
Keep laughing; Cuil isn't quitting yet - fromedome
http://www.businessinsider.com/cuil-office-tour-2009-11
======
makecheck
The name probably caused them more trouble than it should have. It's the same
criticism being thrown at Bing (the idea that Google is a verb now, and you
need a name that works well for that).

I can't just tell my friends "hey, try out Cuil", I have to spend a few
seconds explaining how to spell it. That's no way to get the word out.

The technology is good, the site is very fast and relevant. But there's a lot
in a name.

~~~
sp332
People forget that Google had the same problem. Before Google, "google" was
spelled "googol".

~~~
jacquesm
It still is, google is the misspelling.

As for CUIL, their crawler was such a nuisance at some point that I blocked
their complete network. I doubt I'm alone in that.

And if those 'twiceler' guys don't start playing nice I'll do the same to
them.

~~~
andrewljohnson
Pretty sure twiceler is Cuil....

~~~
jacquesm
Ah! thanks.

That clinches it then. One more agent for the ban list.

Apropos, I think that plenty of bad guys are masquerading as twiceler as well.

Mozilla/5.0 (Twiceler-0.9 <http://www.cuil.com/twiceler/robot.html>

When 'CUIL' first came out their crawler was all over my servers, sometimes to
the point of making them inaccessible for users, I remember having a devil of
a time getting rid of them because they came from lots of different IP blocks.

Apparently their bot is called twiceler, maybe they should name it 'CuilBot'
or something to that effect.

~~~
whughes
Judging by your response, maybe they _shouldn't_ name it Cuilbot.

I wonder if their overzealous bots and subsequent blocking are reasons why
they launched with such terrible results. I heard several reasons for that
catastrophic failure:

* Overstressed subject-specific servers failed, leading to porn on hamburger searches and that kind of thing

* Crashing, random result variations due to overload

* Excessive media hype exacerbated the load issues

Another one to add to the list?

------
EricBurnett
I'm sorry, but 7 petabytes for the largest search index in the world? I'm
hoping the reporter misquoted the developers here. If we conservatively assume
servers with half a terabyte of hard disk space, that's 14,000 servers for the
web index. Google was estimated to have 450,000 servers in 2006, and
presumably has many more than that now. So less than 5% of their server stack
would be required to store that size of web index. Considering that web search
is still Google's core product, this seams easy to believe. And much more if
you include image caching, maps, videos....

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eli
The name is silly, but who cares. The search results just aren't very good. My
impression is that the ranking algorithm is passable, but that they just don't
have nearly the depth of Google. Less popular but highly relevant pages that
come up in google are completely missing from cuil.

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gojomo
I'm still awaiting the day Cuil does phrase queries. I know, most casual
search users don't do quoted-phrase queries -- but Google and Bing do, and I
occasionally use them, and Cuil has no chance of being my default search
engine if it doesn't take the trouble to support them, too.

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astine
_making Cuil the neighborhood store stocking the hard to find antique and
offbeat books._

Cuil's design is too slick to pass as a neighborhood book store. It needs more
rough edges and needs too appear old and established. Instead it feels young
and fresh and naive.

------
aarongough
Personally, I would worry about having my livelihood run on those servers.
What's their redundant power system now? Do they even have one?

Their wooden pallet/cables hanging over table system seems like every Sysadmin
darkest nightmares...

------
known
I've given feedback to Cuil to change their results page. But they _ignored_
it.

------
online
their search quality id even not matching duckduckgo, not mentioning google
and bing

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b05us
when i looked at this, i wasn't excited or envious of all the geek gear, i
just thought it represented a massive waste of resources. they took their
shot, they flopped...any time/mindshare leftover for google alternatives now
belong to bing and players to be named later (blekko etc). to continue to pour
money into hardware and development just seems like a massive waste. just give
the money to an inner city school...actually put that wealth to some positive
use for humanity

