Archive for July, 2008

29 Jul 2008

cuil – another search engine

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Posted in Work | 3 Comments

A few days ago i blogged about scour.com – a new search engine. I now have it as my default search engine in firefox.

I think it’s a very promising search engine which is gonna take a hammering for being seen as a ‘paid to search’ ‘scheme’. People don’t understand that it’s an added incentive to use scour – it’s not the sole reason why you should use it!

Anyway, enter cuil.com – a new search engine set up by some ex google employees. I don’t like it.

The results are annoying… It messes up the order of results… for example is smemon.com ranked no.2 or no.5 for ‘smemon’. The owners claim the column look is to make things easier to read – i think it looks like a mess myself. Rather than read results in order (no.1 no.2 no.3 etc…, my eyes are all over the place – there’s no sense of order.)

The thumbnail images are going to be useless unless webmasters can change them. (In the FAQ’s it says they use “advanced algorithms to determine the best image to show the user” – that really clears up that then :roll: )

Thirdly, no image or video search? *ouch* that gunshot through the foot must be painful :cool: Come on, this isn’t 1999.

Ok, on the flip side there’s no scrolling. Apart from that, it’s a backwards step for search imo. I blogged about scour and how they were changing search for the better with social style voting systems to organize search results.

Cuil is just the same old stuff rehashed in a different layout. It’s nothing to get excited about, it lacks a community feel and why would anyone use it? What does it do differently? NOTHING.

Having more indexed pages than any other search engine isn’t a selling point. That doesn’t make cuil attractive – if anything it hurts it. Google could easily index more pages but they don’t as the majority of unindexed pages are spam.

The future of search is people power. Human powered results is the next step forward. Scour is the first real attempt at that, cuil is nothing more than a google clone which fails to capture the imagination.

Looking at a few of the comments around the web, it appears i’m not alone in thinking cuil need major work. The actual search results are dodgy too… relevancy seems to be an issue.

This is no ‘google killer’ – they have the media wrapped around their finger – i’ll give them that. But it’s all smoke and no fire.

Anyway, looking at the bigger picture, google must be getting a little hot under the collar… for the first time in a long time, there are now some serious attempts to put a dent in google’s monopoly. It means people are realizing google ISN’T untouchable and that there’s also a lot of people out there willing to jump ship to another search engine for one reason or another.

29 Jul 2008

$1940 worth of domains for $32.50

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Posted in Work | 1 Comment

I’ve bought 4 domains now in the past couple of days – all keyword .com’s. They have a combined value of $1940 according to estibot.

I got all 4 for a combined total of $32.15. In fact, i got two of those domains for BELOW my usual registration fee of $6.

I got one for $4.25, the other for $5.50 :mrgreen: Now that’s what i call working clever… i didn’t think i could buy better domains for any less than reg fee, but now i know you can if you’re lucky ;-)

So now the question is – how accurate is estibot? Lets be extremely pessimistic here and say the real value of a domain is 1/20th of what estibot predicts – it still means the domains are valued at $97 – 3 times MORE than what i paid for them :mrgreen:

In my own experience, estibot is pretty accurate with it’s predictions for small-medium sized sites and domains. For larger sites, it’s slightly skewed because it can’t paint an accurate picture of traffic or RSS readers etc… plus it doesn’t factor in current revenue.

But all of my new domains have been valued on keyword frequency in search engines… what that means is the domains i have are pretty popular, common search terms. So they’re very strong keyword domains and being dot com’s, they’re not gonna lose any value whilst i have them ;-)

I have one or two more ‘big buys’ lined up this week – domains valued at close to $1k. One of them has over 230m results in google ;-) I doubt i’ll be so lucky as to get all of them on a shoestring budget, but who knows… most i’ve paid so far for a domain has been $16.25 and that domain was valued at $910 :cool:

All i need to do now is build up sites around these domains then flip them based on unique design, simple functionality and with a real focus on the value of the domain name.

28 Jul 2008

a go slow week ahead

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For the past two weeks now i’ve been extremely busy, pulling in over $400 profit in return (assuming some pending auctions go to plan).

