Is cuil cool?

Word spread today about cuil, a new search engine founded by ex-Googlers that is supposed to be bigger, better, and badder than Google. Frankly, I'm not impressed.

First, it's slow as molasses. Now, I know it's day one, and everyone's trying it out, but it doesn't even come close to Google on response time.

Second, there's just not enough information on the first page of results. When I search, I want a clear, concise list of results with no more content than necessary to determine if the hit is relevant. Not only does cuil provide too much content in the results, but it's not often relevant.

Third, Google is a one-stop shop. I get web, news, images, video, etc.

Let's take an example. My search term is "Cobb County Police Scanner".

Result time:

• Google: Blink of an eye. To short to notice.
• cuil: 2.5sec for the page to finish rendering

First page of results:

• Google: 10 results, with all ten relating to either a Cobb County Police Scanner, or the Cobb County Police.
• cuil: 11 results. None were relevant. The first hit looked relevant, but was a keyword harvester and redirected me to an adult site (gives new meaning to Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky"). The rest of the hits were a mix of offline servers, keyword harvesters, and porn sites. cuil was totally useless.
  

Versatility:

• Google: After my web search, I clicked on over to images. About half of the first 21 hits had to do with Cobb County Police, and the first two hits were very relevant pictures of the Cobb 911 call center.
• cuil: No image search
• Google: Next, I headed over to news. The first hit was a dud, but about 3/4 of the remaining hits were relevant, and one even had to do with the City of Marietta's recent radio purchase - very relevant.
• cuil: Crickets
• Google: Shopping was a bust - no hits - but there were a bunch of ads on the far right that would have gotten what I wanted if I were in the market for a police scanner.
• cuil: Nada.

Bottom line? I'll stick with Google. And if Google is down, I'll go to Yahoo. And if Yahoo is down, I'll go to MS Live and if that's down, well, I'll find something else that's not so "cuil".

What kind of donuts are these?

My wife was in South Florida for a work event, flying in and out of FLL. This morning before catching her flight back to ATL she goes to pick up a couple of donuts at the Dunkin Donuts in Concourse D... One for her, and one for her boss (who prefers totally plain donuts). So she picks two that look reasonably plain, points them out to the cashier and asks "What kind of donuts are these?"

The response? "Dunkin Dounuts".

Bewildered, she just bought them and left. You can't make this stuff up.

ATL and TPA photos coming, and a few of my favs so far.

I spent the past week in Tampa taking a class for work. My outbound flight last Sunday was delayed by 4.5 hrs for no particular reason whatsoever. They can call it weather all they want, but the bottom line I think is that we had no crew (likely our crew was on an inbound flight that had weather problems, but at a hub, that's an Ops issue, not WX). The flight after ours actually left about 2 hours before ours, so clearly WX wasn't the limiting factor. Anyhow the delay left me enough time to snap I guess a couple hundred shots from the south parking deck. The weather was awful during the afternoons in Tampa after class let out, but hopefully I got a few keepers there too. There are a couple great spots along Hillsborough Rd. just north of the airport when arrivals are coming in on the 18's. I'll get them edited, uploaded and tagged (along with the rest of my older photos) as soon as I can, but I need to upgrade my flickr account first.

In the mean time, here are a few of my favorite aviation photos I've taken so far. I'm sorry they aren't Airliners.net quality (but then again, no one is exactly sure what is anymore). If you haven't noticed yet, my flickr Photostream is at the top of this blog, so if you ever want to see more, just click.

For just a second, ATL looks like LAX:


Aeromexico departs 26L:


My very first photo accepted on airliners.net...Looking at it now, I don't quite understand why, but I'll go with it:


This was the best I could do through the DL763ER's window, but I don't get to go spotting in Paris very often (OK, never):


Taken from a balcony at the Renaissance Concourse:


The Delta TOC as seen from the Renaissance:


I have tons more that I've taken since March. More to come. If you like these, you'll love Chris' Photostream. He's another local spotter who has far better access to ATL than do I. 'Till next time....

A new beginning....

Indeed, I've had this blog for a while, but I finally decided to dispense with my static home page, so with this purge and first new post, my blog becomes my new home page.