It seems like these days competitors to Google are coming out of the woodwork. Awhile back, I introduced Powerset, who is now a property of Microsoft. Powerset is bringing back the concept of synaptic search, while a new search engine, Viewzi is focusing on a different concept. Viewzi brings search to a new light with different views.

While Powerset and Viewzi are good search alternatives to Google, so is Ask, Live search, Yahoo! and AltaVista… The one who I think may ultimately pose a threat to the Google giant is a new search called Cuil (pronounced cool). Cuil boasts a page index in the billions while Google is in the millions. This may just be hot air; however, Cuil searches by page contextual relevance. While Powerset is searching page synaptics, and Google is searching keywords, Cuil is searching the page content. What makes this so different from Google is page rank. Think of those days back in gym class, it was a popularity contest when it came to choosing teams. This is similar to how Google ranks its pages, the more links, the more popular, the higher in the search results.

Cuil has it easer than PowerSet. Synaptic search is a complicated task, while searching the contents of the page are much easer. The other Thing that makes Cuil a viable alternative to Google is who developed it, Tom Costello, a Stanford professor and Anna Patterson, Google’s search developer. The one thing that I want to know, is why hasn’t anyone come up with a good alternative sooner?

Give me a brake, I said that I was not going to write about the iPhone, but this is ridicules. There are some great apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and then there are some down right awful ones. For example there is a flashlight app the simply turns the screen of the iPhone and iPod Touch completely white. This may be useful but I would not pay almost $1 for it! The one that really gets me hot around the collar is MyAccountsToGo… at $449.99 it costs more than the phone! MyAccountsToGo is an accounting and financing program for sales reps that allows them to view and sync their customers information, such as sales. This program has good potential for a sales rep; however, it does not allow you to modify any of the information. Give me a brake, at $449.99 and without the ability to modify information, this app is not happening!

Are we heading down the road towards another Great Depression? There are many signs that would make it seem so… The dollar is losing its worth while the price of gas goes through the roof. I now believe that we will see gas prices at or near $5.10 by the end of the summer. Even more disturbing is the fragile state of the Middle East. Something is going to give, and it isn’t going to be pretty. Tom Merritt, a Cnet editor, has made a insetting observation, and I think he may be onto something.

…you can see some historic cycles by looking at things that chracterise certain decades.

1820s – War/Recovery (If anything recovery from 1814 but tenuous)
1830s – Promise (Railroad construction booms)
1840s – Turmoil (Mexican-American War)
1850s – Depression (1850s depression, Bleeding Kansas)
1860s – War/Recovery (Civil War, Transcontinental railroad, death of Lincoln)
1870s – Promise (Telephone, light bulb, phonograph, reconstruction)
1880s – Turmoil (electricity, cars, new imperialism)
1890s – Depression (Panic of 1893, depression)
1900s – War/Recovery (End of Phillipine-American war)
1910s – Promise (Relativity, X-rays, radio, Hollywood, World War I)
1920s – Turmoil (Flappers, Roaring 20s)
1930s – Depression (Great Depression)
1940s – War/Recovery (WWII)
1950s – Promise (TV)
1960s – Turmoil (Vietname, hippies)
1970s – Depression (Stagflation)
1980s – War/Recovery (Cold war)
1990s – Promise (Peace, tech boom, Internet)
2000s – Turmoil (World Trade Center, Iraq, Afghanistan, terrorism)
2010s – Depression
2020s – War/Recovery

Read Pattern of the Decades

Update: The more i look at the market the more I think this may be true. The past few weeks have seen hard days in the stock market, many of them closed at grater than 600 point losses. As it stands, the markets are now no better than they were more than five years ago, and this after the all time high about a year ago. Things don’t look good, time to “batten down the hatches”!