Not So Cuil After All • Hacker News Board

Re: Not So Cuil After All

#11

Post by blogimus » Mon, Jul 28, 2008, 7:48 PM UTC

smoody wrote: post #3

Unless the blog author builds software that never crashes -- even when it get millions of hits on its first day, then he should cut them some slack. I'll put money on the fact that Google didn't have the same kind of traffic on their first day that Cuil did. And Google has had 10 years to get it write. Yet he expects perfection on the first day.

Today was the first day I heard of Cuil.

I don't think it is as much of a matter of writing software that never crashes, but rather a matter of protecting your site from crashing on the launch.

I'm interested in their reasoning for going with a "grand opening" and subjecting the site being hammered instead of inviting groups of early adopters/beta testers and incrementally stress testing the system.

Re: Not So Cuil After All

#12

Post by unalone » Mon, Jul 28, 2008, 8:55 PM UTC

smoody wrote: post #3

Unless the blog author builds software that never crashes -- even when it get millions of hits on its first day, then he should cut them some slack. I'll put money on the fact that Google didn't have the same kind of traffic on their first day that Cuil did. And Google has had 10 years to get it write. Yet he expects perfection on the first day.

That's because Google lived in an era where there weren't a bunch of asshole flunkies writing about tech startups. They created a product that spread via word-of-mouth, not through press releases. People that used Google liked it, and it spread.

If you launch under the pretense of being a possible Google killer - and the people making this certainly did nothing to stifle that outrageous claim - then you need to expect a ton of flack when something goes wrong. And things went wrong.

Re: Not So Cuil After All

#13

Post by captain-m » Tue, Jul 29, 2008, 8:34 AM UTC

Cuil does have some things going for it though. They have a great privacy policy and the category function seems to be working quite well.

Hopefully the search results will improve over time. I'd love to see a Google competitor.