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Cuil Proves the Bubble Is Back
MattSparkes writes "Cuil may only have launched this week, but it seems that they're already enjoying late-'90s boom-style comforts. 'Lunch is ordered in every single day. Huge fridges burst with snacks and drinks. Bowls of strawberries and muffins lie around the rest area. The company pays for a personal trainer and gym membership for everyone. A doctor calls round each Friday, after the weekly barbeque, to see if everyone's in good health. Employees drift in an out at times that suit themselves.' Seems like an awesome place to work, but how long will their $25 million VC funding last at this rate?"
Cuil Proves the Bubble Is Back
First of all, a single anecdote does not prove anything. If you included eBay's Skype deal or Google's YouTube deal ... wait, scratch that last one. See, there's constantly non-prudent business deals and every now and then you see a real whopper.
Lunch is ordered in every single day. Huge fridges burst with snacks and drinks. Bowls of strawberries and muffins lie around the rest area. The company pays for a personal trainer and gym membership for everyone. A doctor calls round each Friday, after the weekly barbecue, to see if everyone's in good health. Employees drift in an out at times that suit themselves.
Do you think that this is what caused the dot com bubble? Do you think the vast majority of people were living like this when it burst? I'm no economist but I thought that the problem wasn't with how the IT and Web Site companies were spending their money but rather what the customers they found were giving them money for--basically nothing. A few HTML pages? Not even worth my time to read?
$25 million in venture capital is nothing these days. Let them burn it. Yeah, we'll all be laughing a couple months from now when they're busting their asses to find some income--or maybe they are correct in thinking they are the next Google. Hell, Slashdot ran a story reporting them to index more than Google. With the kind of press they achieved, maybe they're right to live like royalty for a bit?
Does anyone look back on Google and say "They hired a massage artist? Proof the bubble is back!" No, because they thought they were going to be big and they were.
You want to prevent another bubble? Don't take a job where you're not sure how you or any of your coworkers draw revenue from real customers who in turn receive some service or product that makes complete sense. That's how you prevent a bubble. And unless you're part of the 1% calling the shots on how to spend money, you needn't worry about how other companies spend their money. This frivolous spending should just make it easier for Google to beat their bottom line and steal customers back. And if they can't, well then let Cuil rake large piles of capital together and set them afire to their heart's content.
My work here is dung.
I know that many people will say that perks like these are only positives because they can only make people happier about their job, which is good for the employee and good for the employer as well.
I would like to suggest that it's not all roses in reality. I have worked at places where the employer provided lots of cushy perks and I found that it tends to attract a certain type of employee: the type who wants the job not because they like the work, but because they like the perks. In my experience this type of employee is not the best for the company; and what's worse, the general working environment tends to become antiproductive even for employees who otherwise would be more productive.
I have found that in Silicon Valley companies, there is almost a sense of pride taken in how unstructured the working environment is. The "cool, hip" companies are the ones that encourage their employees to engage in nerf gun fights, have parties every Friday, and generally play around on company time. Sometimes it is hard for me to believe that these companies can be globally competitive, but maybe companies all over the world are all doing the same things.
I personally believe that there is a fine balance between too much carrot, and too much stick, but that the answer certainly does not come from throwing the stick out completely. I am most motivated when there are expectations of me, and I have worked at companies where expectations are disturbingly low. I honestly believe that most people, even if they won't admit it, need a bit of structure in their working environment to be most productive.
There is definitely a desire for people to believe that the best working environment is the one where the employer puts the least demands on its employees and gives all of the best perks possible, and that such an environment would make everyone more productive if only employers weren't so pig-headed and could just realize that ... but I think this is really wishful thinking. It actually worries me that software companies in the USA are often like this because somewhere there must be companies that Just Get Shit Done (India maybe?) without all of the frivolities and eventually, they're going to dominate. And I want the software industry in the USA to stay healthy because that's how I earn my living.
By the way, I think that it would be hard to out-cushy Google. Their campus is like Club Med and I have a hard time believing that they get anything close to maximum productivity out of their workforce because of it.
Posting AC because obviously I don't want my current or past employers or coworkers to somehow get word of this and get pissed off at me.
But if we are smart, we can still make money. I recommend selling short on Google now.
From what I heard, they had $33 million in capital, strawberries, checkups and BBQs don't use that kind of cash. Over staffing will however. Nothing in this article makes me think they're doing anything over the top like private jet rides to Las Vegas.
MABASPLOOM!
" how long will their $25 million VC funding last at this rate?"
Based on my late 90's Start up runs in NYC, I would say the Doctor and Free Gym Personal Trainer will be gone in two weeks, the food in a month, and 75% of the employees in 3 months.
Stories like this may even bring PuD back to F**kedcompany postings.
Awesome!
From my experience with using Cuil for a few days, it is utterly and completely useless in its present form. Yes it's nice visually, but it's a search engine got heaven's sake - visually pleasant is nothing if the searches don't return anything useful.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
I think there will be a pop.
Have you tried it? Part of the draw may be the speed and the images next to the search results, but realistically, not really the best results, and the pictures that come up on the results are stock photos - not any relation to the site content at all. (if you have your own domain, search for it and see what I am talking about)
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
the only reason any of that matters - is because right now their search doesn't work. if it did work better than google, people wouldn't care what they did with their money. but it doesn't - and so cuil is doomed to become a joke, or reference to failure. And it's not like this wasn't obvious right from the start.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
If it were former HotBot engineers that were doing this would this be such a big deal? Probably not.. It's the Google association that is generating all the media. IMHO, Cuil is having it's 15 minutes.
