The Lounge

Hi guys.

I just wanted to let regular readers know that the Technology Lounge has moved to a new domain and can be found here.

Please bookmark the new site and I look forward to seeing you over there and continuing to discuss the latest technology news and gadgets.

Thanks,

Danny.

New search engine Cuil is coming under heavy fire from webmasters everywhere, less than a week after its official roll-out. Despite the claims of the ex-Google employee owners behind Cuil, whose tagline is "Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil", the new search engine is definitely not as knowledgeable as it would like to think.

Apart from the fact that the servers had a decidedly bad first day performance - although I'll cut them some slack with that - the main problem with Cuil is the use of images that accompany their search results. Far from representing the company in question, Cuil's search engine has images that have nothing whatsoever to do with many of the actual listed search results.

Even worse, because the images are linked to the company that they come from, many webmasters are reporting a drop in traffic as Cuil users click on an image and get taken to a completely different site from the actual website they were hoping to get taken to.

Aside from this major cock-up, Cuil's search engine is also coming under fire from webmasters who are questioning the legality of using an image without proper license, particularly if that image leads to a 3rd-party website. You can imagine how a company would feel if their hard-earned online status was suddenly ruined by Cuil sticking a nice image that led to a porn site or worse.

While it's early days for the new Cuil search engine, I can't help but feel that they've messed up royally from the start. Whether they can recover in time and remedy these hugely important issues will be down to whether or not users already blase about the new search engine will try Cuil again after the early mess.

I read a news post that came from last month's What Teens Want conference in Manhattan, announcing their findings from "in-depth research". According to the informed heads at the likes of Buzz Marketing, "Technology is starting to define what's cool in a way that fashion used to define what's cool." Well blow me down...

Pardon my blase approach, but technology is not the new cool for teenagers - teens have always thought technology was cool. Heck, when I was a teenager (many moons ago, I can tell you!) I was after the latest LaserQuest home system or Atari 5200 (see, told you it was many moons ago!). Even before that, teenagers thought that colour movies were cool; vinyl records were cool; even Rubik's Cubes were cool!

While I agree that teenagers are more up-to-date on what's happening in the tech world before others, I just can't see the reasoning or the value behind these findings. Of course, I guess the researchers have to validate their funding some way or other...

SEO specialists and Internet marketers using Google Page Rank are in for a fun ride over the next few days when Google updates its page ranking system. The leading search engine provider uses the Page Rank tool to show (allegedly) how popular a website is on its engine. The Page Rank is based on a score from 1-10, depending on authority links in, visitors, SEO, etc.

However, many webmasters, SEO specialists and Internet marketers have begun to doubt the effectiveness of Page Rank as it frequently rates sites higher than ones that are obviously more popular. This has led to less relevance being placed on a website's Page Rank - something that Google obviously wants to address as it continues to become the de facto standard for online presence. 

No doubt Google's new scores will be monitored closely when the new Page Rank update is released later this week.

According to a leaked letter, illegal file sharing in the UK is about to be hit hard by the British government. Following similar crackdowns in North America, where the likes of Torrentspy and others have had to close doors, illegal file sharing sites are about to come under the scrutiny just as intensively.

UK newspaper The Guardian claims to have a letter from UK Business Minister Baroness Vadera, which cites a proposed agreement between the UK entertainment industry, the major internet service providers and the Government. According to the agreement, a target of 80% has been set as far as cutting down of illegal file sharing by 2011.

With an estimated 7 million users of illegal file sharing sites in the UK alone, it would mean each ISP would have to send out  an average 1,000 letters per week to customers that are known to use file sharing sites to download movies and music illegally. To further combat the problem, the Government are also proposing a $60 yearly licensing fee to allow legal downloads.

With the shambolic situation of current UK ISP's, there must be some doubt over how effective these new proposals will actually be, and how it would affect customers who already use alternative methods to get online.