For those of you who still wonder how it all got started, here’s a beautiful animated explanation. History of the Internet by Melih Bilgil

Ubiquity is a plug-in that enables you to seamlessly integrate common web services into your daily communication over the Web. It’s still in early stages, but looks pretty impressive. Visualize Apple’s Dashboard for web and this is pretty much it.

TinEye is a new web service for finding images, and what makes it different from Google Image Search is that it doesn’t look at the tags and keywords next to it: you must upload an image in order to find something similar.

There’s a video explaining it on the front page, but here’s how it works: it creates a “fingerprint” of your image based on the pixel structure. Then it compares it to the “fingerprint” database it already collected. This type of search allows for pattern recognition and incomplete matching, which in turn allows it to return even altered images as results. I don’t know does the algorithm works and probably will never too – just like Google – it’s a trade secret. But from the test results, this really works. And will probably continue to work even better as the “fingerprint” database grows and the algorithm gets refined.

del.icio.us just launced a complete interface redesign of their bookmarking system.

I must say that it appeals to me more than the recent rudimentary version.

I’ll post updates as soon as i get the chance to explore it in more detail.

Update:

It seems that the update brings nothing new besides small interface design improvements and the change of the domain name.

New domain is delicious.com, in effort to make it easier to remember. (People were misstyping del.icio.us – go figure). Old domain name still works for the hardcore crew.

…but it gave relevant results from start, if remember correctly.

Former employees of Google have decided to jump in the search engine market with their fresh project named Cuil, after the Irish word for knowledge. One not-so-small thing that set them apart is the fact that their search index is 3 times that of Google and 10 bigger than MSN‘s, but that’s not all: they rely on new set of algorithms that will contextualize your search. Will this be a Google killer? Many disagree.

I jumped on the Google wagon long time ago. It was fast, it delivered precise results, and it grew. Yet, few things started to bug me recently: I felt violated as my search history was saved and used for filtering my search results, and this latest Viacom victory was a drop too much. Cuil took a step in the right direction: they decided not to save any search history, cookies or otherwise, clearing themselves from any future problems regarding user privacy. It’s like they’re reaching for the user trust of days gone by.

I am, for one, interested in the story development. Cuil sure suffers from birth pains, but that is to be expected. It’s still not very precise and spews out results that have meaning only for basic terms. Any specific searches will give you far less then hoped for.

Nothing more to do now than to give it a chance and see if it improves.