V: What do you want to do for a living?
R: I don’t know. Any suggestions?
V: Well, what are your goals in life?
R: Hmm… I suppose my goal in life is to know everything about everything.
V: In that case you should be an academic, but do you think you would be happy studying behind a desk all day?
R: No, I guess not… and I don’t care for academic culture either. So I suppose my goal would be to know everything about everything and to put all of my knowledge to good use. Are there any careers for people like that?
V: (sarcastically) Well we’re not feeling very ambitious tonight, are we?
R: Not particularly.

…

V: So there are no careers that match your life goals; what are your main interests?
R: My main interests are science, creative writing, art, architecture, computer programming, psychology, religion, history and politics. Probably a few others that I can’t think of right now.
V: (slightly annoyed) I said your main interests. Which one are you most interested in?
R: I can’t answer that question. I couldn’t bear to give any of them up.
V: (sighs deeply; pauses) What about hobbies? What do you do for fun?
R: Well, I like reading, hiking, bicycling, drawing, writing, playing piano. Also studying all of the things I mentioned above.
V: Studying? For fun?
R: Yeah, I can be kind of a nerd sometimes. The rest of the time I do those other things – you know, the hiking and drawing and stuff.
V: You’re hopeless. (shakes head; walks out of the room in exasperation)

OK, so the internet is abuzz with news of a new competitor to Google called Cuil.

It’s a bad sign when you’ve chosen a name that you have to tell people how to pronounce. Their press release, as well as the over 800 news articles covering the story, feel the need to inform us that the name is pronounced “cool.”

Of course, I only found all of that information by searching with Google. Despite the publicity, Cuil’s results are not yet aware of their own existence.

—

Seriously, though, Cuil has a pretty interesting concept. The suggested searches are usually pretty spot-on, and I really like the result page format.

The positives pretty much end there. Many of the pages that Cuil pops up with are link farms with little or no real content, and the results pages are pretty sparse on reference material. There’s a definite bias in favor of commercial sites, and against informational sites, news sites and blogs.

Most notably, Cuil seems designed to ignore Wikipedia articles. This wouldn’t be a problem, except that they haven’t really replaced them with any other general reference material.

If I search for “Rock Paper Scissors” on Google, I get a link to the wikipedia article, the world RPS society, various RPS leagues, and a couple of businesses. The same search on Cuil produces most of the same commercial sites – the leagues, the businesses, and a couple of online game sites that google misses, but without the Wiki link, the results page lacks any readily accessible information about what “Rock Paper Scissors” actually is.

Cuil’s bias against reference material goes deeper than just wikipedia, though. For example, a google search on NSString (the string class in the Mac OS X system framework), produces Apple’s framework reference as the first result, which seems sensible.

Cuil, on the other hand, correctly identifies the search as a reference to the Mac OS X API, but the search results are almost entirely mailing list entries. The official reference material for NSString is nowhere to be found.

—

Finally, Cuil also has a strange propensity to return “no results” pages for uncommon terms. If a term is uncommon, it seems like the search engine should be more able to come up with a good results page, since there are fewer sites to choose from.

Alas, even when sites exist, Cuil is unable to return results for some obscure topics. I suspect this is just a getting-off-the-ground issue – the number of no-results searches is dropping by the hour – but it’s not promising.

—

In my tests, Cuil does a great job if you are searching for large commercial or semi-commercial entities with official web sites, but a poor job of searching for reference material, user generated content (opinions, customer generated reviews, etc.), or general subject information. Current event information is also mostly missing or difficult to find.

They may improve, and I hope they do – but for the time being, I’ll stick with Google.

it just occurred to me that I have no idea why anybody would work as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company for more than a year. I mean, if you pull in a hundred million dollar salary, you could retire after your first year and spend a couple million dollars a year for the rest of your natural life. You could buy yourself a ten million dollar home – and pay cash. You could spend your days in passive leisure (if you’re lazy), or doing something you’re passionate about without having to worry about making any money at it.

The question becomes, then,why doesn’t anyone do this?

OK, so this post has got to be just about the most ridiculous piece of theology I’ve ever read:

To sum up: the idea that God will judge people and cast them into eternal destruction—hell—for all eternity is a great comfort to anyone who is angry about injustice. Those of us who teach the gospel or tell it to others have a wonderfully comforting message of damnation that will bring hope to all who put their trust in God. The more we speak of it, the more comfort we offer.

(emphasis mine)

News from Detroit: Somebody Stole Jesus.