Sure - It took me all of 45 seconds to break the newest challenger to Google - cuil.com - which was built by some ex-Googlers and boasts being the World’’s largest search engine. So - like some blogs have already mentioned - Cuil isn”t so cool.

But - hey - it takes time to get cool. Fonzie didn”t ride a motorcycle until he was like what… 12…

And hey - you can”t be cool forever. At one point the Fonzie character was cool . Put him next to Jay-Z now-a-days though… So let’s try to remember that when we speak of Google’’s cool factor.

What is - might not be what is - later on down the road. Google wasn’t even around however many years ago - the internet is still in diapers - so while 40000 bloggers are rushing to jump on the bandwagon of denouncing the next Cuil thing I would like to kick back and say hey - be cool… give it a couple of years… coolness on the web is not a factor easily measured out of the box - especially when the box is placed next to the main industry goliath.

And I do like the black screen. If the Internet went all black for a week I think we would save 2 billion killowatt hours… On predominantly black screens… “Image displayed is primarily a function of the user’’s color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen.” Roberson et al, 2002

posted by M. Nedell 7-22-08