There’s yet another new search engine on the block, Cuil, made its public launch today and already call itself the “biggest search engine on the web”. The new engine named “Cuil” (pronounced “Cool”) after the gaelic word for “wisdom”, founded by husband-and-wife team and run by a team of former Google employees. The people at Cuil claim the new search engine uses fewer servers than other search engine big boys, yet indexes much larger chunk from the web.

I played around with the engine quite a bit, it might be good in the future, but right now, it’s just lack of something. I did a couple of test searches and the results Cuil returned were often disappointing. Personally, I think Google is much better. Cuil is good for obsure searches, and not so good when you are searching generic stuff. But its nice to see people rethinking the way search results can be displayed. Instead of a list, it displayed results in three columns (you can switch to two column as well).

Though Cuil offers a unique perpective on search, it looks to be a long while before it can challenge the top players. Cuil has a long way to go…

Will keep trying it out for the next few days.

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Well, it’s finally here: Bill Gates official last day at Microsoft as a full-time employee. That’s right! After 33 years building one of the most important software companies in the world, he finally stepped down to fully concerntrate on Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is pretty cool considering all his money sure he can help a lot of people. However, he still remains as Microsoft Chairman as he is the largest single shareholder.

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Microsoft buys Yahoo? The Internet is swarming with rumors that the Software Giant is buying Yahoo to compete with Google - a leader in search engine advertising industry. As off now, there’s 57,700,000 search for the term “Microsoft buys Yahoo” in Yahoo search, 25,400,000 in Microsoft Live Search and 267,000 in Google search.

Many of you might be asking what’s the new name will be, will they come out with the new inovative Internet tools and will that be enough for them to take on Google? According to Microsoft, they have a plan to integrate employees and “retain” key Yahoo Engineers and the top people.

According to CNN: Earlier this week, Yahoo announced plans to lay off 1,000 employees by mid-February, citing what CEO Jerry Yang described as “headwinds” facing the company. It also reported lower fourth-quarter earnings — though still ahead of Wall Street’s modest expectations for the firm.

In conference call Friday morning, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer indicated he won’t take no for an answer after Yahoo rebuffed takeover overtures a year ago.

“This is a decision we have _ and I have _ thought long and hard about,” Ballmer said. “We are confident it’s the right path for Microsoft and Yahoo.”

To underscore its resolve, Microsoft is offering a 62 percent premium to Yahoo’s closing stock price Thursday. If the deal is consummated, it would be by far the largest acquisition in Microsoft’s history, eclipsing last year’s $6 billion purchase of online ad service aQuantive.

- Bismarck Tribune

Should they merge? Anyway, this merge would obviously give Google a run, and this got to be an exciting 2008!

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