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Posted on July 31st, 2008 by Matthew Sparkes
Life at Cuil: strawberries, muffins and porn
A new search engine launched this week, prompting a surprisingly huge response online. To be honest, I was just as guilty of getting excited as anyone else.
Whether it was the David-versus-Goliath appeal of a tiny startup going up against a company that can boast to be both a household name and a verb, or whether it was the pure controversy – several Cuil engineers have come directly from Google, after all – I don’t know. But one thing looks certain; we want the search monopoly to be toppled.
However, while the same level of attention remains today, the tone is far different from the hopeful news stories surrounding its launch. Now bloggers are complaining, a lot.
Social bookmarking sites are littered with screenshots of empty search result pages, for terms that really should throw up the odd link; “Iraq war” for example (since fixed, for me at least), “Cobol” (ageing, yes, but I’m sure I’ve seen mention of it online somewhere before…) and “student loan” (which sadly do exist, I should know).
It is early days, admittedly, but as soon as you officially launch you open yourself up to analysis and ridicule. The complaints are valid, too; these results certainly don’t seem to be on a par with Google, and for an underdog to succeed it needs to not only match, but surpass the market leader.
Some of the complaints are extremely serious – with pornographic images popping up on search results, out of context, and even with the safe search feature turned on. If you can’t trust the site for use at work, or by your kids, how much will it actually get used?
There are also worrying problems with Cuil as a business. It obviously doesn’t have the same sort of cash behind it that Google does, but how long it will actually hang on to its meagre $25 million investment?
Sarah Carey, The Sunday Times columnist, also works for Cuil, and recently posted on her personal blog about how quickly the company is burning through this VC cash. The post has since been removed, but thanks to Google’s caching feature (not available on Cuil), the post can still be read here.
“I have a secret life. You may know me as a domesticated, rural housewife and while this is true, for the past year I have also tasted the life of an international software executive,” says Carey, before going on to describe day-to-day life at Cuil.
“Lunch is ordered in every single day. Huge fridges burst with snacks and drinks. Bowls of strawberries and muffins lie around the rest area. The company pays for a personal trainer and gym membership for everyone. A doctor calls round each Friday, after the weekly barbeque, to see if everyone’s in good health. Employees drift in an out at times that suit themselves,” she continued, before temporarily expressing worry about the spending.
So she confronted her boss. “This was disastrous! His company would never succeed if he wasted money like this and didn’t crack the whip. He laughed. This is the way it works out here. You have to be nice to people. I summoned up the audacity to ask for business class travel and was granted it without hesitation. Knowing the cost of the ticket was over €2000, which is about $5 million given the current exchange rate,” showing that her problem with the overspending, forgivably, was short-lived.
I’ll watch Cuil with interest, but would I invest? No.
Tags: cuil, engine, Google, porn, search
Posted in: Rant
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33 Responses to “ Life at Cuil: strawberries, muffins and porn ”
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July 31st, 2008 at 12:25 pm
I read the cached blog entry, and I have to say, how delightfully 90s of them! They probably outsourced the development and their vendor guessed that a bunch of PHds would ego surf their own names and made sure to return the right results so they would think it was working. I mean, how else do you explain the fact that they thought it worked and the rest of the world is wondering what they are talking about? Did they not use their own search engine?
July 31st, 2008 at 1:36 pm
> But one thing looks certain; we want the search monopoly to be toppled.
Do you know anything about anything? Nobody _wants_ Google to go under. They provide the best search results of any search engine. Why would anyone, in their right mind, want them to fail or even be looking for something better?
While I agree with the rest of your article, that one point is plain wrong.
July 31st, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Toppling the monopoly is very different from toppling the company. What’s needed is competition. Google has little to no competition in search and it’s even worse in advertising. Without competition we’ll get worse results. If cuil actually manages to succeed, both cuil and Google will be the better for it. And in turn, so will we.
July 31st, 2008 at 2:20 pm
I haven’t been terribly impressed with google’s search results recently. They either need to improve or be replaced. Will Cuil do it? From what I’ve seen so far it’s *possible*, but I wouldn’t say that it’s *likely*
July 31st, 2008 at 2:36 pm
> But one thing looks certain; we want the search monopoly to be toppled.
Doggone right !!!
I am truly surprised and grateful to Google for not having gone (noticeably/publicly) “evil” for a period of years (centuries in biz+tech world), and being so good to the open source world.
But while they have been and remain the best gatekeeper, they remain (effectively) the only gatekeeper to the internet for 99.99999% of people, and that is EXTREMELY dangerous.
