It seems Google has never faced such fierce competition before. CUIL, a brand new Search Engine application launched yesterday, comes with everything Google’s search engine has, plus a new, sleek, ‘web 2.0’ look. Just yesterday, on its launch day it indexed approximately 121,617,892,992 web sites.

Let’s face it, we all love Google, and Google has done a lot more than just the most efficient, popular search engine out there. Regardless, there seems to be a common trend around the web. We have seen it before between Apple™ and Microsoft™, between Facebook™ and MySpace™.

Not to mention the huge development of open source software, frameworks, libraries and even operating systems that become more and more stable every day.

“Either invent something new, or build on something that already exists” —easier said than done.

Check out this new search engine at: cuil.com

Now, having said that, CUIL’s features are not the most appropiate for every search. Category listings can be extremely useful, but sometimes we want to see the results of a search as quickly as possible. In other words, we can safely say that CUIL will never be ‘better’ than Google, but at least, CUIL might become more appropiate in some circumstances.

—The Stagecoach Designs Team

Here we go again:

Google has finally released its much anticipated answer to Wikipedia, Knol.

I’m reserving judgment for the time being.

Who hasn’t.

If you get any tech rss feed, then you’ve seen Google’s latest baby, released today, Lively.

From Slashdot:

“Google has launched a Windows-only, in-browser (you need to install a client first, though) 3D avatar world — Lively — that you can embed in websites and use to interact with other people. It’s not as expansive as Second Life yet, but expect things to get better.”

You know where I’ll be for the rest of the day.

I was never a big user of RSS feeds. I either found them updated too frequently, too little, or simply uninteresting. Then I found this website:

http://artofmanliness.com/

Referred by a Slashdot Thread I found myself pouring over archives, and wanting more. On the advice of this same thread, I checked out Lifehacker, the Reuters Science and Technology feeds, and Consumerist.

So, how does RSS relate to search engine optimization? From the Google Patent Application # 20050071741:

Documents for which there is an increase in the rate of change might be scored higher than those documents for which there is a steady rate of change, even if that rate of change is relatively high. The amount of change may also be a factor in this scoring. For example, documents for which there is an increase in the rate of change when that amount of change is greater than some threshold might be scored higher than those documents for which there is a steady rate of change or an amount of change is less than the threshold.

Not only does this tell us that what we all assumed to be true (even optimized content needs to be kept fresh and updated, but it also points us to RSS as an easy way to saturate our site with our target keywords.

Just one bit of advice for anyone looking to add an RSS feed to their site, DON’T USE JAVASCRIPT. The content won’t be indexed.

For anyone looking for a good RSS reader, I recommend the Sage add-on for Firefox.

In my humble opinion, this is one of the most useful javascript snippets web developers will eventually have to use and reuse. Specially knowing that absolute positioned elements ‘don’t have a heigtht’, and thus they don’t expand their containers or correctly position subsequent elements bellow them. In my original article Expanding Divs (The Basics). I explain the general logic of the code that forms the function that follows. Based on that, I figured there has to be faster way to accomplish this. So I converted the code in the previous article into a set of functions. (more…)