modrepublic

Everyone likes to bang on about how Google Docs is going to be the end of Microsoft Office, but people say that sort of thing all the time… 2008 is going to be the year of the desktop Linux apparently, or was that 2009?
Anyway I don’t actually mean to right off Google Docs, I use it myself all the time, however for very different purposes then what I use MS Office for.
Google rolls out new features every few months or so, and the latest is a welcome addition to the online office suite… templates.

Microsoft released a new version of Windows Search on Windows Update and made it a recommended update for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and 2008 users. Windows Search 4.0 introduces a wealth of new features and improvements over the previous version including the automatic indexing of shared folders, improvements in indexing online e-mail as well as in the performance and stability of the indexer.

The new search engine Cuil got some huge press coverage in the last few days from the likes of Techcrunch and The Guardian which also proved to be a test for their server infrastructure. Many startups who go public with their website either get no visitors at all or so many that their servers cannot handle the traffic and they effectively go boom within the first hours.

Charity can be helped significantly through minor changes to what we done online; by changing search engines, buying through a portal or even simply installing a Firefox extension. This article will highlight several of these worldwide.
UK

Torrent websites are much like Linux distributions, there are so many out there that it is easy to lose the track. Torrent search engines can be divided into two categories: Site search engines and meta search engines. Site search engines obviously only search the torrents that are hosted on one selected website while meta search engines crawl the databases of several torrent websites which often leads to better results.

When you type in a word or phrase in the Firefox location bar you are either taken to Google’s search result page for the search term or, if the term has an authority website, to a website that is the authority for that search term. While most users might like the idea that Google is the default search engine and have nothing to object about that fact some would probably like to change the default search engine in Firefox to another one.

Vista integrated search right across the operating system but restricted access to Windows Search technologies only.
Windows Search provided decent performance, but just wasn’t as fast or efficient as Google Desktop. Google protested against Microsoft’s restrictions in Vista. Microsoft’s response was as of Vista Service Pack 1 to allow third-party applications to be set as the default for searching within Windows.

Internet Explorer users are a bit at the bottom when it comes to useful add-ons for their browser. Sure, there is IE7 Pro which is a fantastic add-on but can you name other ones? I’m not using Internet Explorer regularly and one factor that is playing a role is the lack of add-ons that add features to the browser. In addition I think that the Windows Marketplace, that is the website that stores add-ons for Internet Explorer, is rather complex. There is no way to display only free add-ons for Microsoft Internet Explorer for example.

I can’t fully understand some of the decisions behind the launch of Cuil, the wanna-be Google Killer. I also don’t quite understand the amount of hype and media attention that went with it.
In short, Cuil (pronounced ‘cool’) is a brand new search engine founded by a team consisting of ex-Googlers and various other Internet entrepreneurs including the founder of AltaVista. The team contained members who had worked on Google’s search engine index itself, and led real credence to their claims.