Even since its release years back, everybody knows that Google will claim x million matches to your search, but fewer than 2 dozen (out of the entire internet !!!) will be relevent, and odds are good that if these two dozen don’t happen in the first 3 pages, you’re out of luck.
Using Google is exactly like using a half-full septic sewer; every once in a while you will catch something useful floating by, and the guide is actually pretty good at helping you wade through the sewage to find the handful of good and useful results, but in the end, its still a disgusting, overfilled sewer, and you can’t help but wonder if there is a bigger world out there, with less crap and more … trees/lakes/cities/libraries/good.
Honestly, I hope they both succeed; I think its entirely plausible. Personally, I go to Yahoo.com for news and pop culture, google for tech searches (chemistry, CoSci, etc.)
July 31st, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Unless Google has purposefully made their search algorithm worse, I doubt the results are suffering in the slightest and the difference is just in your mind.
Also, until Google start doing anything wrong, there’s no need to topple the monopoly. Their advertisements aren’t obnoxious, but rather helpful and unobtrusive.
Since Google is doing a fine job now, and since I can’t see them worsening without a massive change in their direction, the monopoly is all good.
July 31st, 2008 at 2:46 pm
1 word: vaporware. it appeared yesterday. it will be gone tomorrow.
July 31st, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Their layout, at least, is a novel approach. Maybe that bit is salvageable.
July 31st, 2008 at 3:24 pm
I think they’re gonna party like it’s 1999!
See, the thing about VC cash is it’s like monopoly money. When it runs out, you just go get more. The “problem” comes from acting like it’s real money.
You know how many sucka VC’s dream of getting in on the ground floor of the next Google? Cuilio knows this, that’s why they spend money with no concern about actually producing any tangible results. Or any revenue, but they won’t have to worry about that one until the VC funny money starts drying up. At that point, “creating revenue” just becomes your new talking point to sucker in even more VC money.
I’ll give it to Cuilio, they learned the scam well, and learned from the best. From the stupid name to the “it’s like work, only less work” approach to managing employees, they should burn through that $25 mil in a few months if they are lucky. It will be a hell of a ride!
July 31st, 2008 at 6:23 pm
The name is all wrong which is the problem. Also, if you type in culi instead of cuil, you get brought to an Italian porn site.
July 31st, 2008 at 10:58 pm
Why is Sarah Carey (sorry Dr Sarah Carey) so obsessed with doctorates? The term PhD must appear in that deleted blog entry like 20 times.
August 1st, 2008 at 12:33 am
Would someone please post a link to the google cache.
August 1st, 2008 at 2:13 am
@John S…
I think over time your expectations have changed. If you remember pre-Google, back to AltaVista, user skill was required to pull useful floaters out the tank. Reach back, mash up some AltaVista specificity with your current Google-foo and you’ll pull trophies from the tank nearly every time..
August 1st, 2008 at 6:13 am
Todd, there is a link to the cached page, fourth paragraph from the bottom.
August 1st, 2008 at 11:12 am
One point that nobody seems to have mentioned is that their search results are illustrated with images taken from other, often rival, websites. I wonder what the copyright implications of that are?
August 5th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Seems to me that everyone’s missing the original value proposition of Cuil. Their original claim was that they were going to build a search index at 1/10th the cost of what Google has produced. Has anyone asked Tom or Anna at Cuil what their actual index/search costs are?
I’m not surprised that Cuil’s search results are poor. It doesn’t appear that they have anything special in terms of a Page Ranking algorithm at this point, but that really doesn’t matter if they were able to achieve an index/search at 1/10th of Google’s cost. If Tom & Anna achieved anything close to this cost savings I’d think that they would be prime picking for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft.
At this point, if Cuil can demonstrate an up-to-date index that scales to Google’s level at 1/10th the cost, then I’d think Google or others would start taking a look at them.
Based on what (little) I know about Anna and Tom, it seems to me that their strengths are in the area of architecture and index. Anna is all about the index, she built Archive.org’s index, then went to Google and built the TeraGoogle index, now it’s the Cuil index. What people seem to be missing is that there’s a big difference between the index and the ranking system. Without a competative ranking system Cuil can not compete (IMO), but they can add huge value to Google if they can reduce their web index to 1/10th, 1/5th, of it’s current size. The cost savings in power alone would pay huge dividends I suspect.
August 6th, 2008 at 2:12 am
€2000 = $5million?
Is that the new math?
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