Comments on: Cuil

By: Guy Bague

Guy Bague — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 21:29:46 +0000

So tell us then Sarah. What kind of visa do you have to work in my country? H-1B? I, L-1A? Greencard? Citizenship?

By: Darren J. Prior

Darren J. Prior — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:26:29 +0000

I don’t understand why when I type my name in on google or cuil or whatever my blog doesn’t come up. Does anyone know why?

By: Paul

Paul — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 09:53:05 +0000

Cuil, my arse!, You lot dont even know the meaning of the word ‘knowledge’ yeah right!!!! more rubbish on the internet is just what we need.

Can I suggest Sarah as a ’strategist’ to Cuil, that you divest both your time and money from this venture. Stick to the Sunday Times.
Then again how about Cuil Windows or Cuil Linux??

I’m left thinking ’snowball and hell’

By: Search is not a solved problem « Returned Emigrant

Search is not a solved problem « Returned Emigrant — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 17:17:39 +0000

[...] note on their site and I’ve also been following the robust defense being offered on Sarah Carey’s blog. Cuil is offereing something different; the size of their index, suggestions by category, [...]

By: Pete

Pete — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 08:30:44 +0000

I haven’t yet had time to try out Cuil, so can’t comment on it, but the name just makes me cringe. Hopefully I’m in the minority. I think that most of the world will just see it as a stupid, uncool misspelling of Cool. From a brand-building point of view, “cuiling” doesn’t work very well as a verb, which is one of Google’s big wins.

By: John Smyth

John Smyth — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 10:10:11 +0000

I’m surprised that Cuil don’t have a blog to communicate with users, particularly to inform them of glitches, forthcoming stuff, cool [or is it cuil] tricks for users to optimize their searches, etc.(your example above, typing your url into the search will tell Cuil to index it the next time around).

Cuil will succeed in one of two ways :- they will get as good as Google really fast or they will be bought up by Microsoft or Yahoo. As for the fact that it took 10 years for Google to get where it is – doesn’t matter. No-one is looking for a state-of-the-art 1998 search engine. Apple didn’t adopt that attitude with the iPhone.

On the plus side, the use interface is very clear and user friendly, and the drop-links seem to be working better today than at launch (due to less traffic, I presume). The images still don’t seem to match the context of the search but that might improve in time.

Hope it works out – competition is good.

By: Braz

Braz — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:58:50 +0000

Electron – that’s a good point giving that everybody I know who works for Google believes they’re in a marketing company and I don’t know anyone there who isn’t highly technical. Google without AdSense and all the rest would mean that their primary income would disappear. I don’t know how many Google ad campaigns I heard stories about with key word costing going random thru the roof. I suspect its the fault of click monkeys or gold farmers, which are tacitly supported by Google when its not stomped down fast and hard. The stomping rarely happens alas.

B – in fairness, it took both Yahoo and Google quite a long time to realise that they needed usability departments, I doubt that Cuil have got more than a handful of usability engineers, if at all. Usability, done properly takes time. I’ll happily give them the space to get it right. Lots of new start-ups in the last two years don’t get it right, if they don’t they fail so why worry. The Internet Web 2.0 is the Darwinian evolution in action, time will tell.

By: Electron

Electron — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:44:34 +0000

The fact that ranking is not dependent on hit count will break the US monopoly on e-comm. – google is a rip off and is the only game in town at the moment. We’ve given up advertising with them and now advertise our site in the old fashioned way using specialist press. Cuil’s approach may catch a wave from despondent e-commers who are continuously subjected to culling by google’s ranking methods

By: Paul Moloney

Paul Moloney — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:18:15 +0000

“The site isn’t alpha, beta or anything. Its presented as the final result. ”

See, that’s the problem. When Google originally launched, there was almost no fanfare; people just gradually discovered a rather boring almost-monochrome website that wasn’t overloaded with widgets and ads and loaded quickly – important especially in pre-broadband days. (It’s still only 16k) They allowed it to gradually catch on and get plaudits and awards and eventually it became a behemoth.

The Cuil hype was extraordinary – a big day 1 launch of a search engine. I can’t remember the last time any search engine – or indeed any web site – got launched with such a press frenzy. So people presumed the product would match the hype. And when it didn’t, they scoffed. Unfortunately, that’s what happens.

By: B

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 07:25:28 +0000

Wow. Just say it. I am full of shit. Nothing like a personalised attack first thing in the morning.

They still left the user out. The technology might be state of the art but if it fails to interact with how the human works what is the point. The technology I am sure is brilliant. Technology alone is not the full answer.

I worked for IBM too so whats the big deal?