A few ex-Google employees just launched a new search engine called CUIL (pronounced cool). The UI is sexy, black with white text and laid out in three columns, allowing you to quickly scan the results. It’s got some nifty AJAX sliding menus on the searches that allows you to view sub categories in your search.

According to their website, CUIL “Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.”

CUIL ranks pages based on relevancy of the content so I did a search for my own name and got links to content I’d written or mentions of me or the company, but several of the images that came up with the search were totally unrelated to the content on the page or my name. (There’s no mention of the potomac on the page and we’re in California.)

I did another search for the Exploratorium and discovered some nice features. A box pops up with related searches such as location, other museums in the area, local information and maps. Sweet!

They may need more time to index as fully as they intend to. A search for Twitter on Google yielded 73,400,000 results and on CUIL 800,000. I didn’t go through them all to see if the 72,600,000 missing links were irrelevant. Maybe I’ll try a smaller search.

All in all I think CUIL needs more time to develop, but I like the direction. For the moment I prefer Chunkit which returns more digestible chunks of information, let’s you email the “Chunk” to a friend, and shows you an indexed version of any site you visit. More on that one later.

When Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh posted to Twitter Serena Williams was going to be in the office and to send questions for her, I thought, hey, good idea.

It’s just another example of how this company gets social media marketing. It’s fresh, it’s innovative, it’s real and we like that.

Hsieh is a great evangelist for Twitter. See the Twitter page on the company site to hear more about his views on Twitter, see links to company employees’ Tweets and public mention of Zappos’ on Twitter.
and then read his blog to get an idea of the company values and how those values carry over to staff and how this company has grown with this kind of thinking at the helm.

Social media participation like this can really pay off in interesting ways. When compeitor DSW decided to let Zappos know about a lawsuit for service mark infringement, Hsieh told us about it on Twitter. He spoke openly and privately to many of his followers on Twitter about how he felt about the way the lawsuit was revealed to him and the community definitely rallied around him to lend support.

Rock on Zappos.Who wouldn’t want to work there?

The parade of apps that support Twitter never ends, and that’s probably what both brings Twitter to it’s knees and keeps people using the app. All these shiny new toys cannot be ignored. TweetDeck is the newest of these, and, as usual, it was irresistible to sign up for the beta.

I’m a big fan of Summize for keeping track of topics that pop up on Twitter, and I’m also a big fan of Adobe Air clients that make my life easier, so beta testing TweetDeck is a no-brainer.

One of the things that drives me bonkers about Twitter is that when they start to get a heavy load they turn off pagination, or even replies. This means if someone replied to an interesting Tweet last night you’re going to miss it. Using clients like Twhirl let’s you view these older tweets, but you have to scan through a pile of content to get there, and in a pretty small window. This can be painful.

TweetDeck archives up to 168 hours of Twitter traffic in their databases, allowing you to see what you missed while you were offline.
Even if Twitter is offline, you can still follow the tweets that happened before the outage.

You can see your Twitter results in multiple columns, All Tweets, Replies, Group, and Search, making it much easier to quickly scan for what you wanted to find.

The group tab allows you to select Tweeters you want to follow relative to a topic, your friends, or whatever else you’d like, making it a lot easier to see what’s going on in particular areas of interest.

You can perform global Twitter searches using Summize, or local searches of just your friends, and the results stay in the search window, updating automatically.

Remember, this is still in Beta, so there are a few glitches. I noticed that some of my friends didn’t show up in the group lists (This may be because they hadn’t posted recently?), but overall it’s a solid app and a welcome addition to my toolkit.