Cool
It's actually hard to pronounce Cuil as "cool" once you've seen it written. I was so busy trying not to visualize the spelling I had to do the intro to this video about 45 times, but hey, at least it made Aaron and the guys in the control room laugh! Bill O'Reilly I feel your pain!
Needless to say, I'm not a fan of the name, but I hope the new search engine can live up to some of the hype. As I say in the video below, I've been hearing about this company for a while from people I really respect and trust, so I was a bit bummed that the site was down so much today. Also, in my informal tests there were nowhere near the quality of results that are on Google. Although this seems to change moment to moment. I searched "Sarah Lacy" and it gave me zero results versus nearly 400,000 on Google. For a moment I was elated! No record of the tumultuous ups and downs of my Internet life? I searched again and got 77,000. And none of the first few pages had links to my blog or any of the hundreds of things I've actually written. That's pretty sub-par search for something so hyped.
Still, I trust my sources on this one. I plan to continue to give Cuil a chance. For one thing, I like the UI and I love the privacy policies. If they can come close to Google results, they'll build a solid fan base with those features alone. They may never really threaten Google, but it's great to continue to see innovation in this space. Search is so important to our everyday lives and not even Google does it perfectly.
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New Book
An unforgettable portrait of the emerging world's entrepreneurial dynamos Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky is the story about that top 1% of people who do more to change their worlds through greed and ambition than politicians, NGOs and nonprofits ever can. This new breed of self-starter is taking local turmoil and turning it into opportunities, making millions, creating thousands of jobs and changing the face of modern entrepreneurship at the same time. To tell this story, Lacy spent forty weeks traveling through Asia, South America and Africa hunting down the most impressive up-and-comers the developed world has never heard of....yet.
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Sarah Lacy is an award-winning reporter who has covered high-growth entrepreneurship for more than fifteen years. She is the founder, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of PandoDaily.com, the site-of-record for the startup ecosystem. She lives in San Francisco.
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Cuil has alot of work to do. I did a search for my name and didn't get a link to my website (been in business for almost 6 years). So then I did a search for my website and got absolutely nothing. Then I typed in Denver Indoor Rock climbing and got good results. We'll see. I'll give them a shot because none of the other search engines are great.
Posted by: Jason L | July 29, 2008 at 05:41 AM
I'm amazed at the publicity they generated on Day 1. If only their search results were as 'cool' as their PR. So far a massive fail for me, but will keep trying to see if they get any better.
Posted by: Shafqat | July 29, 2008 at 03:23 PM
I think you "trust your sources" when your sources lead you to information that you can't personally verify -- like a president running a skunkworks of burglars and disinformation agents.
I don't think trying a piece of junk search engine first-hand really requires the pedigree and sound opinion of the Valley's best and brightest before you come to form your own opinion.
Posted by: jackparsons | July 31, 2008 at 12:01 PM