I wouldn't have mentioned cuil in this space had I not gotten a spam e-mail whose subject line describes cuil as "a google-ish search engine."
A while back I made fun of Ask Jeeves in this space only to learn that a colleague was actually at Ask.com and (justifiably, it turns out) begged to differ with my knee-jerk critique.
Given the performance issues I've seen this week on trying cuil, and the terrible results from any useful search term*, I fervently hope I don't know anyone who works there.
*- for example, a movie quote or lyric snippet or something with the "site:" clause. Anyone can write code that delivers decent results for generic words ("penguins") or proper nouns ("Coldplay"): A reasonable solution there would be to take 100,000 particular keywords (choosing them is sort of an interesting task) and build/cache result pages that include the relevant Wikipedia link, fan sites for any performer, etc.
Posted by Matt Bruce at August 1, 2008 12:53 AMI work at Ask's parent company, I was in no way offended by your remarks.
Posted by: OTC at August 1, 2008 04:40 AM