Forum Moderators: bakedjake
SAN FRANCISCO — In her two years at Google, Anna Patterson helped design and build some of the pillars of the company’s search engine, including its large index of Web pages and some of the formulas it uses for ranking search results.
Skip to next paragraphThe makers of the Cuil search engine say it should provide better results and show them in a more attractive manner.
Now, along with her husband, Tom Costello, and a few other Google alumni, she is trying to upstage her former employer.
On Monday, their company, Cuil, is unveiling a search engine that they promise will be more comprehensive than Google’s and that they hope will give its users more relevant results.
[nytimes.com...]
Oh-oh, be careful, don't mistype Cuil.com. I'm serious. Such as li instead of il. ;)
I really like what their doing, and hoping for the best, but what in God's name were these people thinking with this cuil.com domain name? If they didn't know 2 transposed letters puts you on a porn site, ya gotta start wondering.
Originally they were named with two Ls at the end.
Ya. They lost one in search somewhere. :)
Brand Suicide
[webmasterworld.com...]
The owners of the li just became Millionaires! Probably were already. ;)
Search for 'cuil'. They don't have themselves listed!Guess who does though. ;)
That pretty much sums it up.
What I do not get though is how they get the logo's all mixed up.
Plus as already mentioned some results are full of the same domain.
I like the layout, even if the results did all look like ads to me on my first try.
BTW I did manage to get to the second page and do numerous searches so I guess they fixed the load problem or less people are searching.
Does'nt Google have an anti-competitor clause in its employment contracts?!
[edited by: Visit_Thailand at 10:01 pm (utc) on July 28, 2008]
Well, okay the people they are showing look better than myself. But that's the only positive thing.
My first impression of the name a few months ago was that it means "see-you-ill" -- there's probably a story behind that.
I was, and still am, thinking that the name is just for the short term; the thing was made to be sold.
[edited by: Tourz at 12:25 am (utc) on July 29, 2008]
Considering the goal is to beat or at least compete with a publisher system the lack thereof was a tremendous let down. A fraction of the 33 million could very well have been applied to a payroll system for publishers even if it meant taking on debt to finance it.
I provide services as unique and original as you will ever find online with entirely self moderated information appearing across all my two-thousand or so websites. The days of the free ride internet are obviously getting to the point of over. This launch was not cuil it was just cruel.
backed by 33 million dollars in venture capital
Seems like it would've been cheaper to buy out something like Gigablast, which seems to work OK, remodel it a bit and move forward quickly instead of starting from scratch.
Seems like it would've been cheaper to buy out something like Gigablast...
....................
Not cheaper, but less expensive. With only $33M they need as much traction as possible.
but there's no doubt that their innovative approach has come up with something much more interesting than m*h*l* and many other 'giant killers'.
the question that concerns me, however, is this:
If it settles down and starts delivering the goods, will we have to rewrite the seo book? (sorry, Aaron!).
Either way, I think it would be unwise to write it off just yet, and a new direction gives us hope of more competition than we've seen since M$ promised to beat Google, a few years ago.
I think it would be unwise to write it off just yet
Write it off?
Nah.
But it's still blocked from my server! ;)
[edited by: incrediBILL at 2:43 am (utc) on July 29, 2008]
I have since (today) un-blocked the cuil bot but will be watching it closely.
I have seen $49.00 shareware external search scripts handle crawling and ranking better then this lol.
I have seen $49.00 shareware external search scripts handle crawling and ranking better then this lol.
No, it'll be even funnier because NUTCH is free!
Not much of course... but interesting to see.
In July, they crawled less than 1% of my total pages. And they claim to have indexed how many pages? 121,617,892,992? Bull.
... I find it interesting in that more and more sites have turned to a black background (at least on their homepage) which was once a big no no, ...
Issues with images really does need addressing. I share a name with a pretty well-known sports personality. A search (correctly) brings up sites about him - but with my picture :)
Flattering for me - but not very accurate!
... but they should have purchased cool.com long before the launch... now it will cost them dear.
[edited by: Asia_Expat at 8:36 am (utc) on July 29, 2008]
And also, I wonder if it's a sneaky HCI test. I made a rubbish system on purpose to test user behaviour and reactions once. And it was very successful research.
Just a few stab in the dark theories.
