Zing Blog by ZingWiz

Helmut Krone. The Book.

If one requires a new best friend, one may purchase this book for me.

For those who are curious, but don’t know, Helmut Krone revolutionized advertising with his self-deprecating “Lemon” ad for the VW Beatle.

He was also responsible for the equally brilliant “We Try Harder” Avis campaign.

Helmut Krone. The book.
Graphic Design and Art Direction (concept, form and meaning) after advertising’s Creative Revolution.
By Clive Challis
The Cambridge Enchorial Press Ltd.
ISBN 0954893107

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Ok, so Cuil.com has been live for about two weeks now. I like the idea of it, a search engine that is less about popularity, and more about relevancy and organized results. Sounds great. They claim to index around 121,617,892,992 pages (as of this posting). That’s a pretty good amount. I’ve heard some really round number estimates on the amount of websites on the internet, anywhere from 4-11 billion (and counting). That’s an average of 11-30 pages per site (anyone know how many pages the average site has??) Either way, this seems like they are looking at a good chunk of the web.

The problem is…

I don’t think they were really ready to go. I tried out some searches when they first launched and got overly confused when all the SERPS had the same photos of unrealted people and random objects. Each page I clicked on came up with the same photos. It took me a few seconds to figure out the links next to the photos were actually different than the previous page. What’s up with that?

I’ve gone back today, however, and it appears Cuil.com has tweaked their search results. (For instance seobook.com comes now if you search for SEO).  But things still aren’t quite right. A search for Zebra comes up with some strange results (2,268 to be exact, compared to 57,100,000 Google results). Nothing on the main results page is related to the animal. A second click is needed to get to any results about actual Zebra. Aparently Zebra printers are more relevant than Zebra animals. Should I be ashamed I’ve never heard of them?

I’m also thrown off by the fact that there sometimes appears to be a bar at the top of the page and a box to the right with more possible results. The box on the right is marked “Explore by Category”.Except in my Zebra example, the categories don’t appear to coincide with the main results page. The main results page is technology oriented. The Explore by Category box has links to Zebras, National Parks of South Africa, Fauna of Nambia, Fauna of Angoloa, and “Automatic Identification and Data Capture”

The top bar references “Zebra Printers”. “Zebra Technologies”. “Zebra Print”, “More”

If I try to find a “how to use” guide for their search results, I may find out the difference between the top bar and the “Explore by Category” box. But if you ask me, the UI should be more straight forward. I don’t want to read a manual to decipher the results.

The other engines just give you a list. It’s pretty easy to weed through the results, but can be a pain if 5 out of 10 results aren’t relevant to what you’re looking for.

My suggestion to Cuil…

Would be to make the results immediately understandable. For instance, there’s room currently for 3 columns. Why not make each column the most relevant categories, with a “more” option, or other categories available in the top bar. Then some one can scroll through the results in the column that they are most interested in.

I would seriously work on making the photos more relevant, too.

Anyway, they should have done a bit more beta testing before launching to the world. You only get to make a first impression once. Let’s see what they do to bounce back.

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My favorite Web-related open source software packages:

1. Wordpress – easy to install, design, expand blogging platform. Everybody uses it…come on, give it a shot, you know you’ll like it.
2. Magento – A new eCommerce platfomr. A little confusing, but man, they’re are building everything you need into this puppy, and it looks great (but could use more templates)! Currently in version 1.1, but very deep. I see great things on the horizon.
3. Drupal/Joomla – both very nice Content Management Systems for creating dynamic sites. Like Wordpress, but on steroids. Both have their pluses and minuses. Drupal seems more flexible, with a more “professional” community, but Joomla has more templates and a larger community.
4. Notepad++ – I love this little text editor.
5. WinMerge – This is a file comparison tool that isn’t just for the web. I don’t use it that often, but when I do, it saves me a lot of hasstle – mainly when I’m upgrading particular eCommerce websites from one version of software to another. It allows you to compare two files, and shows you what’s differernt and what’s the same so I don’t end up overwriting the custom coding I spent hours on previously.
6. FireFox – Superior Web Browser for two reasons 1) it is more standards compliant than IE5,6,7 and 2) because of the nice web geek plugins out there like FireBug,  Web Developer Toolbar, SeoBook.com’s SEO plugin, IE Tab (eliminates need for IE!), Screengrab (for the portfolio sots), and a ton more. -  3.0 was just released like 2 weeks ago (at the time of this posting)
7. lipsum.com – This isn’t exactly open source I guess, but I thought I’d include it. I pretty much always go here to get filler text for design projects. I’ve been to a few other sites that may be better (maybe), but this one is always the one I always remember, and it’s got a text generator where you can specify how much text you want.

What are your favorites?

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