After a lot of hype, Google’s most anticipated iPhone Killer is out. Touching the G1 is no iPhone, but then again, its not always about the touch… its about the appz. So what is it all about ?
In short, the key features are

1. Touch Screen
2. QWERTY Keypad
3. 3.2 MegaPixel Camera
4. 3G & WiFi and other Connectivity Options (Bluetooth etc)
5. Most important of all. Out of the world Internet Experience & lots of APPLICATIONS

iPhone started a revolution with its innovative touch screen and best Internet Experience, but the G1 hopes to cross it all. You can get a G1 for $179.99 from T-Mobile. The Android Marketplace has also gone live along with the G1.

Currently from recent hands on reviews, it seems that the G1 doesn`t have a dedicated Video Player. But lots of other information regarding the G1 will come to the surface. As of now, the phone has lot of features compared to the iPhone. Although the market is not yet .. ehmm .. filled up like the iPhone’s AppStore, but hey its just launched. Currently there are close to 40 free apps and paid apps will be coming soon. We can expect a lot of applications in the coming weeks.

I was just surfing through Youtube.com to find a really interesting video. The video is a demo of Google’s upcoming OS for mobiles, i.e AnAndroid powered phone. I did a little more research on what it is all about. I have already posted an article about how Google Crome might end up in Android. You can read it Here.

The new mobile, called “Dream”, will use Android, Google’s OS for mobile phones, and will be manufactured by Taiwanese manufacturer HTC. The HTC Dream will be the first smartphone on the market equipped with Google;s Android. A variety of third party apps have already been created on the Google Android platform.

T-Mobile will be selling the HTC Dream in late October, according to an article by the Wall Street Journal. It also stated that T-Mobile will announce about Dream officially on Sept.23rd at 10.30PM. Stephan Frank of Android Authority posted a screenshot of the invitation he recieved to attend the press conference in New York at the above mentioned date.

Quoted by timesonline.co.uk

A senior executive displayed a phone that used the Android operating system during a demonstration at a Google event in London yesterday, but covered up the manufacturer’s branding.

The demonstration immediately prompted speculation that the device was the “Dream”, adding to the hype about the phone’s expected launch at an event in New York next Tuesday.

Google, which is notoriously secretive about new technology before it launches, would not confirm or deny whether the executive had shown off the new phone. However, a spokesperson did say that it was the first time anyone in Europe had seen a working phone using Android.

Seen yesterday by The Times at the Google Developer Day event at Wembley Stadium, the touchscreen device looked much like released photographs of the Dream.

When asked to make a phone call on the Android phone, Mike Jennings, the Google executive who demonstrated the device, said: “I can’t show it off any more, I’ll be out of a job.”

It is thought the new handset will have a slide-out Qwerty keyboard as well as built-in GPS (global positioning system). The phone is expected to be able to run Google’s range of web applications, including Gmail, Google Docs and Google Maps, and will likely also feature Google’s new web browser, Chrome.

The handset manufacturer, HTC, said they expect better sales for Dream than most analyst estimates.

A source close to the launch was reported as saying that the company expects to ship 600,000 to 700,000 units of the new phone this year, whereas analysts have put the figure at 300,000 to 500,000 units.

Just when I thought Google had done it all, Google proved me wrong once again, this time by launching a web browser ! I was pretty excited to read the latest news – ‘Google Launches Open Source Web Browser – Google Chrome’. Finally Google enters the Browser Battlefield. Click to Download Google Chrome from www.google.com/chrome

There are already lot of browsers available apart from Internet Explorer. Some of them are Mozilla Firefox, Apple’s Safiri, Opera etc. So can Google really take over the ‘Internet Browser’ market as it took over the Internet search market with its search engine ?

Internet Explorer currently holds approx 70% of the market share while Firefox has approx 20%. Upon that Internet Explorer comes pre-installed with every Microsoft OS. Its gonna take time before Google Chrome can gain some momentum in this long race. Google has gone the Open-Source way. Google Chrome has very plain looks. No eye candy here .

Google says Chrome is faster, more secure and easier to use than any other Web browser, especially Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
If there is any error or something has gone wrong with a plugin, Other browsers would immediately freeze up every open tab, but in Google’s browser each tab acts like it has its own engine.