It does make you wonder though if the Google lovefest is over. Now that they are a publicly traded company their only obligation is to their shareholders and as a publicly traded company they should probably change their motto to "We do less evil than everyone else".
Makes you wonder if all the attention to Cuil just brings up the fact that maybe people are starting to turn on Google and why not? Maybe they're getting TOO much power. With that being said, more power to Cuil.
It sounds expensive, but if there's 10 employees, that VC funding could last years.
Google set a precedent for perks, so it's only natural that companies are going to try to repeat that success for recruiting purposes alone.
body massage!
There are a ton of companies out there that offer free snackies, gyms, on-site doctors, etc. For the most part they are prudent financial decisions. free snacks: the cost is VERY minimal compared to the good will generated and assuming it's stocked internally, you don't have to allow an outside vendor in to stock machines improving your security. gyms: healthy employees cost less to insure. healthy employees miss less work. healthy employees are more attractive and will lead to improved workplace chemistry. healthy employees impress customers. on-site doc: employees only need to take 30m off work to see the doc instead of having to get in a car, drive to their doc, wait, wait, wait, see doc, drive back to work which is 2 hrs minimum. so, while a lot of these really seem excessive, they aren't.
Plus, how much does a bowl of strawberries cost?
Buy lunch in? Perhaps it works out cheaper than maintaining a kitchen and staff. This is a non-story.
The cynic in me also thinks that maybe Cuil want people to think they're young, confident and worth investing in.
Their search engine seems pretty average at best from what I've seen so far, yet strangely they're getting lots of media coverage. Is this "story" part of that?
Be on the front page of /. every week, boosting their add impressions.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Perhaps the headline should be "Cuil Proves that VCs are Still Vulnerable to Hype"?
You eat too many muffins!!!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
good idea: new search engine
bad idea: search engine is called "cool" but they don't have cool.com.
good idea: free strawberries, etc. around the office.
bad idea: employees can come and go whenever they feel like it.
Good idea: 25 million in VC money.
Bad idea: spending most of your VC money on something other than the product that got you the VC money (i.e. strawberries, etc).
stuff |
The only carrot I have ever seen is a paycheck, everything else is a stick.
Cuil Sucks. Seriously, it sucks real hard.
I liked their privacy policy and thought their approach to searh results was unique and fresh, it just needed a bit of getting used to.
So, I have tried using it in place of Google since it was announced.
I gave up today in shear frustration.
Take me home Google! I missed you so!
This signature is lame.
Not sure if there is bubble but one thing I did learn about during the Cuil-crash-and-burn-at-launch fiasco was a new search technology out of Cambridge that is in beta right now. It is named true knowledge, and uses natural language strings for search, and wiki style user submitted knowledge base in conjunction with a standard search engine. It is pretty neat and promising search technology that I found searching after looking that the shorcomings of Cuil. I highly recommend getting a beta account at true knowledge if you are interested in improving search results in a fine grained approach.
I have never heard of Cuil until this article. I'm a little impressed with the depth of their search, as I did a quick test of searching for old screen names and found some old stuff, and some unexpected stuff (like being mentioned outside of the site I registered for).
However, their results display screen sucks ass. Their 4x3 grid is annoying, especially given the size of each result. Clicking on Preferences completely failed to correct this. I was hoping for "Grid view" vs "List view", but I guess a list view would be too much like Google and completely unacceptable.
Until it fixes this, and adds a conversion calculator, I see no reason to switch to the new kids on the block.
...for financial institutions. I work at a Financial Firm in NYC, and we don't even have coffee makers in the kitchen! And they took away the vending machine. Bottled water has gone up from $12 for 2 cases to $16. I've been reduced to filling up my bottles at the sink, and shorting Google. If you're a Shadenfreude, you've enjoyed this post.
Who calls a break room a rest area? The only thing at our rest area is bad coffee and stale donuts provided by the local VFW.
"Nothing to see here. Move along."
Maybe I missed it somewhere but, how exactly is CUIL going to make money? There aren't any ads on the search pages and, last I checked, I wasn't billed for pressing that search button. Sounds to me like someone had a Cuil idea (see what I did there) and was charismatic enough to convince VCs to pour money into a business that doesn't have a plan to make money. Either their plan was to blow through as much VC money as possible and have a blast doing it or they've got an ingenious plan to steal ad revenue from Google (good luck boys).
~Syberz
Google will acquire them within a year... unless Microsoft beats them to it.
Regardless of the cost of any perks they may enjoy there, a search engine company needs to have a search engine to live. To me, cuil appears to be a quick hack without the huge index it claims, and without a decent ranking algorithm.
As an example, I did a search for my home town (a really tiny place, 1000 people or so). The top 10 google results included the towns unofficial homepage, a googlemap centered on the town, the wikipedia article for the town, a couple of weather sites with forecasts for the town and so on. All relevant, none repeated.
The first page of cuil displayed *seven* "find hotels in $town" (believe me, there are no hotels) or "find single women in $town" (same story there...). A lot of these spam sites were even repeated five or six times among the first results. A japaneese version of a result was listed higher than the english version of the same result, and so on.
