Not So Cuil After All | Hacker News Reader

Not So Cuil After All

hostscope.com

9 pointsjrrl12 comments

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.

  s/get it write/get it right/

you forgot a semicolon

I am appreciating the joke.

  $ echo get it write | perl -pe"s/write/right/"
  get it right

The semicolon is not required.

The blog author was one of the founders of Lycos (read: search engine long before Google) and was pretty involved in keeping it alive under stress (albeit 1990s stress, not 2000s stress).

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.

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.

"There's no such thing as bad publicity" - but there is such a thing as going public before your technology is ready, and thus turning off all the early adopters.

Most of the geek/connected crowd has now heard of Cuil. And most have now tried it.

And, sadly for Cuil, most will never try it again. That's one hell of a wasted PR shot. Rookie mistake, huh.

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.

The initial reactions to Cuil remind me a lot of the initial reactions to Google ~10 years ago.

Does anybody truly have a reasonable expectation that Cuil will match or better Google on their initial release?

No, I was impressed with google the first time I used it, and that was early on.

I guess my early results were different, I often recall getting "better" results on Yahoo and AltaVista, but preferring Googles overall UI better, so I kept at it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com