Serious Simplicity

Very cool new feature showed up in my Google Reader today. If you’re like me, you probably can’t help adding more and more RSS feeds to your readers but in reality I hardly read 5% of them. If I spend a day away from Reader the unread count easily adds up to 1000+. So this feature promises to be very useful at simply discarding outdated stuff.

Google added a themes feature today to their Gmail (Beta – whats that about huh?) service.

Well. I don’t like it just because it confused the hell out of me when I signed in to my account. Now, it’s not that I’m resistent to change by any measure… and definitely not design changes as most people who work with me will know.

It just seems however that when a company like Google – who were never big on flashy aesthetics – go to great lengths to introduce themes and skins to their products (iGoogle was first I think) perhaps they’re running out of useful features and practical stuff to add to their products.

Personally I would have preferred a new settings tab that allows me to remove some of the stuff in Gmail rather than add more clutter!

Is Google Reader next…

[Update: The pebbles theme is sweet though :-)]

California-based Cuil (pronounced “Cool”) launched a new search engine today that claims to have a larger index than Google (120 billion pages) and is aiming to rival the search giant in the search business. This claim seems to have more credibility than other recent search engine start-ups (WikiaSearch, Mahalo) given that the company founders are search experts themselves as well as being ex-Google execs.

At first glance, it seems that Cuil’s claim to have a larger index may be a slight exaggeration. In the few comparative searches I ran, Google seems to return at least 5 times more results. But that’s pure quantity and we all know that we rarely get past the first 2 pages anyway…

What’s more interesting and definitely very exciting is the innovative search interface Cuil presents its users.

• The “auto-complete” feature in the search box is simple but useful. It’s almost a basic feature nowadays (except in Google)
• Most top-notch super excellent feature is the “category bar” just below the search box which suggests broad content categories for what you happen to be searching for.
• Similarly excellent is the “explore by category” box on the right. One of the nicest things here are the tooltips you get when you hover over a link with a very good summary of the topic/webpage.