I just left a company (unfortunately) that had lunch catered daily, stocked drinks, had a heavily-used foosball table, and (un)officially had flex time among many other benefits. This company happens to be a market leader with no debt and VERY profitable revenue stream.
The company was fortunate to have certain events happen at opportune times, but the benefits were needed to lure a skilled workforce into joining the team. Cuil will probably fall flat, but the "excesses" are warranted IMO.
:-( If I didn't have to relocate, I would never have left.
They are enjoying their perks.. sure... but meanwhile their resumes are probably already submitted to other companies. These guys are either the most optimistic crew in the world (to be confidently contesting Google with a subpar engine) or they are just enjoying their time while it lasts.
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
Too bad their search engine sucks... I searched for: homepage, and my homepage wasn't in the results. Contrast that with Google, where my homepage is the #1 hit.
Just tried cuil this morning. Completely useless results. It won't matter if they are run by dot com fools of the most brilliant business minds today. If the product sucks (and in it's present form it does) it won't last long.
they put these stupid little images next to search results which have no relation to the result.
my site is a gaming editorial site at the moment, and they put a stupid little picture of some little kids running on the beach next to it.
WTF?
cuil is not.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I've tried their "search" engine. I can get better and faster results from a printed telephone book. They may be made up of intelligent, educated people, but they need to get someone with brains on board to perform a complete rewrite of their search algorithms ASAP. I don't see their VC investors being too happy right now and in the near future they're going to be pissed.
I'd like to see some stats to see if they are even getting any traffic now that people have seen how worthless their search results are.
How long will the $25M$ VC funding last?
One kilo of strawberries is, for the sake of ease, around 50 strawberries. The cost of one kilo of strawberries around here is $10.
Fifty employees will probably eat around 4 strawberries a day measured over any prolonged period. Let us say 25% of the strawberries go bad and get tossed out. So we need 250 strawberries a day, or around $50.
With $25M, they will last in excess of 1300 years if they had no other expenses and no income.
I have really stacked the cards in Cuils disfavour here. Perks like these are trivially cheap. The only people who complain about stuff like this are idiots or coinpushers who can't see any benefits of spending money.
For the record: I work in a consultancy company. We have free coffee and fruit, heavily subsidized lunch, someone comes in to give massages every friday if we want them, there is a playstation or something in the offices, and our gym passes are subsidized as far as my employer can without me getting hit with more taxes. We buy whatever techie books we want, and the company pays. We regularly go out and eat together - around four times a year.
This company has not fired anyone the last ten years.
Perks does not mean a nonperforming business. A bad bottom line does. This is not the same thing.
Of course it means something. It's attitude. The company is badly run because the management sees fit to waste tons of money before a single nickel is generated. It's bad management, plain and simple. The VC's, if they were smart, should be outraged.
I don't respond to AC's.
It even finds pron for you when you don't want it!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/29/cuil_launch/
"You eat too many biscuits."
Fixed that for you. It's called Chronic Biscuit Toxicity.
Now keep in mind I've never worked for one of these uber-perks companies, I haven't had the benefit of living in Silicon valley, but I don't believe that perks and a relaxed work environment are indicative of some kind of "bubble bursting" danger.
Why is it so many companies (especially US software companies IMO) think that the only way to beat the competition is to work 80 hour weeks in a gray cubicle farm? The majority of my employers have been like this, even the startups, and guess what, they have plenty of their own inefficiency problems. I find myself thinking "I could work like 20 hours a week and get more accomplished than they do in 60 with all the BS going on here."
Anyway it's not the work environment that caused the bubble collapse. It was all the VCs who were filled with non-technical people suddenly enthralled with the magical new technology (OMG Internetz!) and somehow thought the consumer had gotten just as excited about it as they had. These people invested millions of dollars in funding on companies with ideas like "Shop for groceries online!" They actually thought the general public was going to jump on that? I mean come on.
So I will take these "OMG new bubble!" posts to heart when I finally hear something ridiculous like that going on again. But I suspect most of the investors got burned so badly last time that maybe they're a bit more conservative now. Risks are fine (new search engines, etc.) as long as they have a sound concept behind them.
With every slashdot article they will last longer. Just let them die...
I tried Cuil, and it seems awfully lame to me.
I didn't get any results I was looking for, all I got was a bunch of links to companies that were obliquely related to my search.
Cuil is an advertisement delivery platform.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
challenge google on its data retention and privacy policies and atttitude in foreign countries by contrasting sharply with them
go zero retention, max privacy, and tell beijing "fuck you" on its authoritarian dictates
in the meantime, with google's court efforts saying we don't really have privacy, and saying "i bend over" to beijing, the rewards you reap will be spectacular:
1. you will earn tons of free advertising and pr in the press
2. all us zealots here at slashdot will switch allegiance to you
3. the average joe will gradually realize the issues and the benefits
then we will all do the unthinkable: we will slay google
regards and good luck
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=free%20porn&sl=long
You will find http://124.freejoin0302.nvvam.org/ as the #4 site, yesterday it was #2... it is definitely not free porn.
If you fail on the free porn search... I don't have much hope for anything else.
I am very underwhelmed by cuil. Most basic searches say they have a ton of results, but if you start to look there are duplicates from page to page.
Searching for terms, which on Google bring up my current website, on Cuil they produce results which point to pages on a different URL that I stopped using a year ago.
