emconsteroids

Some search engine caught everyone’s attention today. Cuil was supposed to be the next Google according to – well, first of all, … Google. But also the New York Times, the BBC, SlashDot, CNET and much more…

I’ve been working on a “new approach to web search” for a while either, and what Cuil did, I must say, is very clever.

If you search for anything which for sure will not yield in any results, for example jakldfjasdfhjklasdfaajdkfla, you will be facing a error message saying “No results because of high load…”.

I highly doubt that this has to do anything with the load. They are just not prepared to admit that there is simply no result for this query at all.

This rises the question: What is better? Admitting that there is too much load or admitting that there is no result at all? I’d go for the latter. Unless you’re cheating. Meaning, while showing the error message, going sneakingly grabbing results from other search engines and aggregate them. Or why else would you write “Please try your search again.”? You would only do that if you know that the next attempt would return some useful results. Usually, this is the case. Not however with jakldfjasdfhjklasdfaajdkfla.

Of course, the first thing I tried today was the vanity search. At first I got the too much traffic error. At present, I get 1,628 results.

emcons.net gets me currently 398 irrelevant hits. Let’s see how many there will be tomorrow…

Helvetica – the documentary film by Gary Huswit is now available for download in iTunes.

I got myself a limited edition of the movie on DVD last year and saw the movie a couple of times already. Even though it is not exceptionally exciting, it has a few interesting passages. Towards the end of the movie however it’s slightly too long stretched. If you enjoy beautiful fonts though, this is a movie for you. Even just looking at the images makes your heart jump higher … because let’s be honest: Helvetica is the most beautiful typeface ever designed.

What I find striking about the movie being on iTunes are two things:

1.) Distribution has become dirt cheap. Whereas before, you had to produce DVDs including all sorts of material such as DVD packaging, cover design, DVD design and merchandising, nowadays you simply upload it to what is to become the universal gate for software. This is good for the producers, the consumers and above all: Apple. This however is a worry to media distribution companies such as Universal, Sony, Warner and the such.

2.) The second thing that strikes me about this is what I’ve just done can be done easily: recommending or linking to it. This for sure will drive sales as a sale is basically less than 5 clicks or 5 seconds away from here. I find it wrong that I can generate value for all those guys mentioned above (the consumers, the producers and Apple) without seeing a single penny.

Something has to be invented here. I’m working on it. Stay tuned!