Google’s Matt Cutts has posted a response/defense to the notion that Google is out to steal any thunder. He takes each point made by Mike Markson, the Blekko guy, and counters it with why Google was not "stealing any thunder." His response to that initial point is this:

"I wasn’t familiar with this one, so I dropped an email to Ola Rosling, the Googler employee who wrote the blog post announcement," says Cutts. "It turns out that there’s a straightforward reason for the timing: the blog post was planned for a different day, but an early/unexpected baby arrival resulted in this blog post being rescheduled."

Another instance mentioned by Markson was when Cuil announced that it indexed 120 billion documents, and 3 days before it Google announced it had a trillion. Cutts says Google passed a trillion a month before.

There are several other items mentioned, but Cutts counters each one, though Markson is not entirely convinced by all of them as an update to his original post indicates.

Is Google out to steal the thunder of others? Maybe, maybe not. Does Google have the right to do so? I don’t see why not. If potential competitors are announcing things that can persuade people that they are better than Google in some way, why would Google not want people to know that they are as good/better in that particular area when applicable? Wouldn’t you do the same for your business? Yes, Google is a very dominant force, but while they generally don’t turn out to be, how many of these things have been labeled "Google-killers?" Is Google supposed to roll over to the competition?  What do you think?

It’s not an ideal thing when any exec leaves a company, of course.  The timing of this development – it comes less than two months after Cuil’s disastrous launch – makes the situation worse.

 Louis Monier

Then there’s what Michael Arrington reports: "Monier was recruited away from Google a year ago, where he was working on advanced search products.  Prior to Google he was the head of search at eBay and was the cofounder and CTO of AltaVista.  He is widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of Internet search according to search experts Danny Sullivan, John Battelle and others."

It should come as no surprise that no replacement has been named.  Monier intends to at least serve Cuil as a consultant, though, so things could be worse for the company.

One last, entirely irrelevant note: depending on his hairstyle, Monier looks a bit like either John Ratzenberger or "Survivor" winner Richard Hatch.

Hitwise General Manager of Global Research Bill Tancer reports that after an initial spike last week rocketing Cuil to a rank of 106 among websites at launch and grabbing over half a percent search share, the would-be dark horse has dropped 1034th in terms of traffic, and 34th among search engines.

But that means it’s still on the radar. Cuil will just be lower key, and, more importantly, lesser trafficked while the pedigree engineers make much, much needed tweaks and hope for a second chance.

Tancer’s other numbers are interesting. The majority (66%) of those using Cuil are male, which is not so surprising, historically speaking. Things get a little weird, though, when Tancer reveals that the largest age group using the search engine qualify for senior citizen discounts at Shoney’s.

He guesses it has to do with the number of news sites covering Cuil’s launch and directing traffic there still. 
 

Regardless, the important part is the 50 million searches conducted the first day of launch. "[T]hat’s in the same ballpark as Microsoft’s Live Search and approaching Yahoo!. And they have a bit more infrastructure than our small start-up," the Cuil team blogs. The traffic "outstripped" their ability to respond, causing some machines to fail, and, as we know, the masses to be underwhelmed.

Hitwise’s Bill Tancer reports that Cuil premiered at position #106 of all Internet sites, in tenth place among search engines, grabbing 0.6% of search share on Monday. Not quite Live Search or Yahoo ballpark, not even in Ask or AOL’s either, but really kind of startling for a debut.

Tancer also reports that a third of Cuil’s traffic originated from other search engines, and over a quarter came from news and media sites. After hype and subsequent deflation, Tuesday’s traffic wasn’t quite the same level and Cuil’s rank dropped to 197, and 12th among search engines.

But still…

Those numbers illustrate some interesting things about this launch, and one crucial point beneath the surface. First point: a lot of credibility and disclosure to the right sources goes a long way. Sarah Carey, Cuil’s communication strategist and columnist for Ireland’s Sunday Times, blogged this morning she sent word to no more than 20 journalists.

Sounds like they sent them to the right journalists who were able to recognize the Stanford/Palo Alto/PhD/former Googler search brains behind what was effectively touted as the world’s biggest search engine, and the fever just spread from there. Google’s post about scanning a trillion URLs daily also suddenly has interesting timing, published just a couple of days before Cuil hit cyberspace.

Second point, the important one: It appears the Internet is hungry, starving even, for a Google competitor. All that goodwill, all that hoisting to the top, bestowed on Google all those years has lulled in the face of a now spooky Internet steamroller. Who would have thought Yahoo would be rendered virtually impotent? All that good will, all that hoisting to the top was waiting for Cuil, and unfortunately for its founders, Cuil’s crowd-surfing ended badly.

But they sure got everybody’s attention quickly, nobody’s more than Google’s, you can bet. If Cuil can be fixed—and it needs to be fixed relatively soon—then a second go at it looks not just possible, but potentially very successful.

They may want to trim their budget a bit and invest on some infrastructure and scaling, though. Carey’s now famous prose style shined quite the light on the inner workings at Cuil and how they’ve been spending their VC money. That post was deleted from her blog, but you can still take a peek via Yahoo’s cache. This section is an eyebrow raiser:

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.

When I observed this behaviour first I was appalled and took my CEO friend aside. 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. 

Well, they say you should dress for the job you want and not the job you have. If a company wants to be the Googleplex, one might suppose they should start acting like it.