That's the kind of cutting edge firm I want to work for!
Debt is exponential.
Results not found. Searched a word in my domain quite common in Japanese.
From Cuil
7,735 results for yubi
From google
Results 395,000 for yubi
I've used Google since snap.com went the way of the dodo.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Cuil has now been on slashdot twice, but it's also been in the NYT and on CNN, so the mainstream media has picked this up. The general consensus on /. seems to be that Cuil is not that great of a search engine. I tend to agree with this sentiment (I can't find anything useful in my searches). However, my inclination is that /.ers may search for things that the rest of the world would never. Is it possible that Cuil's search engine is better at finding useful sites for searches like "best food for puppies", and not so good at "gentoo install man"?
/.er would never have to search for the gentoo install man. I apologize for my insolence.
Yes, I know, a real
2 days ago, I found a bug in cuil. You couldn't search for anything if you put a period (.) in the front of a word. For example, searching for ".NET" has 0 results(>5 billion results on google). I sent this to their feedback e-mail, and hadn't heard anything out of it. Testing it now, it seems they fixed the problem. I'm impressed with their agility.
If this is the bubble, it's pretty weak, when you consider that Yuil was hacked together in a day and provides basically the same thing as Cuil from a front-end perspective (and the last thing we need is yet another crawler)... It took Cuil a year? Oh, guess they have a lot of investor's money to burn.
This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
It's important to note that while Cuil is a search engine, Culi [NSFW] is, well, not.
The world is heading for a worldwide economy, that means that we have to start working harder and more efficiently to compete with foreign companies. People need to realize that this is where we are going, for better or for worse.
*crickets* OK, I will. My website is http://www.ursuspacificus.net/blog/ I could find no search results pointing to my website on Cuil. Nor could I find any results indicating any websites out there in the series of tubes link to my site. Tried with quotes and without... Tried lopping off the path. Tried lopping off the protocol spec. Tried lopping off the "www" and the TLD. Nothing. All I got was a bunch of links to dating sites which have apparently scraped my profile from sites I'm actually on. WTF? Long lost friends have found me by googling me. I know my website has some visibility by googling myself. Having cuiled myself, I'm left wondering whether my website is even up at all! ...wait... there it is.
And how does one *pronounce* "cuil", anyway?!
I tend to think it's homonymous with "soil"
...the proof is that they launched the site without anyone noticing that it basically doesn't work.
Just one example, from a half-an-hour spent playing with it trying to find something, anything it did better than Google. There is a humongous auto dealership in the Pacific Northwest named Lithia Motors, so big it's listed on the NYSE, stock symbol LAD. If you do a Cuil search on Lithia Motors, the hits that come up on the first page include a Wikipedia article about Lithia Motors, a Reuters report, a news item about its expansion in Iowa, its rank among America's Most Admired companies... every darned thing.
Every darn thing except: the website for Lithia Motors.
Just guessing at the URL and typing "lithia" into the browser's address field works better than using Cuil.
Shades of the bad old days when MBAs called the shots and didn't bother their pretty little heads over product details. Who cared about the product itself, when all that mattered was the pitch?
I can just imagine the pitch for Cuil. Imagine a search engine that indexes more than Google, works better than Google, and is staffed by top-notch Google expatriates.
What I can't imagine is why they unveiled it before it was working. "You only have one chance to make a first impression." They've managed to garner so much publicity that almost anyone potentially interested in it has given it a try... and the first impressions and word-of-mouth are so bad that IMHO if they ever do get it working, their only chance will be to relaunch under a different name.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
barbeque is spelled 'barbecue'.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
I always test search engines by issuing a 'tits' query. There should be some birds among the results.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
1. Lame product that doesn't work but gets funding...check
I have tried using it for a few days and have never seen so many dead links (results of spider traps), unavailable servers, 404s, etc... it feels just like AltaVista in the days before the end.
2. Lots of money without a real plan... check
25 million for yet another search engine
3. Marketing people advertising how great their work environment is to get attention... check
*this
4. ???
5. Profit
Yep, all in order here, cover your ears, boom coming again.
Unless of course enough of us get together and actually move the market in the direction we want.
Actually, we do have the money to influence a small volume stock, but doing so would be collusion, I would think.
This is my sig.
The search results I'm getting from them are pretty bad, so far. I'm sure they still are working out the kinks, but really, should they be "rewarding" themselves by handing out all these perks when it seems the real objective, providing a decent, reliable search engine, hasn't been met?
This is exactly the type of wasted VC behavior that went on in the late 90's.
Lot's of companies have perks. I once had a job offer where one of the perks was a tasty free lunch every day and a bonus system where I could trade my bonus for up to a month's paid vacation. I couldn't afford to take the job at the salary they were offering ever since my girlfriend sold me to my current masters (she racked up a ton of credit card debt in my name), and frankly I was nervous that there would be a trade off for such perks in insane amounts of unpaid overtime. Besides, I don't take much vacation anyway, and I'd worry about taking a month off (oh, look we didn't need him for a month, guess we can lay him off if need be).
Oh, and of course, I was watching the special fetures on the Incredibles, and they showed some of the perks for working for Pixar. We all know there are a ton of perks for woking for Google.
Frankly, in the old days at some companies, they had things like a company motor pools and pensions. So, muffin baskets don't impress me that much.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
I've tried both Cuil and SearchMe.com and although I still prefer Google overall, I must say that I don't understand what the big deal with Cuil is (and why it's getting so much press) when SearchMe.com is way more "Visual" (isn't that what all the hype with Cuil is???)
