Separately, in a bid to shore up morale within a company that has been besieged by competition, a tough advertising market and the so far unwanted takeover gestures of Microsoft, Yahoo has introduced a campaign to encourage employees to dress in purple–the company’s primary color–at work.
–ZDNet

You know things are bad when management tells the people to pull “morale building” stunts like this.

hull taking in water? arrange the deckchairs.

it’s dark and you have no lights? just start whistling.

predator approaching? bury your head–if you can’t see him, he isn’t there.

okay, maybe that’s a bit harsh–they are trying to rearrange their homepage, after all…

but could you just leave the Barney costumes out of the equation, Yahoo?

in related news, an overdue rant:

have you tried Cuil, the (latest) Google-killer?

apparently, its founders believe that the reason we all left Yahoo is the reason we should now leave Google for Cuil: web page content analysis.

remember the early days in search when Yahoo would try to determine the relevance of a page by examining its contents?
and so we ended up with oodles of webpages with paragraphs of text at the top and the bottom that said sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex…
and the page was about some guy’s holiday in the Alps or something.

now, Cuil isn’t that dumb, but the Cuil team somehow believes that Google’s PageRank tech is “superficial”. you know, the tech that changed search forever by ranking pages democratically: pages about holidays rose in relevance the more they were linked to by pages about holidays…

well, the founder of Cuil once poached salmon from the River Boyne in Ireland, where the Salmon of Knowledge was caught.
this was a magic fish, see. it knew everything there was to know about everything.
so maybe, just maybe, the Cuil folk know something about search that the rest of us don’t.

you use Cuil for yourself and be the judge.