On July 28, 2008, I wrote the following about cuil:
Is cuil Name for New Search Engine Cool Enough?
Also on July 28, 2008 highly esteemed and well respected industry technology expert John C. Dvorak wrote the following in PCMagazine Online about cuil:
The New Cuil Search Engine Sucks
I thank John C. Dvorak for his valuable insight, stunning perfection, impeccable prose, usual accuracy, verbal economy, on-line alacrity, understanding of what we need and most of all for agreeing with me.
Copyright ©2008 DM Jackson - WebMarket West - All Rights Reserved.
Published by dj //
Limping into the Search Engine arena yesterday, new Search Engine cuil, pronounced cool, launched to much fanfare, sporadic outages and intermittent pages announcing that their, “servers are running a bit hot right now.”
Boasting 120 billion indexed pages, the cuil leadership team consisting of expatriate Google workers, Anna Patterson, Russel Power, Tom Costello and Louis Monier, promise Internet users that if big is Google then huge is cuil. However, initial criticism from well respected experts like Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land along with glow in the dark servers indicate this remains to be seen. In addition to hot servers, which are not cool, cuil has other features that may take some time for us to warm up to.
Call me quaint or call me simple, but when I enter the name of my own company in a search box, I really do prefer to see it pop-up as the top listing on the results page instead of listings for DUI Lawyers, Dubai real estate or what have you. Funny thing is, quaint or simple, so do all of my Search Engine Marketing clients… all of ‘em!
At least for now, this is going to be a real hard sell for the Search Marketing crowd. How does one respond to a corporate or professional client when cuil with their zippy state of the art Search Engine technology has a new algorithm that relates them to cabbages?
Apparently, we are not alone in placing value on accuracy over quantity. Numerous comments by those that have actually been able to get cuil search results have been unimpressive, to say the least. Our own test searches in what cuil executives tout as the world’s biggest index returned results that can best be described in polite terms as bizarre. Instead of seeing a typical list of related pages similar to those generated by MSN, Yahoo or Google, the too-cool cuil returns a non sequitur search train wreck that could pass for randomness at first glance. To fix this, cuil offers you, “helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want.”
Beats me how this is ever gonna be better than Google’s get it right the first time philosophy.
Copyright ©2008 DM Jackson - WebMarket West - All Rights Reserved.
Published by dj //
Posted on July 17th, 2008 in Marketing
An article at CNNMoney reports that Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) Chairman Roy Bostock and Chief Executive Jerry Yang blasted dissident shareholder Carl Icahn as a “corporate agitator” who would “strike any deal” with Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) to “get his money back quickly.”
As displeased as we are at WebMarket West to think that we all may soon have only two great marketing channels to work with instead of the three great we now have, blasting dissident shareholder’s is not going to win them any favor with the new regime.
Come on, Roy and Jer! Resign yourselves to the inevitable, like the rest of us are doing. Suck up to your new boss a bit and if you don’t have anything nice to say about Carl, don’t say anything at all. Or, at least don’t say anything that will upset the stockholders on the winning side.
Published by mikej //
Posted on July 14th, 2008 in Uncategorized
An article in this morning’s ZDNews titled, Microhoo mudslinging: Icahn says Yahoo distorts facts of offer makes us wonder who has already decided that the seemingly inevitable conglomeration of these two Internet giants should be called Microhoo?
It’s bad enough that apparently we will soon be losing the ability to choose where we go for Internet marketing resources. While this kind of leviathan corporate takeover tends to strengthen the bottom line of the ultimate winner, it softens our opportunity. So, how ’bout we call them Yahsoft?
Published by mikej //