By the way about cuil indexing trillions of pages vs. it's being just a big lie: check your httpd access log, cos' nobody's gonna fake THAT. I've got plenty of hits from Twiceler (cuil's bot), but only on some sites. Most were only hit on /robots.txt. Some sites - even large ones - were not indexed at all. But some were thoroughly read, so I cannot really say the number is a lie, they seem to index lots of pages. Finding the content, now, that's another. But the interface seem to be a crap: if there's too much load on servers it returns "not found" instead of "server error". Stupid.
I feel your pain, my site being around since 1996 was not found but a copy of it embedded into another spam marketing site (dirty trick used by spammers) was found 90+ times, no other search engine is this dumb to fail to notice this... and none of the servers are up anymore which results in very stale data being kept around to boost their databases.
Maybe they should cull their results to actually provide useful hits?
Seems like an awesome place to work, but how long will their $25 million VC funding last at this rate?
As other high-flying dot-bombs have proven, $25 mil in VC money is chump change... and there are way more chumps out there where that came from.
Like every Good Conservative knows, nothing spends sweeter than other people's money... especially when there's zero accountability (a situation all Good Conservatives strive for).
you are one of them morons who is not able to understand that just as every country's economy is linked in global world, each person's well being and spending power also linked to well being of a country's economy.
basically bottom line is that you are unable to understand enough of those douchebags not able to spend due to going bankrupt, you are also going to go under if government doesnt do anything.
please, get a ticket to neptune and leave us alone. no, better get a ticket on voyager iii.
Read radical news here
Please don't let prison rape be the new Godwin.
I was searching for a preacher I read about in weird news who ran his motorcycle off stage during a sermon.
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=Jeff+Harlow+preacher+motorcycle
http://www.google.com/search?&q=jeff%20harlow%20motorcycle%20preacher&sourceid=firefox
Cuil: No results were found for: Jeff Harlow preacher motorcycle
Google: Every link on page one was about this incident.
Enjoy the perks while they last, folks.
Public use of any portable music system is a virtually guaranteed indicator of sociopathic tendencies. -- Zoso
By the way, I think that it would be hard to out-cushy Google. Their campus is like Club Med and I have a hard time believing that they get anything close to maximum productivity out of their workforce because of it.
you forget that software is a CREATIVE field. creation process is something mankind has never been able to totally figure out, how it works are a mystery.
you can neither measure creativity, or systematize it, nor do anything 'structured' with it.
a google employee engaging in nerf gun fights in %10 of its work hours can put something creative to the table that a, say, microsoft employee who works in %110 of his working hours in legacy corporate style cant. and this can turn the tables.
and this is actually what its been like for the last ~12 years.
Read radical news here
All this proves is that people at Cuil are living the good life at Cuil's expense.
Possibly bad management at one company does not equal the return of the .com bubble.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Ah, time to reminisce; remember the last time a story without news behind it came out? Let me remind you as Wiki Takes on Google!
Or not, as the case proved.
Is Cuil a story without news, or is it funding without a product? Either way, I doubt anyone will remember it in 3 months time, but that won't stop me applying for a job there...
cuil == culo
We have a subsidised restaurant, if you like sub-school dinner fare. Coffee is just piss.
There's a water filter that's rather unhygenic even after boiling. We get one free drink and a snack (rice cracker, if you're lucky) once a month.
Occassional left-over food too.
We can get a corporate rate at a local gym chain. Last time I asked it was about 10% off from 5,000 yen per month, so it's cheaper to join as an individual during a promotion.
At least we have that too. Compulsory chest xrays and barium meals every year to keep that healthy glow.
My boss moans that I don't stay until 8 pm or later...
This is a massive company in Japan. Almost all are the same.
i was looking up: "steve ballmer" and it showed me a picture of some guy in a latex suit with his penis visible then i tried looking for some warez and it only showed leggit copies or shareware and when i searched for "porn" it returned 121,617,892,992 web pages as result
If they have the correct number of staff, don't give the CEO a 1 million dollar christmas bonus, don't launch a 10 million dollar ad campaign, buy all SUN gear or have their headquarters in the center of an attractive city they aren't going to burn through 30+ million all that face. Muffins can be bought from the local baker. Strawberries can come from the supermarket.
And for this small daily investment you get much happier employees.
The alternative? The dutch company blokker (retailer) has a no-frills police. No water-cooler for instance, no soft-drinks machine (not even one you got to pay for) nothing extra. Who wants to work there? Nobody. In fact I happen to know they had to hugely overpay for their IT because nobody wants to work for them internally and even people in warehouses are leaving for greener pastures.
Basic rule of business, spend money on things that give you a return on it. Being frugal can easily cost you far more then the pennies you save.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It seems that Cuil indexes the keywords i searched yesterday and couldn't find.
Maybe it even uses other search engines to fill gaps where it couldn't supply results the previous day ?
Ok, I just don't get why Cuil is getting all this attention. It doesn't do anything revolutionary enough to get people (this includes non-geeks that make up the VAST majority of the search market) to use anything but what they were using yesterday for search.
Yes, it looks nice. Yes, it's got a hip image. But it has nothing that will put a dent in any of the major search engines usage.