Quote from a Google Employee
“If one Web app misbehaves or one Web app is consuming a lot of your computer’s resources, the rest of the apps can still act very responsively,” Rikowsky says.

Meanwhile, I ran a check on how people have searched on Google for their favourite browsers(The 4 major browsers), and the results were as follows :

Google Trends – internet explorer,safari,opera,firefox

Just in case if you don`t know what Google Trends is, With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. The Graph shows how often the topics have been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most.
You can check it out @ http://www.google.com/trends

Ok! I have heard a lot now ! Well, Cuil is the newest search engine on the block, From the above image, the first thing that comes to your head is “OMG ! 121,617,892,992 pages” !!
Cuil also has nice looking interface (unlike google – nice logos though), But looks are not the only factor to decide which search engine is the best.
If you look at the guys behind Cuil, you`ll notice some of them are from Google, the founder and others from IBM etc. They have a management full of big guns !

So lets see how Cuil fares against Google in narrowing down results from today’s one of the most prominent markets…The Internet.

• Test 1 : Interface
• Test 2 : Average default Loading Times for any search
• Test 3 : Search Results
• Conclusion

Test 1 : Interface

Cuil Interface v/s Google Interface

Cuil Interface v/s Google Interface – Results

Cuil

The home page is neat, clean and pretty ! Quite appealing to the eye ! The Search box is well placed. There is an autosuggest feature as well. When you search for a result, the page is displayed in 3 different coloumns (you can change the way it is displayed i.e 2 or 3 coloumns), which I found quite wierd (since I am used to google results perhaps ?!). The keyword I used was ‘hosting’ and I got a neat AJAX powered category box to help me refine my search, nice !
Thumbnails for every site in the result is displayed.
To goto the next page, there was a neat tab. It was a good feature to add

Overall, people may find it appealing. The look is a boon for newbies surely !

Google

Ok ! Now I bet everyone must have googled once in a while, anyways, the same old classic google home page. Sometimes the results page tends to get cluttered with ads all around when you are searching for a particular keyword, but in general the look is plain.
To goto the next page, I had to scroll down all the way, till I found Gooooooooogle

EDIT :
If you want to try google with the cool autosuggest feature, you can visit here http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
Thanks Andycolden.

Test 2 : Loading Times

For testing the loading times, I used pingdom.com. The unique thing about the tool in this site is that it loads everything i.e HTML,CSS,RSS any Scripts if present etc. I had searched for “php mysql tutorial” in both Cuil.com and google.com. The graphs are respectively posted below.

Cuil took approx 4sec.

Google took approx 0.7sec.

Since Cuil tends to load a particular website’s logo image or so, the time taken for cuil to load a page is more compared to Google. But then hey ! you can`t have everything together right ?!

Test 3 : Search Results

Now this is the most important of all the tests ! Everyone wants the best results ! So lets put our search engines to the test ! I obviously couldn`t run a full comprehensive search. But there are some things I have noticed.

1. For one, Cuil rarely returned any wikipedia results (atleast for me). Some keywords I used to search were nouns (names of prominent people), names of different places. I guess Cuil hasn`t given much preference to wikipedia pages or so.
2. Keyword: ‘country India’ – Returned results completely irrelevant, while Keyword: ‘India country’ displayed good results. (Cuil returned 65,000 results while google returned 36,000,000 results)
   Google also displayed much relevant pages compared to Cuil with the above keywords.
3. According to Cuil’s technology, it ranks pages on the basis of its content and not on the basis of clicks. Currently it claims to have indexed 120billion pages.
4. I wanted to know more details about the latest iphone 3g. So I used, Keyword: ‘iphone 3g july 2008′. returned 257 results in cuil which were not that satisfying since none of the results were fresh, while google was able to retrieve the latest information with ease.

Cuil has recieved tremendous response despite being released with barely any publicity. Check the following graph by alexa.com

Amazing response ! After 3 days the rank was 1,090,420

Conclusion

In general, Cuil.com is a good search engine. The results were a bit monotonous. The Search Index is very impressive, the collection is large, but it needs to be constantly updated with new pages. I couldn’t get fresh results using cuil.com and sometimes the results were completely irrelevant.

As of now I am still sticking to google.com, but I`ll surely give cuil try for its neat interface and nice autosuggest feature and tabs based on your search query.

Overall : Cuil – Good Index, Results still need more polishing