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It's Official, but not Surprising: Cuil Bombs

Paul Lilly — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 13:45:48 -0600

Someone cue up Taps for the little search engine that couldn't. No, Cuil hasn't gone anywhere, and that's exactly the problem. Managed and developed by former Google employees, the $33 million startup had high hopes of dethroning Google as the go-to search engine. Well guess what? Surfers are still going to Google, and it doesn't appear the same can be said for Cuil.

It remains to be seen if Google has simply grown too large for another search engine to challenge its dominance, but whether or not that's true, it's going to take a much better effort than what Cuil managed to muster, which seemed doomed from the start. Poor performance, indexing methods that slowed down websites, and quirky search results all led to heavy criticism following Cuil's debut. And that was before VP of products Louis Monier resigned from the team. Talk about a confidence booster!

So where does that leave Cuil today? Not much of anywhere. After an initial flurry of activity following the search engine's hyped up debut, traffic has waned considerably .In the medical world, that kind of flatlining means its time to notify the next of kin. In this case, that would be Google, but something tells us they already know.

Image Credit: Alexa

ComScore Shows Google on the Rise

Justin Kerr — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 12:51:26 -0600

The results are in, and this might not surprise you, but Google’s market share is on the rise. November’s results show a meager, but still notable bump of 0.4 percent giving Google a grand total of 63.5 percent of all searches being done in the US. Google’s gains came mostly on the back of Microsoft’s Live Search and Ask.com which both gave up 0.2 percent. In terms of overall search engine market demand, the number of total inquires slipped a surprising 3 percent over October’s numbers. All the major search players noticed a roughly proportional drop in activity.

Despite the fact that Google appears to be well on track for world search domination, it’s worth pointing out that it isn’t all smooth sailing. The last time we reported on market share results back in August, Google enjoyed a whopping 69.17 percent of the global search market. Some of the smaller players such as AOL and Ask continue to hobble along with 3 to 4 percent of the market, but even though these numbers sound paltry, each 1 percent of the search market is reportedly worth around a billion dollars. That’s probably why competitors keep popping up, and seem to be slow to disappear.

Sensis Search and Maps Gives in to Google

Justin Kerr — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 21:58:50 -0600

Ever heard the expression,” if you can’t beat them, join them”? It turns out this is an attitude shared by the executives over at Sensis, the advertising and directories arm of Australia’s largest telecommunications company Telstra. Starting in Q1 2009, all of the Sensis business listings will be incorporated into Google’s mapping service. Google will then be implemented to power the native search and mapping functionality on the site. Sensis’s decision has been widely criticized as an admission that could not compete with Google, but I would argue it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Many larger and deeper pocketed rivals have attempted to duplicate Google’s success over the years with arguably little to no lasting success. Yahoo and Live search aside anyone else remember Cuil?

The announcement was made at Google’s headquarters and Sensis CEO Bruce Akhurst said the deal would allow them to focus on their yellow pages business listings. Both parties have openly denied that any talks are taking place with regards to a merger, and according to Sensis the deal is only intended as a means to share revenue. Neither party is revealing any specifics as to the terms or financial agreements, but presumably Sensis determined it was the best way to save market share. According to Nielsen NetRatings, Google Maps serves just over 2.5 million Australian visitors, with a mere 1.2 million using the Sensis Wherels service. Even more dramatic are the search numbers with 9.3 million Australians using Google, and only 184,000 users choosing Sensis.

Another search engine bites the dust, can anyone take on Google? Let us know what you think.

Un-Cuil: Search Startup's VP Product Bids Adieu

Pulkit Chandna — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 08:29:15 -0500

Infantile search engine Cuil came out a cropper during its launch when it crumbled under the weight of its lofty promises – blame it on the copywriter’s strong imagination. But any startup needs some time, sans any distraction, before it can stake a claim for a place in the big league.

However, Cuil’s management will find it difficult to stay focused on its development roadmap for the time being. The startup has lost the services of its VP Product, Louis Monier, who has quit. Monier was an employee worth his weight in gold for Cuil due to his vast experience in the field of online search. It has been confirmed that there were “philosophical differences” between Monier and the Cuil bosses. A huge blow for Cuil as retaining top talent is one of the biggest challenges for any startup.

Cuil's Twiceler Website Crawler's Causing Plenty of Problems for Websites

Mark Edward Soper — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 21:56:21 -0500

The search engine startup Cuil (pronouced "Cool") we first told you about in July isn't very "cool" in the way its indexing robot works with websites. TechCrunch reports that Cuil's Twiceler website crawler is bringing many websites to their knees.

What is Twiceler doing? Last year, posters on The Admin Zone forum on Twiceler pointed out that the crawler was creating many connections in a short amount of time, resulting in an de facto denial of service "attack" on sites being crawled. While Twiceler doesn't work the same way now, it's still behaving badly.

