Ron Gilmour

I dimly remember the days of search engine plurality. When you wanted to search the web, you had a number of choices: Yahoo!, Alta Vista, Northern Light, Lycos, Infoseek. If all of that was too much to think about, you could choose one of the meta-search engines like Dogpile that would pass your query on to a number of individual search engines. But at some point several years ago, most of us accepted the fact that Google, with its page ranking algorithm, was the best game in town. “To Google” became a verb and Google’s share of the search market probably topped Microsoft’s share in the browser market.

Every now and then, someone would question the Google gospel and try to promote a new search engine. Take Teoma, for instance. It popped up in 2000 and a few people were excited about it for a little while, but after the novelty wore off we all went back to Googling. Not only did Google have a great ranking algorithm, but the sheer volume of pages in its database was unsurpassed. Google has some issues with privacy, but who is really naïve enough to think that anything they do on the Internet is private?

Once again, a new contender has dared to raise its head. It’s called Cuil (apparently we’re supposed to pronounce that “cool”) and it launched yesterday. Cuil claims to search “more pages on the Web than anyone else.” The number they give today is 121,617,892,992. In addition, they are up front about their privacy policy, stating that they “analyze the web rather than our users.” So, they are claiming a larger database and the moral high ground (remember Google’s “don’t be evil”?).

Cuil’s interface is quite good. A page of Cuil results looks much more appealing than a page of Google results. Each result item displays with a blurb of about 40 words or so, as opposed to Google’s 10-15. This feature is useful in determining the relevance of a site. Cuil also features an image next to each result. This is decorative, but rarely informative. In fact, the images often seem to have been selected at random from the site. I did a search on “corn” and found that the entry for the Kentucky Corn Grower’s Association is adorned with an image of the Google logo, presumably because the page features a Google search box. A search for my place of employ, Ithaca College, turns up a picture of a horse and buggy. I can’t imagine where that came from.

Cuil offers an interesting feature called “explore by category,” similar to Google’s “related searches” feature. For the corn search, the “explore by category” menu offers a choice of “American cuisine,” “agricultural pest insects,” “crops,” “sweeteners,” and … wait for it … “UK MPs 1826-1830.” Huh? This feature does not always appear. A search on something fairly unambiguous (e.g., sea slug) will not show the “explore by category” box, but a term that can have multiple meanings (e.g., cook, java) will trigger the feature to appear.

In terms of search results, I am not especially impressed. On the corn search, one of the top hits was the Corn Island Storytelling Festival. The first page of Google results for the same search yielded only items actually relating to the crop. Generally, Cuil does not seem to share Google’s affinity for Wikipedia. Google searches very frequently feature this site high on the list, where in Cuil it seems to come up less often.

So, from what I’ve seen so far, I’m willing to give Cuil high marks for a good interface and kudos for their stand on privacy. As to search results, I’m going to keep playing with it. Only time will tell if this is the next big thing or if it destined to follow Alta Vista and Teoma into oblivion.

Bookstores are dangerous places for me. Despite the fact that I’m a librarian and can easily borrow any book I want, I will still manage to spend money when I go to a bookstore. The stores that are especially likely to part me from my cash are small independent bookstores. After all, buying from them is the moral thing to do, right? I get a good read and good karma all at once. So I was at The Bookery in downtown Ithaca and somehow exited the store having purchased The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt. I really don’t know why I bought it. It obviously had something to do with India. I like India. It had something to do with mathematics, which I thought might be fun, although I’ve always been terrible with numbers.

The Indian Clerk, as it turns out, is about two early-20th-century mathematicians: G.H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan. I’d never heard of either of them, although Hardy, at Cambridge, traveled in circles that included such figures as Bertrand Russell and D.H. Laurence. Hardy, along with his collaborator Littlewood, received letters from a mysterious Indian who claimed to have no formal training in mathematics, but whose letters demonstrated an unpolished and highly irregular brand of genius. After exchanging some correspondence, they pull enough strings to be able to bring Ramanujan to England.

Hardy is clearly a man most at home in the world of ideas and numbers. While he enjoys his collaboration with Ramanujan, he is sadly unqualified to help his guest adjust to English life. Ramanujan’s nickname is “The Hindoo Calculator,” reflecting his ability perform complex mental arithmetic, and this seems to be how Hardy thinks of him. Hardy is uncomfortable with Ramanujan’s spirituality and culture and seems to resent the few non-mathematical friends with whom he shares other aspects of himself. The question that is raised for the reader is whether Hardy is like this because he doesn’t care, or because he cares too much. Later in the book, as Ramanujan is succumbing to an unidentifiable illness, Hardy is finally able to admit that he loves Ramanujan, but even then he only confesses this to the ghost of his former lover.

I found few characters to like in this book. Hardy seems rather heartless, and even Alice Neville, the woman who falls unrequitedly in love with Ramanujan, seems more obsessively maternal than genuinely loving. (Mrs. Neville’s infatuation, Leavitt tells us at the end, is entirely a literary invention.) The cadre of Cambridge dons is the expected parade of pomposity. Even such noble sentiments as Bertrand Russell’s pacifism become ridiculous in the midst of the intellectual posturing. Sincerity is in short supply, even as the first world war turns Cambridge into a literal and ideological war zone.

As a reader, I tend to be character oriented and often do not like books in which I cannot find a sympathetic character. In this work I found much to like outside of the characters. There is always something interesting about a historical reconstruction and Leavitt’s depiction of Cambridge in peace and war is memorable. From the meetings of the effete “Apostles” to the makeshift hospitals on the grounds, we feel that we really know Cambridge after reading this book.

Finally, there is the math. I thumbed through the book enough to see some really alarming equations and resigned myself to being unable to understand the math, but much of it is quite approachable. The major problem on which Hardy and his associates are working has to do with the distribution of prime numbers. Is it possible to say, for instance, that for a number N there will be x prime numbers below it? The problem is never solved, but in the course of the novel we gain valuable insight into what academic mathematicians do and how they think about problems. Interestingly, Hardy is known for writing an essay called A Mathematician’s Apology which seeks to open the world of the mathematician to the general reader. He would certainly have approved of Leavitt’s efforts in this regard.

Overall, I would recommend the book. It is long and it is rather short on high romance or tragedy, but somehow the pages keep turning easily. Every now and then I would begin to get bored, but never enough to put the book down. If nothing else, it is a wonderful window into a field of study that to most of is very remote.