that little 16 x 16 pixel square that sits in the url bar to the left of the website address isn’t very important to some people, to others – it’s something to sweat over, discuss and argue over. google changed their favicon a couple of months ago, i noticed to be honest wondered why they changed it, i wasn’t impressed with the new design and thought the old design was better – but that’s where it stopped. a few other people went a bit further, quite a few actually – i did a google search for ‘google changes favicon‘ and got back over 810,000 results.

the reason i started this post was that earlier this evening i was updating my site and adding some links from a couple of design networking websites that i have been signing myself up to recently, namely behance network, linked in and coroflot. so far coroflot is my favourite for functionality and design – but that’s another post, the one thing that coroflot does let itself down on is their favicon. it seems like it has no relevance to the website, it’s a pair or cherries that is not featured anywhere else on the website – it’s not part of their logo, the colour of the cherries isn’t even a part of the site’s colour scheme. i use the favicon’s on my site as bullet points, but decided against using the cherries from the coroflot site and used an upside-down heart that they use on their banners and badges (see above).

you can check out what’s hot and what’s not in the world of favicon design here [http://thefavicongallery.com] and if you want to have a go at creating one, i use and recommend this website; http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon.

another week starts and another search engine is released into the world wild web with it’s aim to slay the mighty google dragon.

cuil presents it’s search engine results like blocks of magazine snippets, 3 columns and four rows of reports on websites that it has found for you from it’s very big database – which they also say is larger than google’s.

i tested it out and to be honest, i didn’t like it – i wasn’t impressed at the results i was given back, and the images that it nests within the results look a little random, some seem to be advert thumbnails that just happen to be on the page at the time of the search (or crawl) taking place.

some people will love it i’m sure, but it’s just doesn’t live up to my expectations after i’ve clicked ’search’. lots of companies have tried to get a slice of the search engine pie away from google and so far none have really got as close as a nibble, some offered payments for searching, others better results, some specialised in searching the social networks – a niche engine and others just bragged about how many sites they indexed while not concentrating on results.

there is one “new” search engine that i’ve found over the last 12 months and i was pretty impressed with it. it’s called searchmash, and guest what – it’s run by google. it’s their little test bed for new features and it works very well, the results are accurate and there are enough new features to make it worth using.

Just hit Google to do a search this morning and it’s gone dark – not undercover in a Jack Bauer kind of way – but to get across the message that turning your lights off when you don’t need them helps saves the World’s energy supply. A group called Earth Hour is asking everyone across the World to turn off their lights for 1 hour between 8:00 and 9:00pm this evening as a little demonstration slash experiment.

Find out more here; www.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/earthhour/.

i’ve just finished reading this intriguing story about how 2 very clever university students came up with a better idea to search the internet, and turned it into the world wide webs most powerful brand. the book covers everything from the tech side of things to how they got funding from early investors right up until their historic ipo.

so, what did i learn – quite a bit actually. the googleplex sounds like one of the most satisfying places to work, a great deal of thought has gone into providing the best possible working environments for it’s googlers. you can type a mathematical equation into the google search engine and it will solve it, for example 16 + 105.

fancinating stuff, not quite as good as ‘boo hoo‘ which was written by the owners point of view – but this is pretty close.