That new search engine, cuil, you know the reputed Google killer? It sucks.

From England I typed in "Small business news" and got served a dish of useless American websites - useless to me anyway. Why do I sit in an office in (Old) Hampshire and wish to see small business news from Cleveland, New Jersey, Michigan and Alabama? For the $33 million of venture capital that was reportedly spent on floating this search engine, I expect better.

Cuil is as daft as its name is - which is also French for arse is it not?

Cuil is dead, long live Google.

Labels: rant, search

This isn't a design post, but more of a tip to stop you being driven insane whilst you have to use IE7.

Does anybody else find the sound that IE7 makes when it loads/reloads pages really annoying? It's that irritating "tick" sound when you open a new tab and load a page. Or when an application you're running in PHP reloads every 10 seconds and you get that constant "tick.......... tick.......... tick.........."

I was working from a Vista laptop this evening (I know, I was in a hurry to buy a cheap laptop for my SEO work and the only one that fitted the bill was a Vista machine *slap*) and the constant noise really got on my t*ts.

To fix it you need to go into CONTROL PANEL > SOUND > SOUNDS and scroll down the list of sounds until you reach WINDOWS EXPLORER. At the foot of this section is the START NAVIGATION.wav sound. Either a) completely kill the sound off by selecting (NONE) from the drop-down list or switch to another, less infuriating noise like WINDOWS BALLOON.wav (It'll sound like you're being scanned by radar but it's far less aggravating than the default irritation)

Et voila - no more annoying IE7 pageload sound.

Labels: browsers, rant, tips

The definition of Web 2.0: The proliferation of simple web technologies allowing and promoting the filling-up of the world wide web with an over-abundance of utterly useless information.

Blogs and simple CMS systems abound and I feel like I'm really starting to see the same things day after day, over and over again... Ah yes, another Blogger site, another Wordpress site, another obvious Joomla! site... Yawn!

Oh, and I see you have one of those logos with a reflection... Yawn!

Let's get back to Web 1.9, it was much less stale and samo.

Labels: rant, web 2.0

I'm a big fan of Firefox and always have been. I was a big fan of Firebird before that too (remember that one, oldtimers?). IE6 has been the bane of my designers' life and IE7, although much of an improvement over Internet Excruciator 6, is still not as good as I'd expect from a team of talented programmers with a multi-billion dollar sugar daddy.

So why do I think Firefox is crap?

Well I don't, per se, I just feel that the last couple of releases have been pretty shoddy. Firefox has always been a bit of a resource hog, but I mainly put that down to my multi-tab habit, often having two or more Firefox browsers open with 20 tabs in each.

Firefox has just done it again - 2x browsers open, a total of 11x tabs and although only 130k of memory being used, it's sucking 98% CPU!

It's been the Firefox 2.0.0.8 and rapidly followed Firefox 2.0.0.9 releases that have me gnawing things on my desktop. I just checked my Task Manager for the FF and 19 tabs I'm runing and it was using 200,000k + of memory, and it pretty much locked up my machine. Granted, it's my trusty old HP Athlon 900Mhz with I can't remember how much ram, but the point is, memory usage wasn't this bad before.

Even my Dell 1.73Mhz laptop with 2Gb of ram and my Dell 2Ghz+ with 2Gb ram desktop are suffering too.

I googled for answers the other day and was tipped to diable any plugins. Well, they're ALL uninstalled and I'm STILL seeing Firefox slow as hell.

Anybody got any answers? Was there a "bugger up Firefox" fix by M$ in the last security update to Win XP or is this latest version of Firefox really just a pile of crap?

Labels: browsers, rant

A new client has asked me for some help with their website and part of the task is to assist them with their SEO.

Their current SEO company have submitted their URL to a few dozen search engines and are apparently re-submitting every month for a fee of £40. For this £40 my client receives a report emailed to them once a month. And what does this report say? It tells my client where they rank in each of the few dozen Search Engines for their own name! They're the only company with their name so they're highly likely to rank in position #1 or rank on the first page for their name/term and they do.

There are two "Search Engines" where they do not have a rank or position. One is Ask.com, and the other is "Open Directory" or DMOZ which is a directory and not a search engine!

Now apparently the contract with this SEO company is due to expire at the end of this month so this is the last report with the SEO company. I have already advised my new client not to waste their money on this "service" again.

To simply run a report and email it to the client on a monthly basis for £480 a year is money for nothing in my book. I'd expect to do a couple of hours work every month for that sort of fee and I suspect the SEO Company is using some simple piece of software to generate this pointless report.

I have to add that this may be a reputable SEO Company but this is certainly not one of their reputable products!

Labels: consultancy, rant, search, seo

Why does Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 have such a scrappy tab bar? On the PLUS side IE7's tab bar does use little screen real estate as they squeeze in a lot of buttons (including the Favourites, Quick Tabs, Home, Feeds, Print, Page and Tools buttons) but on the other hand I'm not happy that if a site has no favicon IE7 insists on displaying the IE7 icon.



Nice try, Microsoft, but increased exposure to the IE7 icon will not make me a more regular user of your browser (I'm only using IE7 as my backup pony whilst my trusty FireFox does some work via Privoxy)

Labels: browsers, rant