Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Ex-Google worker Anna Patterson has already sold away one of her innovative search techniques to Google before, but doesn’t plan on selling her latest idea to Google anytime soon. In fact, instead of helping Google, she aims to single-handedly take down the search giant. Her new search engine, Cuil, aims to be better than Google had ever been. Initially kept on a low profile, Cuil (pronounced “Cool") was designed by three Google engineers and boasts the fact that it indexes about 3 times more pages than even Google does (around 120 billion pages). Whether this will convince Google users to make the transfer is another story completely, but they can definitely try.

The block result layout places results in a tiled manner around the web page instead of Google’s more generic ranked list style. However, both the page and its search results seem to take quite a while to load and the website has cut in and out of use the entire day. It’s definitely off to a rough start, but Patterson’s claim of its wider scope seems promising. The search results now, though, are lacking in many areas. They seem to either be repeat results, irrelevant material, or ad placement sites. Maybe the increased scope of sites may contain a greater number of useless web information. Either way, it seems that it has little chance of making that much of a difference in the web search sector. After all, Microsoft and Yahoo are spending millions of dollars on their search engines and Google still seems to be gaining more ground. Let’s hope that they give up soon and offer their techniques to the search giants again, because, quite frankly, most people “doubt [Cuil] will be keeping anyone at Google awake at night.”

Read [CNN]

Ubuntu’s founder, Mark Shuttleworth, has proposed a plan to make his distro of Linux just that much more popular. He plans on overtaking Apple’s Mac OSX in the looks and desktop experience departments in order to overtake the art-savvy giant. Sure, these plans do sound a bit confident for where Linux is now, but that almighty force of Linux programmers is really starting to leave an impression on the industry.

Shuttleworth believes the idea that open source operating systems need not only be for the tech savvy and he aims to push for easier, more stable, and more attractive aspects to updates to his operating systems.

With Ubuntu updates popping out about every 6 months now, this dream may not be as much as a reach as it may seem. If there was one Linux distro that had the best chance of changing the software industry, it would definitely be Ubuntu. Shuttleworth has established the goal of “revolutionizing the open source ecosystem” by the summer of 2009 and finally “beating” Apple by 2010.

Read [The Register]

It seems as though Dell is the first big corporation to really take Linux seriously. Dell is now offering a variety of its PCs with Ubuntu 8.04 pre-installed. However, the customer can only choose the Ubuntu as the option on Dell’s XPS 1330 and Inspiron 1525 PC’s. Sure, this won’t necessarily give Linux any large holding in the market share, but hey, it’s a start right?

Dell says it will begin launching the PC’s this August. Although one would expect the cost of these models to be cheaper, it actually turns out being just as expensive. Why? The cost to take the PC’s off the factory lines and install our faithful Hardy Heron racks up some charges in itself, thereby eliminating one of the major advantages of having a free Linux distro. You can expect to pick up one of these systems for $949 and $549 for the XPS and Inspiron, respectively.

Read [Dell]

In a quest to make its online application Google Docs more and more like Microsoft Word and OpenOffice, Google has added a Templates gallery to its Google Docs site. This new addition enables the user to simply edit a graphically formatted document with the content of their own choosing.

Users can now create their own flashy resumes, cover letters, financial data entry spreadsheets, and spiffy slide presentations, all without annoying commentary! (We’re looking at you, Clippy).

Some designs are, well, considerably lacking in some areas, but there are a plenty of templates to choose from. Although still not fully equipped, Google Docs is on its way to becoming an incredible alternative to document, spreadsheet, and presentation editing on any desktop platform.

Read [Google Docs]

Hints of a new series of Vaio’s have now been confirmed. According to the Sony Style website, Sony plans to release a fresh new series of Vaio laptops this Monday, July 14th. Unofficially, last week, Sony had leaked the specs of various laptops like their SR, FW, and Z series models. Though, no one knew exactly when Sony planned on releasing these details more, well, “officially.” Hopefully this teaser is providing exactly what we’ve been looking for. It’s leaks like these that keep us on the edge of our chairs, Sony.

Read [Sony Style]

GM has chosen its factory in northeastern Spain to be a suitable location for rooftop solar panel installation. The predicted 10-megawatt solar station will be used to supply the plant with most of its power needs, thereby taking the title as the largest rooftop solar station in the world. To get an idea of the scale of this thing, imagine being able to power 4,600 households each year with a constant source of electricity. Now that must be big. How big you ask? GM plans to blanket about 2,000,000 square feet with about 85,000 panels by the end of September. Though, this is nothing for GM. They currently own the two largest solar panel installations in the United States and don’t plan on stopping anytime soon. Next stop, Saint Petersburg, Russia. Take that, Al Gore!

Via [PhysOrg]

It seems that Mozilla must credit a fairly large portion of its Guinness World Record for the highest number of software downloads in a 24 hour period to none other than Stephen Colbert himself. It’s not surprising to hear that Colbert’s on-show guests experience a rush of publicity immediately after being viewed on the show, but could Colbert also have an influence on Al Gore’s internets? Apparently, after mentioning the release of Firefox 3 on his show, “The Colbert Report,” Mozilla’s servers experienced a huge spike in downloads from their site on Download Day. Referred to as the “Colbert Bump,” the effect of the rush in publicity is known to earn increased sales, news interviews, and in this case, and incredible number of downloads. At minute 23 of the broadcast, Colbert says just 7 words: “Firefox 3 just got the Colbert Bump.” Sure enough, minutes later Mozilla sees a huge jump in downloads on their website. Not only was the “bump” felt during the live broadcast, but another bump can be seen when the episode was replayed a couple hours later. Now, if he can influence the hearts of thousands of internet users, why did he drop out of that election? He is the Internet (And So Can You!).

Via [Mozilla Blog]