The new search engine Cuil got some huge press coverage in the last few days from the likes of Techcrunch and The Guardian which also proved to be a test for their server infrastructure. Many startups who go public with their website either get no visitors at all or so many that their servers cannot handle the traffic and they effectively go boom within the first hours.

Cuil is still up and running which seems to speak for the server infrastructure but can they compete with the dominant Google search engine and the other competitors like Yahoo Search or Windows Live?

Search Engines distinguish each others by the relevancy of their results and additional services that might help the user in his search of the perfect website.

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Google Alerts are a great way of keeping in touch with certain changes in the Google index. This can be used to track keywords, news, a favorite device or celebrity and anything else that is indexed by Google. The user can define a few parameters including the interval in which the alerts are send out and the type.

The default type is comprehensive which means that Google observes everything for the user. It can be changed to video, blog or web related alerts which would exclude the rest of the types. Alerts can be send out once per day which is the default value. That can be changed to once per week and to when it happens which could mean that you get bombarded with emails if you happen to observe a popular term.

A Google account is needed to configure and manage the alerts. The mail on the other hand can be entered freely and does not have to be the Gmail address.

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What Google has done for text search, TinEye is trying to achieve with image search. Instead of typing in keywords to find images, you can upload an image, or copy a link to an image and you will be presented with all the occurrences of that image on the net. At first you will see images which are identical, but as you go down the list, you will see variations.

This is a great tool for image researching and especially blogging, because often I find an image I like and want to use, if only the hand wasn’t in the way like that, or the background was different. Of course many of these can be Photoshoped, but not in all cases, and quickly searching for a different image is infinitely faster.

If you install the Firefox plugin your searches will become much faster, you can just right click on a picture to search for it via TinEye. It doesn’t get much more productive than that!

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Microsoft just made a 100 million acquisition of semantic search engine Powerset in its bit to improve existing Internet Searching Technologies for its Live Search. I use Live Search regularly and would say the results are now very comparable to Google and in the case of Image Search much better organised.

Better search is always good, but as a lot of people have been expressing, searching in natural language (“what is the capital of France?”) is not too useful for anyone who has used the Internet up to now. What I would like to see in a search engine is one that can differentiate “free” products from “free download!” or “free 30 day trial!”

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One way to save big at eBay is to find auctions that come with misspelled titles and descriptions. Someone selling a Playtation 3 will probably most likely earn less than someone who is selling a Playstation 3. A bonus would be if the user failed to place the auction in the correct category which is normally a 100% guarantee that the item will sell for less than it is worth.

Auction Bloopers is a website that is offering a search for misspelled auctions at various eBay marketplaces including eBay.com, eBay.co.uk and eBay.de. The basic search requires just a search term that is entered correctly in the search box. The script will then compute misspellings of that search term and send the user to the eBay plattform that is displaying the search results for the misspellings.

Entering Playstation for instance searches for roughly 40 misspelled terms including laystation, paystation and plystation. That search alone found 302 auctions at eBay.com using on of the misspelled terms. A word filter can be used to exclude search terms from the results. Only the title of an auction is searched by default but it is not problematic to extend the search and include the description. This can be done on the eBay website directly.

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