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
Keep laughing; Cuil isn't quitting yet
11–18 of 18 posts
Re: Keep laughing; Cuil isn't quitting yet
#12The 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.
Re: Keep laughing; Cuil isn't quitting yet
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty sure twiceler is Cuil....
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…
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?
Re: Keep laughing; Cuil isn't quitting yet
#14their search quality id even not matching duckduckgo, not mentioning google and bing
Re: Keep laughing; Cuil isn't quitting yet
#15I'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.
Re: Keep laughing; Cuil isn't quitting yet
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty sure twiceler is Cuil....
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…
mod_security makes easy work of these sorts of rules
Re: Keep laughing; Cuil isn't quitting yet
#17I'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....
Re: Keep laughing; Cuil isn't quitting yet
#18I've given feedback to Cuil to change their results page. But they ignored it.