For example, the JazzyChad blog reported recently that Twiceler was indexing invalid addresses that would become 404 (file not found) errors when Cuil users tried to follow them. Joe Kirp's Popular Science and Technology blog reports that:

The Twiceler bot is probably the most stupid crawler I've ever seen, it just downloads everything it can find and it seems that it just won't ever stop. If there's a page using dynamic input in a URL (a calendar for example) it will download the same page 100,000 and more times, simply by following all kinds of dynamic links it can find without using any kind of intelligent limitation.

By downloading thousands of pages per hour on each website it can cause an incredible traffic on a server, and dynamic scripts (written in Perl, Python or PHP for example) start causing an immense CPU load that may even take your entire server down (as reported by several webmasters). Twiceler is really harmful and can cost both money and downtime. A well written crawler such as Googlebot or Slurp (Yahoo) would never affect a website in such a malicious way.

How can you stop Twiceler from bringing your website to a crashing halt? While Cuil claims on its webmasters' information page that Twiceler obeys normal instructions in a web server's robots.txt file (a commonly-used method for directing web search robots to index or ignore specified parts of a site, or all of a site), many frustrated webmasters, such as Alex Higgins, have discovered that Twiceler blows off normal 'do not index' instructions. As Higgins puts it:

Cuil’s Twiceler bot would not obey my robots.txt file. Attempts to make it go away by sending it blank responses with 404 (Page Not Found), 500 (Internal Server Errors), and even 403 status codes (Access denied) went unrespected....I then banned the Cuil spider’s IP address. The it started using differnt IP’s and and cloaked its identity by not sending its usual User-Agent header (Mozilla/5.0+(Twiceler-0.9+http://www.cuill.com/twiceler/robot.html).... Basically, it would find a link to a given URL, for example http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/topics/blogging, and woudl begin hacking the url into different parts looking for hidden directories. Using the above url as an example, it woul begin crawling the /topics directory like this:

/topcis/b
/topics/bl
/topics/blo
/topics/blog
etc…

Eventually, it would repeat the processe for chopping up /topics itself. This bot was so bad that I had to programatically listen for malformed requests and ban its IP Address on the fly to prevent it from crashing my server again.

If Cuil can't make Twiceler behave, can you? Yes, you can. JazzyChad provides a simple addition to the Robots.txt file that will send Twiceler on its way.

If you're not a webmaster, what should you make of all this? Cuil's website indexing technology doesn't seem ready for prime time, and given its flawed methodology, how many of the over 121 billion web pages Cuil claims to search actually exist? You'll have to decide that one for yourself.

How Cool Is Cuil?

Chris Moody — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 10:59:17 -0500

At some point in our lives, we have said, “I can do it better than my employer”. It’s a fact of life of being a minion for some company that has driven you like an Alaskan sled dog in Death Valley during the middle of summer. The realization usually comes some point after you crawl out of a fetal position after work. For most of us that’s as far as the thought goes. For a few daring, brave people that choose to gamble free time, hard earned savings, credit, and sometimes their very souls they go out and actually try to do it better than their former employers. That is just what the people behind the site Cuil.com are trying to do. They want to build a better search engine. Better than Google.

Anna Patterson worked at Google for two years and helped build some of the core structures of the company’s search engine, including some of the formulas it uses for ranking search results. Together with other Google alumni, including her husband Tom Costello, Russell Power, who worked with Patterson on the Google’s massive index, Louis Monier, a former chief technology officer for AltaVista along with about 30 other employees, they are trying to build a better search engine than Google's. A huge undertaking considering Google has over 61% of the search engine market share.

Cuil, (pronounced cool) claims that their Index is larger than any other. Hmmm. A quick search for my website ‘haipyng’, returned a single garbage listing. At least Google, Yahoo, and MSN can find me, even when I can’t find myself. Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land, rightly points out that more web pages indexed doesn’t mean better results. There are plenty of junk pages out there that are nothing more than links to other sites.

Just for kicks I asked Cuil.com to search for “Cuil” thinking I might get some results about the company. Nope. I get results pertaining to the Highlands in Scotland. Not a peep about Cuil.com on their own search engine in the first page of results. None of the category choices lead to anything to do with search engines. Google on the other hand gives me Cuil.com on the first listing.

Cuil.com has an interesting way of looking at search engine results, but it still seems to need some work. It also has to batter past many other search engines before it can even approach the big boys, let alone the king of the search engine hill, Google. I’m not convinced that I see anything in Cuil that would make me use it.

I admire their determination. They dream big and who wouldn’t think it was just…well, cool to beat out their former employers at their own game. Take a look at it. Do you see anything that would convince you to use Cuil?