Can anyone compete with Google?
July saw the much fan-fared launch of Cuil (pronounced cool), which so far, to many in the industry, hasn’t quite lived up to the hype.
Billed as a potential Google killer and dubbed the “world's biggest search engine”, the initial response has been lukewarm, with mixed reviews from many of the industry.
It certainly didn’t help that the site went down shortly after launch and that general first impressions certainly haven’t put Cuil in the same league as Google (or Yahoo and MSN for that matter).
Q&A: Vicky Smith of Travel.co.uk
Travel.co.uk is the latest entrant into the travel comparison market, having launched last week with a website that compares package holidays from some of the UK's top tour operators and travel agents.
We talked to Travel.co.uk's Marketing Manager Vicky Smith about the site...
Site review: Travel.co.uk
Travel.co.uk launched a package holiday comparison site last week, with a focus on providing a better user experience than existing competitors.
We have taken a look to see how it measures up...
Q&A: Thomas Busch of Careerjet
Careerjet is a job search engine that began as a bet by its founders, Thomas Busch and Jean-Benoit Andrieu.
It appears they have won - it now aggregates content from over 59,000 sites daily, and currently displays upwards of 21m vacancies.
We talked to Busch about the site's development and the semantic technology behind its search functions.
Visual book browsing with Zoomii
Zoomii, launched last week, is a virtual bookstore that displays books from Amazon.
The site is built on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud and uses the Amazon S3 hosted storage service. Buyers are directed to the online retail giant via an affiliate link.
Polar Rose widens beta test
Polar Rose is a Swedish startup that has been developing facial recognition technology for image search since it launched at the end of 2006.
Q&A: Kieron Smith of BookRabbit.com
BookRabbit is a recently launched website which combines book retailing with some very useful social network features. Users can upload their bookshelves and compare these with other users.
We recently talked to MD Kieron Smith, who has previously managed e-commerce operations at both Waterstones and Game Group....
Q&A: Shane Lake, co-founder of hungryhouse.co.uk
Hungryhouse, a site that helps users find and order takeaways online, came away from a Dragons' Den appearance last year with the promise of a £100,000 investment.
Unfortunately, the deal didn't work out in the end and co-founders Shane Lake and Tony Charles have since received a £150,000 cash injection from elsewhere.
We talked to Shane about the Dragons' Den experience and where they see the site heading...
Are you coping with Universal Search?
Google has evolved its search results to include images, news, recent blog posts, videos and related links.
Let's build a quick to-do list to spruce up your site for Universal Search.
Travel websites need to improve usability - study
There is plenty of room for improving the user experience of some of the UK's top travel websites, according to a new usability study.
Webcredible's Flights Online study looked at the flight search and booking process on 20 travel agent and airline websites.
The highest scoring website was Opodo with 67%, while Monarch came off worst on 38%. On average, travel agent websites were more usable than the airlines' sites.
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Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
