Rhinovirus

Gmail is down for many domain users(such as myself), from what I have been able to deduce through searching and chating with other Google Apps users:

• Doesn’t effect users of the ‘basic’ non JavaScript UI(!)
• Doesn’t effect POP3/IMAP users
• Doesn’t effect widgets that display your mail such as the one on iGoogle
• Has been occurring intermittently all month
• Google still considers all of its services in beta!

Speaking of problems caused by javascript, let me tell you about a startup called pressflip which has some how managed to scrape a site together without the usage of JavaScript. Yes thats right they somehow have buttons, links, text, and even a search bar with no JavaScript at all. While other sites such as Marlboro cant even get a text link to show up without JavaScript pressflip has somehow managed to concoct an entire functioning website.

What is up with the internets obsession over JavaScript? You want to give your users a rich website experience? I want my email! Some websites inject it where a non-JavaScript alternative is not only appropriate but sometimes already implemented; of these sites I think it is fair to list WebCT as an example. Inserting JavaScript for functions that could be replicated with standard HTML is a sign of bad programming. And shutting down a large portion of your site for the JavaScript users is just as bad.

This is your fault, dear reader, so many of you have contacted me over this passed week about Cuil.com that I cant just ignore it anymore. Or maybe its my fault for giving all of my readers my MSN/AIM, regardless someone is at fault. Over dramatic? Not quite, I was hoping that I could just ignore and let it all blow over. After all, in a few months reality will set in with the investors and they will start demanding that Cuil turns a profit; after that they will have to reevaluate their ‘Cuil analyzes the Web, not its users’ slogan.

If they don’t start analyzing search patterns for marketers, then they will have to add ads, or sell their search technology to companies for private indexing, or something else for money. And if they don’t do all of the above then they wont beat Google’s profit margin. It all comes down to money. How does Cuil make money? Venture capital, and once that runs out… then they will make another business plan. How does Cuil attract visitors? Its doing something that has already been done, but with a nice web2.0 AJAX UI; and don’t get me wrong it’s a perfectly fine mode of attracting new customers, if your UI sucks no one will use it. However, if you focus solely on UI with no substance your users will abandon you.

I’m reminded of a story I heard earlier today about Xserver horror stories, it had a really nice admin GUI but that didn’t stop it from bugging out in mixed environments and failing to read HFS+ metadata properly; eventually it got so bad that the hapless administrator had to switch to CentOS. How is that relevant? No matter how much fancy AJAX you put on the top, if you return nonsensical results your userbase will eventually abandon you. Common searches that I run on Google returned zero results on Cuil, examples include:

• How to protect my home from Christians?
• Am I safe from Christians?
• Velociraptor Christianity conspiracy.
• Template metaprogramming and velociraptors.
• Do Christians fear math?

I could go on!

Now these may seem like facetious examples, but they are vary important. While searching Cuil I noticed that it doesn’t warn you about typos - after reading thus far, you should see that its a pretty important feature for me. The “Am I safe from Christians?” claimed to have 124,744,479 results, but only one showed up in the search results, where are the others hiding because I had safe search off? or is that some kind of bug? Why is it that I can coax more search results by rearranging word positions, what happened to double quotes if you wanted to search for specific phrases?

These are problems that Cuil will have to work out before I’ll be willing to consider switching. And as for the source of income? As a user I could really care less, I do use Google after all. But as an IT professional I don’t like wildcards, every failed Bubble(1.0/2.0/3.0) company ruins investor confidence even if these companies don’t IPO anymore. Call me 1980’s but I prefer companies who say “These are our products: a, b, and c. They do: x, y, and z. They can be used by: r, b, and g. The unit price is free, average, and expensive. That is how we make money”.

Nonsensical filename restrictions, yet another reason that windows isnt ready for the high end server market.