I'd call it a flash in the pan if it was bright enough for anybody to see.
Steal my band's record! Seriously,
I think he is saying these perks are a symptom of a bubble. Kinda like a fever is a symptom of an illness, not a cause of the illness.
In general I'd say companies offering these perks shows either a real shortage of talent or really bad management!
Think Deeply.
I'll admit it too. The search results weren't all that bad, but they stuck a picture of some random guy (I'll regret saying that I'm sure) next to me for no apparent reason whatsoever.
Screenshot here: http://blog.ciarang.com/posts/who-the-hell/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
With out getting in to all the hair pulling and finger pointing... Having a new "kid" on the serach engine block is a good thing...in so many ways I dont want to even take the time to type them all. In short past history has shown us, that in business, when a younger more aggressive element shows up...the only option for the old standered to survive is to change. Change is a good thing...not sure the share holders of "G" want that.. but it is. Besides...now with yahoo on the rocks (so to say)...Google getting involved in everything from the Tesla car to buying a nano tech bio company. Getting another BIG player in the game opens lots of opportunities for all those little computer companies looking for a future buyout exit stratagy. Just my 2 cents
Joe Investor
Let's do a comparison, then, shall we?
NASDAQ Composite Index:
Mar 24, 2000 -> $4,963
Today -> $2,350
I would suggest the poster give their head a real hard shake and think of another title.
rootsmith Inc.
Cuil isn't overspending. I've been over there. They only have about 30 employees. They didn't overdo the server hardware, either.
Bringing in lunch makes sense. They're on a quiet suburban street with only one modest, overcrowded restaurant nearby. Cuil is too small for a cafeteria. Bringing in food saves considerable staff time compared to sending everyone out for lunch.
That's not the problem. The search results are the problem, of course.
What we need is a search engine that gives us ACCURATE results and filters out all the filler websites with no content.
For instance, if I am searching for "[GAMENAME] cheat" is get countless results all from sites that just include every damn game on their site with the word cheat but no actual cheats. These types of sites should be filtered.
For simple searches google seems to have picked up on the fact that Wikipedia is the new search engine. It is often the top result and in fact often I don't even bother with google anymore, just head straight to wikipedia.
The problem is simply that search engine don't yet understand WHAT we are looking for. They just list the sites that have the words we want on a page and then sort them by some system but this system is easily fooled as any search user can tell you.
Quil doesn't seem to be even worse then google at this. Don't impress us with number of results, impress me by making the first page actually give me the type of sites I am looking for.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'll believe the bubble is back when Cuil gets a spokespuppet.
which is an example poor usability and also that their algorithm is probably brain dead simple.
Why are we still talking about this non entity? I sense an slashvertorial.
I used it and couldn't believe how bad it was. Few results, most of them irrelevant.
Alltheweb.com is a better alternative to Google, if that's what you're looking for.
I've honestly not used a WORSE search engine than Cuil in many years.
Makes me wonder: why the hype?
Hell, Slashdot ran a story [slashdot.org] reporting them to index more than Google
I was impressed by the fact that on the day of it's release I started typing my company's name and it predicted my entry and brought me up to a full page of references to our hospital. Then I tested it a little harder... it didn't predict the model names of my 1975 or 1980 electric cars, but found pages of references. Then I through it a really tough one... I punched up the 'name' we refer to my one electric car by.. and I found a picture of MY CAR staring back at me... I think they are headed in the right direction. Good luck!
and people had the same doubts. However, I don't know if they spoiled their employees or not, or how thrifty they were in general, but it did seem to take them a while to get their act together as a search engine.
The nerve of a company to treat its employees like they are valuable assets instead of galley slaves! That's what caused the dot com bubble to burst, not companies with no solid business plan to monetize their ideas and venture capitalists who dumped money into any company that was doing something with the interwebs without doing any research.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Many dot-com business models did draw revenue from real customers who in turn did receive some service or product that made complete sense.
Here are two comparisons of operating websites and dom-com sites that failed. Each pair had the same (or at least similar) business model.
Amazon and E-Toys each sold non-perishable merchandise. The goods could be shipped cheaply, and weren't time-sensitive.
Amazon sells diversified products year-round today. People will buy books or electronics year-round.
E-Toys sold just toys, which have seasonal spikes. This made the Christmas season too important to them. Since the E-Toys servers couldn't handle the Christmas load, the company lost critical buisness.
Pets.com and the supermarket websites, e.g. peapod.com, deliver (semi-)perishable foods to customers.
The Pets.com model lacked infrastructure. They sent customers a single bag of dog food via a shipping company, e.g. USPS. The shipping costs cut into profits.
The supermarket websites have local brick-and-mortar stores to act as shipping warehouses. These companies use their own trucks. They keep shipping costs down, with both short distances and high volumes.
A good business model is not enough. There must be an efficient execution plan as well.
This is all about getting a little buzz going to
wake up the desperadoes in Redmond. Why not party
while you wait for M/S to buy you? They seem to
enjoy buying immature ideas like Powerset, et al.
Then again, maybe Yahoo! might be interested as
well.
"Bowls of strawberries and muffins lie around the rest area"
In their defense, strawberries are in season. Might as well eat them while they're good.
I have nothing compelling to say
Search for, for example, "reset ssg5 default settings" on Cuil - you get 0 results. Search for it on Google and you get first 2 pages of exactly when you're looking for - instructions on how to reset a Juniper SSG5 to default settings. These guys are not going to last...
