Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

Kakle is the new search engine that is making a stir in the Net. It is elegant, rather understated in presentation and is getting ready to take on giants such as Google, Yahoo and MSN . As soon as a search query is given, Kakle.com gives several options to the user. For instance, if you type Emerson, Kakle asks you instantly whether you are looking for Emerson Cement or Ralph Waldo Emerson. It also gives the thumbnails of pages alongside the results. It scores one over other search engines by offering free email with 5 GB storage. Even Gmail offers only 3 GB storage. Kakle also has messenger, chat, games, forums, blogs, and audio, video uploads. It has been in beta version for the last six months and will soon be spruced up further.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of the popular Wikipedia, is now planning to barge into the terrain of search engines. He told a conference of software developers the other day that his company Wikia Inc was planning to launch a community based search service. Wikia has acquired web crawler Grub to power the search service. But the real power will rest on millions of anonymous users, who will use their spare time to index and collate searches. Like Wikipedia, the search service will depend on humans and not on algorithms which are used by Google and other popular search engines. "We (will) collectively work to free the judgment of information from invisible rules inside an algorithmic black box," said Wales. He added that the new service may change the balance of power in the search terrain. We can take him at his word. YouTube to clean up The free for all in YouTube may soon come to end. The popular website has decided to introduce recognition technology from September ...