The Star Tribune is Poorly Edited

From today's Star Tribune:

Who is Steve Zahn?

The "Jeopardy" answer is: He's that Minnesota-bred actor who's now Jennifer Aniston's leading man.

What? No... That is not the "Jeopardy" answer. That is just a normal question, followed by an answer to that question.

For reference, Jeopardy switches around the questions and the answers for no good reason. I don't know how a person could possibly have looked at that and thought "Having never seen Jeopardy, I'm going to reference the popular game show, and incorrectly. People will love me."

Is this nitpicking? Yes, but come ON, man... have you ever even seen Jeopardy?

Snipers on the Auction Seas (A Tragedy in 3 Acts)

Act I (In Which Our Hero Spies the Item of His Desires)

The Protagonist is perusing eBay. He spies a copy of Quarashi's self-titled debut CD.

The Protagonist: I need to buy this!

Chorus: When last you saw this item, it sold for $90. Your coffers are far too bare for such an undertaking.

The Protagonist: Nonsense! I'd never forgive myself if I didn't at least make an attempt.

Chorus: Then make your attempt, though it be in vain.

The Protagonist: Fifty dollars ought to at least give me a chance.

Chorus: Fifty dollars is a foolish number. It is neither so small as to be sensible, nor so large as to assure victory. Your efforts are both wasted and unwise.

The Protagonist: Not at all! See there? The bid is only at thirteen dollars right now.

Chorus: Four days yet remain. Temper your unchecked optimism.

---

Act II (In Which Ominous Signs Gather)

The Protagonist: I suppose I must tell my wife about my impending purchase.

Chrous: This ought to be good.

The Protagonist: I'm buying a CD.

The Wife: Why are you telling me this?

The Protagonist: It's sort of an expensive CD.

The Wife: What do you mean? How expensive?

The Protagonist: My high bid is fifty dollars?

The Wife: ...

The Protagonist: The current bid is only fifty dollars....wait....never mind it's at fifty dollars.

The Wife: ...

The Protagonist: Don't worry, it's a collectors item - any serious Quarashi fan would pay this much and more.

The Chorus: You talk about "serious Quarashi fans" as if they are tangible things that exist in this world.

The Wife: Are you out of your mind?

The Chorus: Our thoughts are akin.

---

Act III (In Which Hope Is Dashed Upon the Rocks)

The Protagonist: With one minute on the clock, I'm still in the lead.

Chorus: Sixty seconds is an eternity in this place.

{Forty Seconds Pass}

Masked eBay Sniper the first: I strike! Sixty dollars!

Masked eBay Sniper the second: HA! I strike! Seventy dollars!

The Protagonist: Wait! NO!

Chorus: Fifty dollars was already a fortune. Seventy would be too foolish even for you. Will you relent?

The Protagonist: Yes.

The Protagonist: This is ridiculous! The eBay system is built along the concept of a maximum bid being the highest you will pay for a given item. What point is there in this pointless sniping? If the user had placed seventy dollars as his maximum bid in the beginning, they still would probably have won the CD, and I wouldn't have had to go through all this nonsense. I'm sure it saved them a dollar or two, but so what? Stupid. I hate snipers.

Chorus: You are merely angry because it's a legitimate strategy and you're neither wealthy nor savvy enough to take advantage of it.

{PAUSE}

Chorus: Well?

The Protagonist: And what if I am?

Our hero resumes his searches, knowing them to be in vain.

Great Moment in Google Search Terms, Volume 1

To whoever got here using a search for "ladybugs mating in a music video", I'm not sure what exactly you may have been looking for, but it seems unlikely that you found it here. Here's hoping that your search came to fruition at some point.

Also... it seems you found my site about 48 pages into the search. I don't mean to pontificate, but who searches through 48 pages of Google results for "ladybugs mating in a music video"? Who even wants to see that that badly?

Not Cuil, Man...

It seems there's a new search engine in town. Cuil¹  is made by a few of the folks who brought you Google. I like Google, it does what I need it to do without giving me too much garbage or sponsored nonsense. Cuil would have had to impress me quite a bit to make me think about looking elsewhere for my web-searching needs, anyway, but I figured I'd give it a shot (new and cool things, and whatnot).

I started trying to get to the site when I heard that it had publicly launched on Monday. I had planned on writing up a quick 'first impressions' blog about it that evening (by which time I would have hopefully had a taste of what Cuil was capable of). As it turns out, if I would have written that post, it would have been empty. I tried 10-15 times to access the site that day, succeeding in getting to the main page twice, and succeeding in searching for anything zero times. I tried my name once, figured that might be a bit obscure, then tried 'Descent', both times it slowed to beyond crawling, then eventually just spit up a blank page.

I've been trying the site off and on all week, both from home and work, with no success. Most of the time, I can't get the main page to come up, and when I can, searching hasn't worked for me. Not once. Sometimes, it will bring up something resembling a search results page, but it will invariably be empty.

So, in the end, here's what I do know about Cuil.

* It has a very pretty front page.

* It has a very lofty opinion of itself (noting that it's index is 3 times larger than any of its competitors - which may or may not be true)

* When it does work, it's slow & kind of buggy (I'm not the only one who has noted this)

* It requires exact spelling when it does work.(that alone means I'll be using Google)

Eventually, I figure that I'll be able to use Cuil to its full potential, but even then, it looks as if that full potential might be mostly smoke and mirrors compared to the 'Google-killer' status that was bestowed upon it. It's not a Google-killer... not even a little bit. It's a heavily overhyped, underwhelming search engine that pretty much exemplifies the dot-com era of the late-90's.

 

Footnote:

¹ - The Gaelic word the search engine's name is based off is pronounced 'que-ill', not quite 'cool', like other websites are saying, making the pun in today's title a little more unforgivable.