After Powerset’s sudden sale to Microsoft, the blogosphere needed a new contender. A former Google search architect and her Stanford professor husband, along with other former Googlers operating under the protective wing of the anti-noncompete laws of California (a law, ironically, Google likes to leverage when it can), thought for sure they could provide that new challenger.

And then all went blank at Cuil (cool), which was touted to have thrice the index of Google, scanning 121 billion web pages. Servers today couldn’t keep up with demand, illustrating what Powerset foresaw as their biggest hurdle: scalability. Microsoft provided that, along with enough cash to see it through. Even if you could get a query to return something today, though, reviews of the results have been mixed.

The results are supposed to be an alternative to Google’s ranking system, which is often criticized for being more of a popularity contest (among a myriad other criticisms) in the search results. Hence all the Wikipedia and YouTube returns.

Cuil is said to operate differently from Google’s distributed server, load-balancing concept—which incidently handles about a trillion URLs several times daily and manages to stay online—and has its servers divided according to category. If one searches for a sports-related query, for example, there are designated sports servers to handle that. One issue, as we’re seeing today: If a spike in sports queries knocks the sports servers offline, other non-specialized servers specializing in, say, cooking, will handle the results instead.

In that event, you get either no results or bad ones, which is likely the cause of all the subsequent, to put it lightly, disappointment following initial launch hype. I thought an ego-search would be sufficiently simple for it—there couldn’t be that many sources to pull from. After a few minutes, Cuil did bring back several instances where my articles have appeared on TechMeme, and once from the New York Times’ Blogrunner. A few images accompany the results, none of which are of me, one of which appears to be a female.

There’s an interesting "Explore by Category" section currently (more than a few minutes later) unclickable to see where they lead, categorizing me, interestingly, under Critics of Scientology, Investigative Journalists, American Bloggers, Scottish Premiere League Players, Villages in Illinois, and Black and White Films.

Yes, there are other Jason Lee Millers, several of them, one of them an up-and-coming young actor, who is noticeably absent from Cuil’s results. But he did change his name to Jason L. Miller noticing, I imagine, how I dominated Google under that name. Also noticeably absent from Cuil: any result from WebProNews, which would seem the most relevant.

Cuil criticism is catching on. Fark, to put it mildly, was unimpressed along with scores of other bloggers. Someone zapped me this image from Photobucket, which appears to be a Wikipedia entry popping up at some point during the day before being edited back to the more positively-spun version. Is it or isn’t it? Doesn’t matter. It expresses a rising viewpoint on the Web today, as evidenced even on Google Hot Trends, where the phrase "cuil sucks" just made the number 2 biggest gainer spot.

So far, Cuil the Google Killer is a colossal flop. Could it recover? Maybe, but it’ll probably be really hard to get all the people on board this morning to give it another shot. 

It has been a while since a new product has come out on the market in the search engine space that actually works well, and is actually fairly interesting in how they present data. Cuil was released to the public this morning, and it is truly something very cool.

Of course the first thing to do is the vanity search, and what was surprising about the results was not so much that there were hundreds of articles with my name attached, but some new folks showed up in the search response that I didn’t expect, gone were all the old junky things from 1999 and 1998, right at the top were all the new things for both me, my known Google ganger, and a host of new people on the web with the same name that either didn’t show up in Google, or were well past the 10 page limit that I seem to have when working with a search engine.

Is this a product that will give Google a run for its money? At this point, with all the search engines out there, it is probably the best contender that is in the smaller search engine space. While Yahoo Microsoft and Google vie for dominance, Cuil might just be the sneaky little search engine that could, and eventually take a good chunk of market share. Not only does it work, but the presentation layer is very easy to use, and very intuitive.

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency. Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private. Source: Cuil

Some of the internal links to the site are broken when you click on the about us info links, you do get some good information about the company, so there is still work to be done. Otherwise, this is one search engine that is worth the time and test drive.

Tags: cuil, search, engine, search engine, better, best, cool, irish, knowledge, fun, entertaining, google ganger, toy

Comments

Well, they’ve got plenty of Wikipedia results in their search. The online encyclopedia holds a catnip-like appeal for new search engines; witness how Microsoft’s recently-purchased Powerset managed to turn this into a quick flip for millions.

The debut of Cuil (pronounced ‘cool’ they say) comes with a boast of an index triple the size of Google’s, at more than 120 billion pages. Size doesn’t really matter in search as much as it used to, as people want a relevant result from two or three words of a query.

When it can hit Wikipedia, Cuil does fine. A quick search for Robert Johnson brought up several results for the legendary blues guitarist, returning those results in a three-column page. The page includes a box with "Explore by Category" options, where a searcher can look at related queries. In the case of our soul-selling bluesman, those include people like Son House and Blind Willie Johnson.

Clicking on them found Cuil a little too hot to handle. "Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity," said the message that returned instead of results.

Danny Sullivan said the site runs off two datacenters, with a thousand 8-CPU servers apparently handling the index, and another 280 delivering results. At press time, it wasn’t enough to handle the buzz from coverage at places like TechCrunch and GigaOm.

Webmasters who want Cuil to tap their pages should be seeing a crawler called Twiceler hitting their sites. Sounds like someone at Cuil might be a fan of Dr. Seuss’ ‘The Lorax’, which featured an environment-trashing executive called Onceler as its antagonist.

The real test for Cuil when it comes back will be how well it handles the niche queries people make all the time, expecting a solid result from very few words. That’s how Google built its dominance in search; people assume search works this way, and they will be happy with Cuil if it does.