Google’s solution to a “certain problem” is to have the user answer some math questions within a time limit at certain hours of the night, on Friday and Saturday.

But me, I get drunk and send inappropriate emails at all hours of the day.

Google proposes that “surely if you can do basic math problems then you have a solid command of what is and is not socially appropriate when it comes to late night email.” However, some question the initiative’s effectiveness:

Not really. Drinking seems to lower inhibitions more than it lowers other abilities such as math skills, and at least for me it never lowers my math skills enough that I would fail this.

Yeah, I had a friend in college who, when drunk, would only ever talk about two things: Thomas Aquinas’s epistemology… and his fiancee’s hymen.

Google Chrome. Google’s web browser to be released later today. In comic form. By Scott McCloud. And here are some more screenshots for good measure.

Google has now photographed Tokyo for Street View, which means you can now see both the Golden Turd and the next nuclear attack all in one panorama. The WHOLE city isn’t done, but you can see quite a bit.

Actually, Tokyo wasn’t the only recent unveiling Street View had. Joining the list is fellow cities Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Sidney, Perth, Melbourne, New Orleans, El Paso, Savannah, and a ton in between.

Pronounced “cool”, the Cuil search engine has an index spanning 121 billion web pages, and operates by comparing your keyword to the rest of a page’s contents instead of relying on “superficial popularity metrics”. This mechanism calls to mind the semantic web, but Cuil’s About page is too ambiguous to tell for sure how Cuil works.

What is sure is that Cuil’s team sees their engine as the future of search. Anna Patterson, who moved to Google after building the search engine used by Internet Archive, has low hopes for Google. From CNN Money:

Patterson enjoyed her time at Google, but became disenchanted with the company’s approach to search. “Google has looked pretty much the same for 10 years now,” she said, “and I can guarantee it will look the same a year from now.”

With these bold words and the talent behind them, as well as Cuil’s claim to fame of indexing a hypothesized three times as many web pages as Google, it is hard dismiss this Google contender along with all the others. But even a cursory glance at the engine’s functionality shows a less-than-polished product without much bite.

A lot of people have been finding massive differences in the number of search results between Cuil versus Google. An interesting example is found in “banana” and its French translation “banane”. “Banana” returns 47 million results in Cuil versus 97 million in Google, while “banane” closes the lead a little bit by returning 5 million results versus 11 million (though still roughly the same percentage-wise). A clear numbers win for Google, but dig a little deeper and you see Cuil vastly improving within only 24 hours since its launch. PontifexPrimus originally found only 15 million results for “banana”, and none at all for “banane” (unless you, curiously, turned Safe Search off).

Of course, the raw number of search results is much less important than the number of useful results. Unfortunately, Cuil falters here as well. Searching for “Spencer Sugarman” on Google returns maybe every individual website I am involved with, all on the front page. Cuil, on the other hand, returns 10 links to Undress Me Robot, and 1 link to an article about Burt Sugarman. The “banana” search mentioned above is much better, providing many relevant and unique results. But what Cuil fails to do on any search I have tried is surpass the quality of Google’s results. Instead, all they manage so far is to land somewhere along the spectrum of Much Worse to As Good.

This is likely to change. It is difficult to tell whether Cuil is incorporating changes as its engine is stress-tested, or if the learning is built-in, but either way the engine seems to be improving. If Cuil expands its hardware to ward against the downtime problems they were experiencing yesterday, and continues improving its search results, the search engine could soon stand strong against Google. But as CNN points out, Google’s immense power as a brand means winning will take a lot more than just marginally better search results or a slicker design.

The commercial promise–and downright coolness–of Google’s undertaking staggers the mind. Which is why many recent accounts of the project, from Toobin’s to Jason Epstein’s in the New York Review of Books to Michael Hirschorn’s in the Atlantic, vibrate with fidgety, egg-headed excitement.

Consider me among the egg-heads.

Perhaps it’s the short lifespan of the web that hasn’t allowed any specific web site to become a de facto choice for design immortality; but Seven was released in 1995, becoming an instant classic, so age is not quite an issue. Or maybe it’s the perennially ephemeral nature of the web, where web sites can change every year, month or week if desired, rendering the sense of commitment less ominous than that of printed or branded matter. It could also be the giant amount of crap that one has to wade through on the internet, but not much more than the amount of bad logos, brochures or signs found day in and day out. Or maybe I’m just thinking about this the wrong way.

So Vit is hard-pressed to find a cause for the web’s lack of such great heights. Here he knocks down possible sources of this dearth, and later he knocks down certain sites’ inclusion in the Hall of Fame. (Google may be a great search engine, but default blue links and bevel and drop shadow logo? For shame!) For any hypothesis on the cause of the web’s impotency, we’ll have to turn to Khoi Vinh’s argument that the web lacks great designers who both think and do. My question to Vinh is this: why is this true only for web design? It is tempting to restrict your vision to only web design, but I find it extremely hard to believe that great print designers are not also graduating to managerial positions.

Then again, maybe Vit is thinking about this the wrong way. At the very least, his logic seems a bit inconsistent when dismissing the age of the web as a non-factor. Certainly, a genuinely classic design could be recognized as such within days or weeks of its creation (as in Seven), so it is not that the web has not been around long enough for people to recognize a web design’s success. However, Seven was released almost a century after the inception of motion pictures, and its opening does not utilize any techniques significantly different than what was available in the previous decades. The world wide web (not the Internet), on the other hand, is like a baby. At most just a bit over a decade old, web technologies are still in early development. Hell, even half of what you find on the web today was impossible five or ten years ago.

While age of the medium is hardly necessary for a design to be considered a masterpiece, it is very influential when considering what the medium can do. Are we yet at a point where web designers can create a site as beautiful as the best Flash website, but as usable and functional as Google? Cascading style sheets bring us very close, Javascript and PHP (and the like) even closer, but I would argue that we are not quite there yet. It will be a couple more years until designers have fully stretched the boundaries of today’s emerging tools.

But should we even try to apply conventional graphical design to web design? Joshua Porter prevails upon us to recognize the web as a different beast, and act accordingly. However, as Jeff Croft points out in the comments, Porter is concerned entirely with interaction design. Google, Amazon, Craigslist, and eBay are all very usable, but they lack any stunning aesthetics (though Amazon’s recent redesign has brought the site closer to Vit’s Pinnaclism). Assumedly, Porter would also see the conventional dictionary as a design success, with its extreme ease of use, but can we really lump it together with Massimo Vignelli’s New York subway map?

Vit would reply with a resounding NO. How a user accesses and interacts with data are important aspects of design, but how that data is displayed is just as important:

When it comes to web design it’s rare that all elements — functionality, clarity of information, and subjective beauty — come together to create a result that is widely admired, recognized or lauded in the same vein as anything resembling the likes of Saul Bass’ AT&T logo, or Susan Kare’s icons for the original Mac OS.

I think web designers are still grappling with how to handle both data and aesthetics. Dynamic websites and visually appealing websites are both relatively new phenomena, each still coming into their own. This all goes back to Mark Boulton’s point that separating content and presentation has led to cookie-cutter websites [1]. When dealing with small website of just a few pages stunning, unique examples definitely already exist, and I think Vit will be satisfied once designers are able to take that beauty and create something that is both expansive (handling large amounts of variable content) and exquisite.

[1] Don’t you hate when you incriminate yourself?