Inconsistencies during early google years. http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/features/google/inconsistent.shtml
AFAICT, such comforts are not all that uncommon in well-funded startups as tools for morale and motivation; what was atypical of the late-90s boom is that companies continued acting like "startups" for much longer than investors would stand for now, not only in terms of comforts provided for staff, but more importantly in terms of continuing to burn through money without turning a profit. And, while doing that, they attracted investment as if they were as solid as blue chip stocks.
If Cuil is around five years from now with similar comforts, a half-billion dollar market cap, burning through a million dollars a week with no prospects of profit in sight, with strong and rising stock prices, that would be a sign that the bubble is back.
I got several 0 result queries when I tried Cuil, so I think they forgot to index some sites.
At least with broad results you can refine with more terms or operators or both.
I didn't like the format of cuil, I like using google to get 100 listings per page.....
music lover since 1969
Google: Multi-billion dollar world-wide infrastructure where they like to build their data centers near power generation stations because they use so much electricity, own thousands of miles of 'dark fiber' and even after years of this build-up, STILL give generally reliable search results and with a few exceptions, I more or less buy their, "do-no-evil" tag line. All this as a result of two guys who thought, "Hey, what if somebody made an uncluttered search engine with unobtrusive advertising that was REALLY, ACTUALLY user-friendly and didn't suck to use?"
Versus. . .
Me too, and we're so 'Cuil' because our imagination-lacking, safe-road and thus lame investors and marketing people figured we needed that MTV-zing to be hip with the kids, y'know?
Get real. What are they bringing to the table which is new? If nothing, then they are just lame opportunists who probably don't know what the heck they are doing because if they did, they're recognize that they're already in stupid-land. UNLESS, and this is my cynical side, there are some smart people involved who are actually just out to fleece investors with an "Honest, see, we're Really Trying" make-work company which everybody with a brain knows isn't actually doing anything but they didn't want to get real jobs.
I can think of a dozen truly useful things one could do with 25 million dollars, but which will not happen because of everything wrong with the world which makes the above scenario a common reality.
The sad thing is that this stupid start-up is getting press. I guess the same is true of internet start-ups as was true of Joseph Goebbels; say it loud and often enough and it becomes true. The bigger the lie, and all that. --Until it comes crashing to the ground when reality kicks in, of course. (Which also tends to happen with governments built on lies).
But on the off-chance that I'm being unfairly cynical, I will put in this one proviso; MAYBE, just MAYBE there are some people at the top of 'Cuil' whose personal passion actually, honestly, really is to build a better search engine and improve the world, in which case, Good For Them!
Whoa. I didn't even make it half-way through that sentence with a straight face. And I tried, too! Oh, well nevermind.
-FL
A bowl of muffins is somehow a lavish "90's bubble" extravagance? WTF!
If $20 in muffins every day, a bit of healthcare helps keep employees happy and healthy, its worth the investment!
The poster seems ignorant about what kind of BS the bubble companies were wasting their money on: $800 Aeron chairs for everyone, designer furniture, arcade games (and they weren't even paying reasonable prices for them, they were driving up Ebay prices to ridiculous levels like $1600 each for a Galaga or Ms Pacman), etc, etc
Even catered meals is good. If it keeps your employees accessible (ie: AT WORK) rather than wasting 2 hrs off at some restaurant, then it's a great investment. (Keep in mind that catered meals do not cost the same as what we pay as individuals. It's not as extravagant as it seems)
Geeze, cuil even scr*ws parents and kids!
http://parentzing.wordpress.com
It seems to be selective... if you search for something mainstream, Cuil will find some reasonable results... Search for something obscure and you get no results at all... Yet their whole claim to fame (or half of it, the second half being founded by ex-googlers) is their immense search base, right?
> Do that to Cuil and you get a penis.
El Reg has a story about that, too, for a different search. It seems like they've managed to index more gay porn than anything else.
How do you spot a company that's more interested in their image than their product?
Many blogs noted that cuil.com can't find itself if you search for "cuil" (without quotes). Few days later, apparently something changed and the first two results for "cuil" are suddenly relevant:
121,578 results for cuil
1. cuil.com (Cuil) ...) ...) ...
2. cuil.com/info/ (Cuil - The World's Biggest Search Engine)
3. www.properazzi.com/Cuil-Mhuine+Irel... (Properties for sale in Cuil Mhuine, Ireland - Properazzi)
4. cdrom.launch.com/track/504676 (Chase Around The Windmill: Toss The Feathers/Ballinasloe
5. topsecretmp3.com/track/159/112152/1... (Download Legal &Chase Around The Windmill: Toss The
Hmm, but result 3 and onward are totally irrelevant, those are the same exact old results we had couple of days ago, where are the reviews, all the press cuil got last few days? Try this, now, search for "cuil " (without quotes, just add a space):
121,578 results for cuil
1. www.properazzi.com/Cuil-Mhuine+Irel... (Properties for sale in Cuil Mhuine, Ireland - Properazzi) ...) ...) ...
2. cdrom.launch.com/track/504676 (Chase Around The Windmill: Toss The Feathers/Ballinasloe
3. topsecretmp3.com/track/159/112152/1... (Download Legal &Chase Around The Windmill: Toss The
Same results, without the first 2 relevant results. I guess someone hand-edited the results for "cuil" but unfortunately forgot to trim the spaces first. Notice it shows 121,578 results in both cases, although the results are apparently different.
