Summer Reading.

Edited my July 8 entry to add Clifford Stoll’s “The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage”

Bing

Or should it be ‘bling’? What’s with the balloons?

MS’s new search engine. Returned mostly good answers on my standard questions, though it didn’t catch the page on who first used the word ‘filk’. The ‘edge of chaos’ stuff was split pretty evenly between Kauffman and the MMORPG.

My take is that it’s on par with Google, but that the big ‘G’ has the approach down better — when I’m searching, I don’t need popups or hoverups, or cutesy pictures of balloons. I want a minimalist interface and the best results.

Bling will be a Google-killer only to the extent that MS near monopoly on the desktop can entice captive IE users to go there.

Cuil Search

As a follow on to the previous entry, I recently came across the semantic search engine, Cuil.

http://www.cuil.com/

Did ever so much better than W|A on the search terms I used, and produced a more usable set than did the Goog.

Popped up the right names for reconstructability analysis and edge of chaos, picked up on Wolfram and cellular automata. Got the dates right. Got good stuff on handbells and filk, and even came up with the first use of the term ‘filk’ music. Apparently by Karen and Poul Anderson. I like it.

Wolfram Alpha

Just tried out the public alpha version of Alpha. It’s interesting, has potential, but is no threat to kartoo.com

Didn’t know:
handbell
click fraud
chaos theory
edge of chaos
neural net
filk

Minimal info on:
server
chaos

Useful stuff on:
Spokane, WA (but not on the river)
Princess Mononoke

Way too deep too fast on:
cellular automata (Wolfram wrote a 12lb book on it)

Didn’t match April 11, 1970 with Apollo 13
Didn’t match Sep 2, 1945 with end of WWII