that it could take up to a month to get a site listed (on Homerweb they only guarantee to list you if you link to them - or at least they used to) .  But I suppose with the advent of Lucene and Nutch (and probably other similar projects I don’t yet know about) there’s plenty of scope for people to “roll their own” search engines and strike out with a view to getting a bite of the search engine pie - there’s even one that donates to charity (it’s called Everyclick, if you didn’t know; it has a nice mouse-based logo too).

I’m still playing with QNX, before you ask, and will post more soon.  Like.  Much.