John Battelle's Searchblog

Just checked out your Twitter feed - amazing! Sounds like you're having a blast! Stay safe!

Hiya John,

I just wanted to share this with you:

Go to cuil.com search for "cuil search engine" or cuil search engine and see what single hit shows up :-)

The're still just scrathing the surface. I reckon the were forced to go live, long before 'their search' was near completion.

wow! its amazing.

I tried cuil -- was not impressed (and it's also gotten a couple reviews stating it's a flop or a failure).

:/ nmw

hmm.. at least cuil makes much better use of the real estate. On my 24" widescreen monitor, and my web browser filling the monitor, a google search result shows 5 SERPs on the left, 4 ads on the right, and 80% of the screen in the middle is filled with dead white space. Nothing going on, no results, wasted.

At least Google should take a cue from Cuil, and put the other 5 SERPs that are below the fold into that dead white space, so that I don't have to constantly scroll to see the results of my search.

I like how Cuil fills the space.

Another thing that I think is funny about the Cuil reactions in the blogosphere is that everyone seems to think that Cuil has to do everything that Google does, and more, within the first day of Cuil's public existence.

What Cuil should have done is put the "beta" tag on the engine, and then claimed that they would forever iterate. Then maybe the blogosphere would have reacted more forgivingly. Like when Google Spreadsheets first came out. Though it couldn't go graphing, couldn't do even a quarter of the functions that Excel can, people were fine with that because of the "beta" label.

Cuil should have PR'ed itself similarly.

It's not like the first day that Google came out that it was immediately an AltaVista killer. At that time, I was using SavvySearch, and SavvySearch was better than both Google and AltaVista.

well http://browse.name is in alpha -- so if your machine blows up, don't come b*tchin to me!

;P nmw

(ps: you can, however, configure it [ http://browse.name/direct.php?query= ] as you "default" URL keyword search engine [ http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Location+bar+search#Changing_the_keyword_service ] )

if you like the text preview concept, check out ChunkIt! at www.getchunkit.com

Thanks so much.John Its amazing.

In Danny Sullivan's podcast Danny talked about how he was disappointed with cuil -- because (among other things) the search engine didn't return the homepage when the domain name was entered into the search box.

Funny! Strange, but true (and funny too :)

My suggestion for Danny: Take two domain names and call me in the morning!

;D nmw

ps/btw: did you hear the funny joke about yahoo ditching the del.icio.us domain? see http://gaggle.info/post/80/breaking-news-google-pagerank-is-worthless