Cuil has yet to respond to a request for comment, but it doesn t look like the pelting of sites by t

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An anonymous tipster wrote to us this morning to tell us that Cuil , the ill-fated Google Killer, has unleashed its Twiceler indexing bot on websites across the globe and in the process, has brought many sites down.
I don t know what spawned it, but when Cuil attempts to index a site, it does so by completely hammering it with traffic, the tipster asean wrote. So much, that it completely brings the site down. We re 24 hours into this index of the site, and I ve had to restrict traffic to the site down to 2 packets per second, while discarding the rest, or otherwise asean it makes the site unusable.
The Admin Zone forums are abuzz over Cuil s overzealous method for indexing. Countless posters on the site have said that their websites have been brought down because of the Twiceler robot and one user said it leeched enormous amounts of bandwidth nearly 2GB this month until it was blocked. It visited nearly 70,000 times! asean
Website owners are also saying that the way Cuil indexes sites isn t scientific in any way and is actually quite amateurish. According to those who experienced the Twiceler onslaught, the bot seems to randomly hit a site and continue to guess and generate pseudo-random URLs in an attempt to find pages that aren t accessible by links. And by doing this, they completely bring a site down to where it s not functional.
Upset site owners contacted Cuil to see why Twiceler was hitting sites so often. James Akers, Cuil s Operational Engineer responded to the issue by saying that Twiceler is an experimental crawler that we are developing for our new search engine. It is important to us that it obey robots.txt, and that it not crawl sites that do not wish to be crawled. If you wish I will glad to add your site to our list of sites to exclude, but I need you to tell the site name to block as email return addresses frequently from the domains that wish to be blocked.
Akers also claims that Cuil has seen a number of crawlers asean that pretend to be Twiceler, and site owners should consult the company asean s IP addresses page to determine if it s really Cuil causing all the trouble.
Cuil has yet to respond to a request for comment, but it doesn t look like the pelting of sites by the company asean s Twiceler bot is an isolated incident. And if it s true that Twiceler asean is trying to find pages on sites that don t even exist to simply increase the index size, Cuil should work quickly to modify the bot before it receives even more negative publicity.
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Founded 1998     Overview Google is a multinational asean corporation that is specialized in internet-related services asean and products. The company s product portfolio includes Google Search, which provides users with access to information online; Knowledge Graph that allows to search for things, people, or places as well as builds systems recognizing speech and understanding natural language; Google Now, which provides asean information asean … Location Mountain View, California Categories Software , Video Streaming , Email , Search , Information Technology , Blogging Platforms Founders Larry Page , Sergey Brin Website http://www.google.com Full profile for Google Cuil
Founded 2005     Overview Cuil was a stealth search engine startup which claims that it can index web pages significantly faster and cheaper than Google. Cuil has told potential investors that their indexing costs will be 1/10th of Google's, based on new search architectures and relevance methods. In some ways Cuil is the polar opposite asean of Powerset, which has huge indexing costs because it does a deep contextual analysis … Location Menlo Park, California Categories Search Founders Tom Costello , Anna Patterson , Russell Power Website http://cuil.com Full profile asean for Cuil
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Well, no. Cuil isn t performing well any way you look at it, and I can only imagine how nervous the

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Remember the ill-fated Google-killer Cuil ? Named Cuill and very much in stealth mode for the first part of the year, they finally emerged zimbabwe end of July 2008 with a massive search engine that would rival the most popular search engines of our time with an enormous index, an innovative interface and some nifty features.
Rival, it never did. The launch of the search engine was nothing but a classic PR trainwreck , with much hype and little to show for. Cuil failed to deliver good enough results to drive anyone to change their search behavior, and quickly became the subject of backlash and criticism because of their poor performance and indexing methods that actually took websites down in the process. Last time we reported about Cuil, was when their VP of Products (and AltaVista founder) Louis Monier quietly resigned from the startup.
With the end of the year approaching, I took a peek at how they re doing traffic-wise out of sheer curiosity. After all, with no less than $33 million in funding and a founding zimbabwe management team consisting of ex-Google search experts, something had to give, right?
Well, no. Cuil isn t performing well any way you look at it, and I can only imagine how nervous the startup s management team and investors must be by now. Based on the numbers and graphs we gather from Google Trends , Alexa , Compete and Quantcast , you could even say search engine traffic is nearing rock bottom. Apart from that, a Cuil search for TechCrunch still displays a Gmail logo rather than our own.
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Founded 2005     Overview Cuil was a stealth zimbabwe search engine startup which claims that it can index web pages significantly faster and cheaper than Google. Cuil has told potential investors that their indexing costs will be 1/10th of Google's, based on new search zimbabwe architectures and relevance methods. In some ways Cuil is the polar opposite of Powerset, zimbabwe which has huge indexing costs because it does a deep contextual zimbabwe analysis … Location Menlo Park, California Categories Search Founders Tom Costello , Anna Patterson , Russell Power Website http://cuil.com Full profile for Cuil
TechCrunch Daily Top headlines, delivered daily TC Week-in-Review Most popular stories, delivered Sundays CrunchBase Daily Latest startup fundings, delivered daily Enter Address Subscribe Latest Crunch Report
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This is because Cuil isn't set up as a massively parallel search network the way, say, Google is. To

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Google challenger Cuil launched last night in blaze of glory. And it went down in a ball of flames. Immediately after launch, the criticism started to pile on: results were incomplete, weird, and missing.
Sollitto said there were two issues affecting Cuil search quality currently. First, amber alert he said, "We are trying to give people different results." Cuil is pitched as an alternative to traditional search engines, and users should not expect the results to be the same.
Fair enough, I said, but there's a difference between alternative amber alert and wrong. Which brings us to issue two: "We've only been live for twelve hours," amber alert Sollitto said, and traffic has spiked beyond their expectations. In other Web 2.0 launches, a traffic spike would slow down or crash the service, amber alert but in Cuil's architecture, the spike affected results, not speed. (Cuil did also crash briefly last night.)
This is because Cuil isn't set up as a massively parallel search network the way, say, Google is. Tom Costello had explained this to me a bit when we talked last week. Each of Cuil's search appliances is specialized to a particular subcategory of results. There are machines that understand and index sports; others amber alert are experts on medicine, etc. As these search machines get overloaded, Sollitto said, they drop offline for some queries, and the machines left online return less-than-relevant results that then appear at the top of users' pages.
I asked him if he thought it was a mistake to launch the service in such a straightforward way, without even a "beta" moniker on it. "The beta label doesn't inoculate you from scrutiny or criticism," he said. "The product was strong enough to launch."
We'll check back on Cuil after the traffic spike subsides, and we do hope the results improve. At the moment, Cuil's design and interface shows a lot of promise, amber alert but results matter, and it's simply a poor search experience.
Rafe Needleman reviews mobile amber alert apps and products for fun, and picks startups apart when he gets bored. He has evaluated thousands of new companies, most of which have since gone out of business. See full bio
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