RutSum

Searchme is a new kind of search engine, a search engine that lets you see your results before you actually visit them. It is currently in beta, and to test it you have to get invited. If you want to get invited, register your email with them on their official site.

I registered on their site for an invite quite some time ago, but got an invitation only yesterday. I was quite excited to be honest, after watching the following video on their website, which more or less sums up why you should consider Searchme as an alternative to your favorite search engine, and what new features it has to offer over the already existing big search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! or Ask.

What I Think

Searchme definitely impresses you at the first look. The concept is new, and it’s exciting to be able to view screenshots of your results. This helps you a lot in saving time, you get a fair idea if you will find what you need on a particular webpage by looking at it’s screenshot.

One thing that is noticeable from this screenshot is that searchme has indexed RutSum on Blogger, while it’s been over 2 months since I shifted to Wordpress. This obviously means that they are very slow in updating their cache, and this is understandable as updating images of the whole web is a Herculean task. But if they don’t increase the indexing speed radically, it might prove fatal for them, leading to their downfall before their rise.

Another thing that is noticeable from this screenshot is that you can scroll through your results in an interface very similar to the iTunes album covers manager. The scrolling was smooth, and not jerky, when I tested it on Firefox 3 Beta 4 on PCLinuxOS.

Below each screenshot, is a small box that pops up when you hover your cursor over it, showing information about that site, where in the page’s content your keyword is included, and the URL of the webpage.

You have an option in ‘Settings’ using which you can filter out adult content, according to your preference.

Searchme also offers you with two themes - Night and Day. I personally like my search results on a white background, so I chose to use the ‘Day’ theme, which is a smooth white theme, with a blue-greyish gradient on the top and bottom.

Now for the feature that I liked the most - Smart Categories. Most of the times, when you are searching for something online, there is an element of ambiguity, due to sharing of a particular name by a variety of things.
For example, when I search for ‘panther’ on Google, I get a variety of search results, about the animal, the Apple operating system, a company by that name that sells media equipment, panther comic books. But usually, you are searching for only one of these. Searchme organizes your search into different categories, and when you select the category you want, you will see results related to only that aspect of the search keyword, and not the other ones.

If you still want to see the static text results with links, there is a button on the bottom of the page, which you can click to bring up old Google style search results.

Though Searchme looks promising with all its new features, I still think of it more as a play tool just for browsing, and not very efficient for day to day searching, especially for web enthusiasts like me, who swear by Google and spend around 1/25ths of their lifetime searching. You tend to play around with your search results, which obviously hampers productivity.

Moreover, a DSL or Cable connection is required for fast searching, while most people in India are still on either dial-up connections, or even 128, 256 or 512 Kbps broadband connections.
Maybe future development and new features could push it higher into the market, but it seems unlikely that it would be able to give a challenge to the already settled big players in the search engine market.

Microsoft just did us all a favour and released the beta 1 version of the much talked about and hyped browser - Internet Explorer 8. They claim to have included many new features, such as Activities, and Webslices, both of which look completely useless at the moment. Other new features include a favorites toolbar, automatic crash recovery,and an ‘improved’ phishing filter. Most of the popular browsers out there (Firefox, Opera) already contain these features and are thousands of times more flexible and customisable than the new IE8.

The really cool part is yet to come. Microsoft’s development team worked their asses off to make IE8 pass the Acid2 test. Hours after the release of the IE8 beta, The Web Standards Project announced the release of Acid3 test. And of course IE8 is nowhere near to passing the test.

Moreover, even though Microsoft said in a press release that IE8 will pass the Acid2 test, it doesn’t. It clearly fails even the Acid2 test.

The sad thing is that Microsoft was working towards passing a particular test, rather than complying to standards. If they had kept in mind the HTML/CSS standards set by the W3C during the development, IE8 would pass all tests by default. If Konqueror can do it, why can’t IE8?

And here I was trying to install IE8 beta on my PCLinuxOS system on Wine :p .

Opera 9.25 scored a 46/100, Firefox 3 Beta 2 scores a 56/100 and Konqueror 3.5.8 crashed all the 3 times I tried to open the test on it.The initial message was that JavaScript was unavailable, after which the score started increasing, and the browser crashed as soon as the count reached to 1/100.

UPDATE 1 : A Microsoft Developer tries to explain why exactly IE8 may not pass the Acid3 Test.

UPDATE 2 : Screens from Opera 9.5 Beta 1 And Firefox 3 Beta 4.

Techcrunch has an interesting article on the rise of click fraud activities in 2007, which declares 2007 as the worst year for online ad monetisation. The stats even state that “one out of every three clicks on a Google or Yahoo ad is fraudulent.”

The most shameful part is that India is the largest single source (4.3 percent) of online click fraud activities. This just proves how we use our ‘overly’ intelligent Indian minds - which is the major reason Indians aren’t respected; even online. People want to earn money from us, by uncovering the talent over here, but all they get in return is a bunch of untrustworthy bastards who are always ready to stab you in your back for your money. We Indians don’t realise that if they spend half of the time spent on thinking of different cheating systems, on making your website/blog more useful to the internet, or spend time in writing quality content and building sustainable traffic, then you could earn much more, and that too - cleanly!

All of us very well know about the TOS, still we try to outsmart the system by using various methods. But in the end, you can never earn as much using cheating as you can by spending time and working hard on the monetisation of your site.

Other countries which are just behind our footsteps are - Germany (3.9 percent), and South Korea (3.7 percent).

Feed Shark is a nice and free blog pinging service, easy to use. Just enter your blog name, URL, and RSS feed URL (and podcast URL too, if you have one), and select the services to ping. Feed Shark automatically pings all these sites with your blog info, and updates them.

I’ve got something other than Chinese spam! I’m excited! Now I’ll get to make new filters and labels, and get more ids to send automated “Fuck you!” replies!