I get home yesterday to discover that Google has decided to emblazon gmail with themes, and I am happy as a Ninja in a Samurai stronghold. You now have 32 different themes to style your gmail interface to be whatever delights your heart that day. One for every day of the month in fact – w00t!

Actually, this is pretty cool. I'm surprised that it took this long for them to finally whip this out. You've been able to do the same thing with lots of other mail clients, as well their iGoogle home page – so why not gmail? There have been tons of folks creating customized themes for gmail for those who use Firefox (not recently though), hell I even did a post on it a while back.

At least now I know my email is secure, I have like 4 little Ninjas guarding it, and everyone knows the power of the Ninja! Just ask Sho Kosugi – and he'll show you just what an 80's Ninja movie star can do. Or if you like it local, give Stephen K. Hayes a shout, either way it's all about the Ninja.

Let the Shurikens fly!

The biggest reason is that it simply doesn't return results when it should be. Case in point, since I redesigned my blog over the past few days (ain't nice lookin'?), I had been trying to get mootools setup so I could scroll the page back to the top, rather than the boring way. I haven't had any luck, but Cuil doesn't return results, where Google does. This is only a single instance too. There have been numerous times over the past several days that I have been looking for something to have either no results at all be returned, or have results that don't have anything relative to say about the search topic. For a search company who touts they have the most indexed pages, they seem to have a lot of things missing, or massive hardware failures.

As I pointed out in my earlier post, they still don't have features like the site: search and image search, so that counts against them as well. What they do have with images is a strange idea of pulling images from other sites that link to the site where the results were returned from. WTF? If that is true, then maybe there was reason some of these folks left Google: because that idea is utter crap. So what you get there is a porn attached to non-porn sites, like some hapless lol-cats searcher (NSFW) a few days ago; don't look at the picture, and don't say I didn't warn you.

I think it's time these folks belly up to the tofu bar and knuckle down to do some real work if they want to salvage this thing. Put down the strawberries and muffins and get back to work. I know things are different in The Valley – but we all have to earn our keep sometime and sitting around like some half-baked teenager just after 4:20 just before a fit of the munchies isn't get the ones and zeros lined up.

I'm not making any predictions on the deadpool for this one, because I honestly think it has potential, but they better git to it. In the meantime – back to Google; after all, I've got stuff to do.

When I started looking around a few hours ago I did find some domains not in the top results when searching for things like WordPress, but just minutes ago it was the top result. I did run into an error though:

No results because of high load…

Due to excessive load, our servers didn't return results. Please try your search again.

This doesn't really bug me too much since I know 80 freakin' million other folks are doing the same thing I am right now on cuil. Running a search for a domain which I couldn't find in their listing. Granted this is a site that gets less than 1,500 hits a month right now. Google and Yahoo both find it right off the bat, but MSN fails to load it as well. They seem to be getting it under control for the most part, after all today was day zero. A couple of the things I don't like are the lack of being able to search for just images, and not being able to perform "site" searches like on Yahoo, Google, and MSN. These two issues may seem small, but they are two things I use quite often.

So rather than jump on the everything sucks until it doesn't band wagon, I am going to switch to cuil for the rest of the week, and see what happens and if I like it better or not. OMG! Get out! Really? How could I ever go a whole week without Google!? Easy. Besides, how can anyone make an informed decision and critique about anything after using for 3 or for queries? Leave that kind of one-sided, sophomoric decision making for ol' GWB; he's better at it than you anyhow.

I am sure Apple is happy about the problems the folks at cuil are having, since it takes the heat off of them for a while as the world takes aim at the fresh meat online.

At first glance I am quite sure there was an acute, collective yalp of excitement by the development community – I know I belched a few in my cube at work. But what about folks who have made the mistake of placing sensitive information within their files counting on the obscurity of the Flash file format to protect it? Well, I'll tell ya… they're hosed. Aral Balkin poses the question is indexing revealing too much. My answer to that is no. To quote Aral:

…security by obscurity — which we know is not security at all.

He is dead on here. Even before Google could index even the smallest amount of text with a swf file, there have always been decompilers. In fact, I can remember using one to recover corrupted files as far back as Flash 4, so this has never been good practice.

Google's announcement several days ago alludes to the abilities, and has confirmed that it does or soon will be able to index Flash content placed by dynamic means, such as SWFObject. This is all excellent news for RIA and Flash developers alike – in fact it is one of the things we have been waiting for.  Despite a persistent bias against Flash sites, these types of interactive applications are the future of the web, so it's about time that the major search players get in on being able to read the content – so we as developers don't have to build alternate methods to view the site solely on getting it indexed.

I am interested in playing with SEO and Flash again to be able to tweak the results even further to better enhance the product being delivered to the client and ultimately the end users.

In a world where everything seems to have some version number slapped on it, web 2.0, (and God help us; web 3.0), why the big-brains at Google couldn't noodle up something even remotely creative is beyond me. Moon 2.0? Really? That's all you got? I can see what someone was going after; trying to make all trendy and cool – but it's not. It's lame. The Moon isn't new, in fact it's actually something like 4 billion years old, so throwing down a Moon 2.0 tagline/logo/thing is a sophomoric attempt to make it seem cool.

The poster is actually pretty nice though (image to the right), and it gets completely ruined by the Moon 2.0 crap splattered over a great image. Then for the t-shirts, there is no Moon image, just the lame logo on a shirt.

Maybe it's just me, and the fact that I am so tired of the web 2.0, and now web 3.0, crap being slung around that it all just makes me want to hurl. Most of the people who toss it around have no idea behind the actually meat of it, so it makes it a worthless acronym for a movement on the web, and how RIA development is changing the face of the web as we know it.

With a winners' booty of $20 million smackers, it just seems to me that someone should have made the decision to hire a top-notch designer to come up with something a bit more creative than Moon 2.0.