Realistically though, things are gonna get tougher for me over the next few weeks. My girlfriend is on two weeks holidays, so i’ll not be online as much as i normally am. We’ll probably go away for a couple of nights to Dublin too.

I then have my maths exam on august 14th – the work for it starts this week. I’ll get out the notes and try to organize them a bit and plan how i’m going to go about studying… the ACTUAL study will start next week…. i’ll have a bout 10 days ’til exam day at that stage. But planning and organizing is the hard part.

So from now until August 14th, my online work will start to suffer. I’ll still be creating sites, just not as many. So that means i’ll have to work smarter rather than harder.

I’ve already stumbled across a relatively untapped resource for domain names and i’m testing that out, but it looks promising so far. For example, i could buy a domain name valued at $900 by estibot for about $20.

I like estibot because it’s a no-nonsense valuation tool. If you’re domain is shit, it’ll tell you… if you’re foolish enough to pay some ‘expert’ to value the same domain, he’ll tell you what you want to hear.

By the end of the week, i hope to have bought several domain names which are valued at over $1k combined. They’ll NEVER sell for that amount, even with a decent site, but it is a big selling point. Many sites will sell just for the name… if the content is somewhat related and decent, it’s a bonus.

So that’s what i call working clever. I *could* find unregistered domains for $6 – but they’d be relatively poor names. For $10-20 i could find decent enough names, valued at $100+.

You can never own enough quality domain names.

27 Jul 2008

if i had $200m i’d buy digg

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Posted in Work | 5 Comments

So apparently google have pulled out of buying digg.com at the last hurdle in a $200m deal. That’s a big shock. I fully expected google to buy digg because it makes sense in so many ways.

Digg probably has the largest community of webmasters and internet addicts under the one roof online – very influential people.

All the big bloggers, big news sites and video sites are using digg. As a result, if it’s not on digg, it’s not worth talking about.

Digg would have been the perfect weapon to pin down the ‘news’ area online for google. That’s why i’m very surprised google have backed away from it.

Perhaps Google fear the community is too powerful or influencial – after all, digg users have made their feelings known in the past (multiple times too) – google don’t like that sort of power being with the end user.

$200m, although mega bucks – is also pretty cheap i feel (not that money is a problem for Google anyway). Google could integrate digg with youtube, igoogle, google news and see it’s value rocket overnight – it’d be great way to knit everything together.

Given the fact we’re hearing google are testing social interaction features on search results (in other words – stealing some digg style features), it really is baffling why they’ve backed out of the deal. Money obviously isn’t a problem, so it doesn’t leave many other problems… perhaps the digg crew wanted a slice of shares or to stay in control when google had other plans? I’m sure we’ll find out at some stage.

26 Jul 2008

Desktop spot-check #2

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Here’s my second desktop spot-check picture, taken a few days ago – late at night.

desktop

What do we have on the desk this time?

  • Dell XPS 420, with a tv tuner and microfiber cloth on top of it.
  • Remote control for my XPS 420
  • TV remote control
  • 5 creative speakers (out of 7)
  • Adjustable lamp with low energy bulb
  • Creative Headphones in a leather bag
  • Lucozade sport bottle – one of my favourite drinks.
  • 2 x 20″ samsung pebble monitors
  • Logitech MX3200 mouse and keyboard
  • ‘Cyber Snipa’ illuminated glass mousepad
  • College ‘repeat’ forms
  • Sticky notes with ‘to do’ lists on them
  • Watch
  • Keys

Not much has changed since the last time… i have filezilla open there on the right monitor doing some ftp work… i also have notepad open, plus a blog (think it’s bannedtvad.com).

So as you can see, i’m already relying on the two monitors – i could not go back to just having one and it’s going to be an absolute nightmare going back to college working with just one monitor.

So by now, you should be able to tell i like to keep a fairly clean and uncluttered work area… usually once a day i’ll just throw everything off the desktop if i find it’s becoming a distraction – i can’t have a cluttered desktop… it’s the one area i have to have perfect.

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