On 16 April 2010 20:25, Emily Monroe <bluecaliocean(a)me.com> wrote: You'll love this blog entry: http://www.cuil.com/info/blog/2010/04/13/cpedia-and-its-detractors He fails to realise the *only* people spreading the word of mouth about Cuil are those who find it ridiculously surreal. - d.

On 04/16/2010 03:09 PM, Nathan wrote: I think there are ways to signal that you are doing something as an experiment and with the requisite humility. A good example is Google Sets, which is part of Google Labs: http://labs.google.com/sets One of their earliest public experiments, they made clear that it was a trial with no practical purpose. Of course, the technology behind it surely found its way into some search-related magic. But they don't present it as anything more than it is. And because of that, people gave it 4.5 stars out of 5. Cuil, on the other hand, took an interesting technology and pretended they had a Wikipedia competitor. They call it an encyclopedia, they name it Cpedia, and they make it look like an encyclopedia. But it's full of junk. So naturally, people compare it with an actual encyclopedia and laugh at it. And then the CEO suggests that the people criticizing them just don't understand the problems involved, and until they do they should shut up. That is roughly the same way they failed to build a search engine, and it is pretty much the opposite attitude to the one that has made Wikipedia so strong: our incredible ambition and substantial pride is balanced by frankness, a deep willingness to be self-critical, and and ongoing invitation to others to help us improve things. Cuil could use some of that, but I expect they'll burn through what remains of their $33m before they close down forever, going the way of Pets.com. And I'll point out that $33m is not far off from the total amount ever spent on Wikipedia, so it's a pretty big crater. William

On 17 April 2010 01:05, Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com> wrote: I'd call your attention to the last comment on the CEO's post: pointing out that what they've done here is create a search-engine spam engine. The only way to monetise this thing would be to put bottom-feeding ads all over it in the hope of attracting search terms. And the Cuil search engine is still the shining example of why Cuil Theory exists. It's comically awful and is most useful to point the kids at and tell them "Google got popular by not sucking like that." It is true that failure is important to future success; but one very important thing about failure, particularly large and spectacular failure is that it is - in fact - failure. - d.