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Is Google making us and subsequently our kids less intelligent nowadays because its much easier to find information by searching online? This discussion popped up when I was driving back home today and I thought it was an interesting topic to write about.

I personally don’t think Google is making us, or me rather, dumber because information is all over the Internet. I think you still need a bit of motivation to search online. There are a lot of people who doesn’t even use Google or any other search engines to look for answers to their problems even though the information is right in front of them, they just need to search (I won’t go there) ! And sometimes it takes a bit of tweaking when searching because different combination of keywords may yield slightly different search results. And just because the information is there doesn’t mean its 100% accurate, and WiKi is a very good example and schools have stressed many times NOT to do research based on WiKi. That’s is also another reason why I don’t think search engines are making us dumber because when you are searching for an answer, unless you are absolutely sure that the answer you found right away is 100% accurate, you will pretty much have to go through at least a few more results to confirm how accurate the information really is.

In the end, yes you no longer have to open up a dictionary or go to the library to look for information. But that doesn’t mean you are or will be less intelligent by searching conveniently on the net. Its still up to the person to find the answers and its just a different mean of finding them by searching online. Therefore, I think its actually the opposite, in which Google is making us, or rather people that hunger for more knowledge smarter instead because its much more convenient to look for and find answers online than going to the local library every time. I’m sure everyone would rather “Google” something rather than driving out to the library in Winter when its minus 30 degrees!

What do you guys think?

Google Chrome, a new web browser released today to compete with Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Firefox, Safari and others. I’ve beta tested with IE 8 and I was not particularly happy with the bug I found. Let’s see if Google’s first ever browser will be better or worse.

I immediately tried to load my Project Mobius web site up to see if something funny would happy. I assumed it was because Flash plug-in wasn’t installed for this browser. While downloading, I went to this blog page for a quick test. The page loaded fine it seemed, but there was a popup that disappeared way before I was able to read the sentence which was really annoying. If the message was meant to be displayed for a mere half a second, why even bother? After refreshing the page and trying to read the error message word by word. I managed to figure out that it was complaining about addition plug-in (again related to the Flash plug-in) was required to display some elements on the page and those elements were shown at the bottom left of the page. The problem was fixed right away after installing the Flash plug-in.

Overall in terms of user interface, its almost like using any other browsers out there. Even the buttons look similar although the placements are slightly different but you will never be in a situation where you cannot find a particular function, well most of the time. I actually prefer the button placements for Chrome over IE8 Beta because in IE8 Beta, the Favorites button is located right next to the Refresh button with little space in between. Where as in Chrome, there is at least some space between the two buttons. It has the Favorites or the bookmarks bar just below the location bar much like in IE8 Beta which I dislike (I hid it right away). Chrome can also have the option to hide the entire bar along with the double arrows. I would rather have the double arrows remain there like IE8 Beta, instead of pressing Ctrl+B to toggle the entire bookmarks bar section on and off. But overall I think Chrome is very clean, a little bit too plain I should say. They should work on the top frame because I am not feeling the plain blue bar at all.

I opened a new tab by clicking the little plus sign and it displayed pages I’ve visited. I could also see a full history and delete a certain day’s history similar to IE. Would be nice if there’s a button somewhere on the page to go back to the previous page instead of always clicking the Back button on the top left. Sorry just being a little picky here.

One minor problem I encountered was when I mouse overed the title, it would not be displayed as a clickable link because somehow I’m guessing its still referencing the top layer when the two div tags were too close to each other, as with my blog’s navigation links and the newest entry’s title link. , which was the navigation links. I couldn’t even select the text from that title.

I only use the basic functions during web surfing such as finding a particular text on a page, going back to previous pages, bookmarking interesting places and etc. I don’t see why I would switch from one of the existing browsers over to Chrome as I’m a very casual web browsing user. But one thing for certain is that, Chrome’s stability is much higher than that of IE which I had problems with while testing IE8 Beta. I definitely will look forward to future releases of Google Chrome.

For more information, please visit the learn more page on Google.

A new search engine called Cuil was launched today (July 28th). It is developed and run by the husband-and-wife team of Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson. I quickly hopped onto the site to check it out, first thing I noticed is that it is very clean, a bit too clean assuming it just launched and had to start somewhere small first. It claims to be the biggest search engine, while I won’t doubt that will or may happen in the future, it certainly is not the biggest yet.

On the bright side, each search will be accompanied by an image whenever possible which makes the search experience more enjoyable as opposite to just plain text results. Costello also stated that the new search engine crawls and ranks pages differently compare to Google’s flagship search engine and it heavily focuses on the “contextual” of a page. As stated from the About Cuil page “When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.”.

Onto the dark side.

Speed-wise I don’t feel any improvement over searching through Google, some times its often slower than Google (maybe everyone is trying out this new search engine?). Many people have also reported that searches were not accurate. I tried to search for Cuil hoping to find more info about the search engine (yes I know there’s an link called About Cuil on the very first page, but correct me if I’m wrong but shouldn’t its own page get indexed as well? About one in a ten searches results in “We didn’t find any results for ” for the same keyword.

All and all I think there is still a lot of work to be done for Cuil in order to even convince people that it is capable of searching if its claimed to be the “biggest” search engine. Right now it just doesn’t stand a chance. I will definately keep my eyes on this.