Cuil - Webmasters Beware

To my dismay, I received an email today from my one of my bosses at work with the subject that read:

The new “Google” is Cuil.

At that moment, although I couldn’t remember why, a dark cloud began to come over me.  Not because I am an avid Google worshipper.  Not because I feared that Google might be dethroned.  No not for that, but for some other unknown reason.  I knew I came acrosse that name before… “Cuil”, but I just couldn’t remember where.  So I continued to read the email and followed the link to this article Ex-Googlers Debut Cuil, A(nother) Anti-Google.

I read the article, instinctively skipping over the first paragraph. Yes, I am weird like that.  But more often than not the first paragraph just provides references to some other posts.  I wanted to get straight to the meat and potatoes.  Kind of like skipping the introduction in a book.

Anyway, I  must say I was impressed to learn that this new search engine just launched with over 120 billion pages in its index.  Cuil claims to the largest and fastest search engine in the world. But being a Webmaster and developer of hundreds of sites and several web servers, I asked myself “How in the world did a massive search engine launch without me knowing about it?”. 

Then A new Outlook email notification popped up:

“More on Cuil…Do a search for Internet marketing consultants. If this is going to take off, we will need to understand where they are grabbing the logos from. The BlueClaws logo isn’t going to cut it for us.” 

So I searched for Internet Marketing Consultants. Yeah, when I copied it from Outlook it selected the period as well.  And what do you know, “We didn’t find any results for ‘Internet marketing Consultants’”.  I was immediately apparent that Cuil has a long way to go before they can claim they are bigger, faster and better than Google. And it wasn’t just me, many bloggers and news article reported that Cuil fails to return results for a variety of search terms.

So then I removed the period and what do you know… My company Single Throw Internet Marketing is right there on the first page. Just it is in Google.  Just as we should be.

But Cuil’s search result for my company showed our clients logo instead of our own.  How did they manage to mistake Minor League Baseball’s Lakewood BlueClaws logo for ours.  A quick blog search revealed several blogs reporting Cuil was in hot water for algorithmic flaws.  Hey it could have been worse.  As one blogger points out, his blog has nothing to do with cigarettes.  I am also pretty sure that Google is going to love Cuil’s thumbnail of Eric Schmidt.

Eventually, I made my way back to the original article I was emailed.  I read that first paragraph I initially skipped.  When I got to the part that says  “Cuil (”cool”),” a light bulb went of in my head.   After quick search I found a post I made last year on samaBlog and remembered where I knew their name from.  When I made that post, I didn’t know who they where. Their spider, the “Twiceler Bot”, had began crawling a new web site I was working on and mauled my server. It would not go away and every time I tried to block the bot, the chameleon put on a new face to avoid detection.

A warning to webmasters:

Cuil’s Twiceler bot maliciously indexes content.  It does not respect well accepted standards like Google’s Webmaster Guidelines or even the Robots.txt protocol.  It blatantly ignores http status codes like 404 page not found and 403 Access is denied.  Their bot has the potential to crash your server and wipe out your databases.  The more you try to fight it off, the harder it tries to index your content.

Cuil’s black background suits them well.  Let’s just say the Google is a white hat search engine and Cuil is a black hat.  A very black hat. Let me go out on a limb here and say I would bet money that a vast portion 120 Billion page index is html error pages and duplicate content.

What do you think of Cuil?  Pass or Fail?  Let us know.

Not only does Cuil fail to return relevant search results, Cuil’s Index is way out of date.  In many cases they return no results at all. I don’t care if your index has 5 trillion pages or 500,000 pages as long as you return relevant results for what I am seaching for.

In my opinion, Cuil fails to live up to their marketing hype. Furthermore, they are going to have alot of explaining to do.  The already have a bad reputation with webmasters who know who they really are.  They are going to have issues gaining trust among the community, so if they want to be the next Google, that’s where they need to start. Especially as more developers and webmasters like myself start coming out of the woodwork to reveal how they got their massive  index.

Cuil - SHAME ON YOU!!!

Share This Post!

This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2008 at 8:05 am and is filed under Geek Stuff, Internet Marketing, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.