

Cuil has disappeared from view - fiaz
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/The-sad-tale-Cuil-far/story.aspx?guid={4814DBD8-BCC5-4E3C-8902-EDC107773452}

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trickjarrett
What did these guys do to earn so much press? Ok I get it, ex Googlers taking
on the behemoth. David vs Goliath. But jesus, let's move on to other more
interesting and more promising websites. And I'm not posting this as a
criticism of posting the story on HN, I mean that the other sites should not
be writing about them anymore. Bleh.

~~~
axod
It does have some interesting lessons in there of how not to do things.
Startups would do well to read and analyze all the countless mistakes cuil
made.

I think it's still being written about because it was such an epic failure of
mammoth proportions.

They did some things right, they got a ton of buzz, tons of visitors, but they
totally messed up their chance. Unlikely they'll be given another one. (Unless
they rebrand at least)

~~~
batasrki
I think that their main problem was lack of availability once the buzz reached
its highest pitch. I could understand less-than-impressive search results,
since that could be an ongoing thing. However, a search engine crashing the
way someone's blog folds under the weight of Digg/Reddit/HN effect is
unacceptable in my eyes.

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ableal
The piece is all "he said, she said", by outsiders. Not much info on what's
going on inside, or current results. So I bravely typed cuil.com (no link,
either), and checked it out (and I alone have escaped to tell thee ;-).

Not bad. I tried today's pet search ('Schopenhauer ladder', since you ask),
and the first page results are different but not much worse than Google's in
quality. Cuil does have a splog at #3. Fewer pages listed (370 vs. 18000), but
that may not be worth much.

Other observations: no page cache, means no word highlighting to help find the
target in bigger pages. No ads in sight ("Hi, Adsense? I'd like to enroll my
site ..."). The design is a little overdone; maybe some will find the 99%
black front page, combined with modern glossy screens, helpful as a mirror for
the soul (or just a mirror).

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TweedHeads
Cuil was an interesting idea killed by hype.

Instead of being a google killer where everybody was picking on their defects,
try a humble start then go step by step pushed by users who like the service
and would like to contribute to improve its defects.

Hope we learn from their mistakes.

Be humble.

