[UPDATED] Former Googlite thinks searching can be better when it’s Cuil

A few days ago Peng told me about a story he saw in the New York Times about a new search engine from Stanford professor Tom Costello and his wife, former Google search architect Anna Patterson. I looked at their result, Cuil (pronounced cool) and I have to say it’s definitely not your old familiar search engine. My roommates and I were talking about Bananas Foster (not necessarily the ice cream from Hagen Daaz) today so I went to Cuil to see if I could find a recipe.

Sure enough, there are some recipes. But I checked out the Restaurants in New Orleans under Explore by category, and saw Brennan’s, which happens to be a place that Peng I loved going to when we were younger in New Orleans and our grandparents would take us. And sure, enough, there was a recipie for Bananas Foster from Brennan’s. Mmmmmm. Good memories, but will the roomies let me cook with an intentional flame in the skillet?

Cnet says the launch didn’t go completely well, but check out Cuil for yourself. If you’re running Firefox go to the site and click the down arrow beside your search icon. You can add the Cuil search engine to your list of engines to use in the Search Bar. Something tells me some of us may end up using Cuil more often than other engines.

What do you guys think of Cuil? Let me know in the comments.

Updated Sunday 10 August: Peng’s right when he said that Cuil too often returns poor, if not outright bad, results. I’ve gone back to doing most of my searching in Google unless I need to search for Ubuntu info, in which case I use Uboontu. Cuil has a lot of promise, but I guess I had beginner’s luck when I searched for a Bananas Foster recipe because other searches didn’t get me nearly as appropriate a list of results.

Congrats to Juan Pierre on his thievery milestone

Last night’s Dodgers win over the Giants saw a milestone reached in the bottom of the 7th inning when Juan Pierre stole his 500th base. In doing so, he also became only the fourth player in MLB history to steal at least 100 bases with three different teams.

There was also a bit of odd ball getting played again after Monday night’s double ejections over something that happened in the Dodgers’ third base dugout. In the sixth inning Casey Blake (again) hit a double that caused not one but two umpire conferences to figure out what happened. In the end the umpires went to the rule book and as Wasabi pointed out on the Blue Notes blog Rule 6.09g dictated that the umpire award extra bases, sending James Loney home (I wonder if he collected $200) and Blake to third.Check out the video of Blake’s disputed double on Ken Gurnick’s wrapup of the game for the Dodgers’ website.

I just pray to the Great Dodger in the Sky that the trade deadline passes this tomorrow afternoon without Manny Ramirez becoming a thorn in Joe Torre’s flesh. (Woops! I had the trade deadline a day earlier. Luckily it looks like Manny will go elsewhere. Unless he stays in Boston for the rest of the season.)

Peng’s links for Wednesday, 30 July

• Tom Dryer: StackSwitch and Wallpaper Plugins with Compiz 0.7.6. I had this link yesterday when I posted Tom’s post about updating Compiz Fusion, but I wanted to check it out before I wrote about it. The StackSwitch Plugin for Compiz Fusion is a nice application switcher that uses the flat desktop metaphor as a basis, and the Wallpaper Plugin finally lets GNOME users put a different wallpaper on each of their different desktops, although I’m not using it thanks to my use of Wallpaper Tray (available in the Universe repo in Ubuntu) to rotate my desktop wallpapers.
• Tom Dryer: Launchy Application Launcher Released for Linux. People who come to Linux from Windows may already be familiar with the Launchy open source application launcher. Now it’s available to penguin lovers as well.
• TualatriX: Improved version: Ubuntu Tweak 0.3.5 released! Earlier this month I wrote about the goodies added to Ubuntu Tweak 0.3.4, and with the release of Ubuntu Tweak 0.3.5 there are even more reasons to love ya some Tweak.
• Maximum PC: How-To: Install Linux Risk Free, With No Formatting or Repartitioning Required. Did you know you can check out Ubuntu without the hassle of installing it? You can, thanks to the 1-2 punch of the LiveCD and Wubi. Thanks to sharks on Ubuntu Forums for bringing this to my attention.