Embarassing. I bet if they see this post they'll fix that too. Well, that's one resultset fixed, couple of hundred billion more to go!
In the posting, it mentions "How long will $25 million VC funding last at this rate?".
Now, I was about to call the PR/Media Rep for Cuil to provide some answers. But after digging around on their website http://www.cuil.com/search?q=how+long+will+%2425+million+VC+funding+last+at+this+rate they really aren't providing any answers. Really. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
When I went on Google, http://www.google.ca/search?q=how+long+will+%2425+million+VC+funding+last+at+this+rate&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
they weren't able to provide me with an answer about Cuil. But they provided me with 96,000 possible answers.
Strange. Cuil really needs to provide substantive answers about their own company before I use them. Whatever they are feeding their employees its really not the right stuff.
"A doctor calls round each Friday, after the weekly barbeque, to see if everyone's in good health."
Is there something in the BBQ food they're not telling employees about?
This sounds like OmniTI. We even have a kegerator in the break room. Only we're not a startup, we do fun Internetty stuff and we've been profitable every year since inception. Go figure!
Shouldn't everyone have perks like these?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=cuil+sucks
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=cuil+sucks
Look, I don't know you. And I don't really even think cuil is that good of a search engine. Maybe it has promise, time will tell.
But this is NOT a matter of "point of view." Probability is deterministic. It's not a matter of opinion or pov. It's arithmetic.
And this is why I said if your "magic number" was prime, THAT would be a little more interesting. Because if it were, then you'd be correct: The probability would be pretty low.
But 2784 has 24 factors.
So, what is the probability that any given number is a factor of 121,617,892,992? I don't know off the top of my head. But there are hundreds of them.
You are assigning meaning to something that is meaningless.
not referring to CUIL in particular which is cool, but the term bubble nowadays is overused, perhaps a more appropriate term when speaking of the housing and finance bubbles would be TUMOR...
Have you been to the top floor of your building lately? The perks up there start at "team of hookers and blow" and move right on to "private jet," for people whose main achievement has been picking the right parents when they were born.
And you think your work ethic is being damaged by a bowl of fruit?!
Yeah, I'm pissed. Just came back from Networkers. (I refuse to call it "Cisco LIVE!") Us CCIEs flew coach. The wastes of oxygen upstairs flew first-class. We spent our time hashing out crap with Cisco. They went to Disneyland with rented companions.
You must be young. Pull a few 72-hour troubleshooting sessions with me caused by MBAs who won't frakkin' listen and then see if you think cherries, a massage and a few hours with your kids is "coddling" you.
Punk.
pictures that come up on the results are stock photos - not any relation to the site content at all
I've searched on a business I'm a director of, the images shown alongside our name do not reflect our product and in fact I'd say they defame it somewhat. That sucks, if we weren't such a small business I think we'd have grounds to sue them.
Also, several results come up with our page content that do not link to our site.
This does not look good. I'm not happy.
Maybe they should cuil their results to actually provide useful hits?
Someone should have told those venture capitalists that cuil sounds a lot like caill. "Caill" would not be a good name for a search engine ;-)
Search return on a Cuil query for "cuil."
"We didn't find any results for Cuil. Try to think of different words to describe your search."
I think that pretty much says it all.
It's in the association of words and proposition of related topics. For example my search on "hot boiled potato" gave me a category box with the only obviously related topic "German Sausage". Now I know I want to try a "LandjÃger" with my potatoes.
Isn't that Cuil/kweel/cool/bleh?
For real search there is always google...
Answer: not long if they don't improve their crap site!
To bad it can't handle the swedish characters åäö...It looks like UTF8 to ISO-8859-1 problems...
For most /.ers whose left hands don't know what their right hands are doing, this is likely NOT a benefit.
"He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom."
reminded me that it is time for a cigarette break
So far I'm not impressed. I've been playing a lot of online Diplomacy lately, so the first thing I thought to test out the new search engine was to put in "diplomacy game." On the first page I got a fair number of results related to the game. Things like ebay listings and such, but none of the bigger diplomacy sites, and a fair number that didn't have anything to do with the game (most had to do with real diplomacy, but a surprising number had to do with "diplomas"). Seemed ok. Not great, but at least most of the results were somewhat relevant. Then I tried "online diplomacy game." First page mostly did in fact have to do with diplomacy, mostly sites that mentioned play by e-mail games, a couple of sites connected with EA/Mythic (apparently one of the founders worked on an online diplomacy game ages ago. I wonder if my friend who works there knows that?) a few forum games, and a couple of links to other strategy games that happened to use the word "diplomacy" on their webpage. Ok, seemed ok but not great, and not exactly what I was looking for. Then as I went a few pages in hoping to find more of what I was looking for: next couple pages are basically more of the same in fact several of them appear to be more or less the same results as I saw on the first page. This continued for several pages, there were more and more unrelated results some had to do with real diplomacy and international relations, and a lot of them had to do with "online digital photo printing." Going about 7 or 8 pages in, I kept getting basically the same results every page, none of which were what I was looking for. Same search in Google turned up sites on which you can play diplomacy online, a Wikipedia page about the game of Diplomacy, a place to buy the physical board game, a newsgroup about the game, and several of the biggest diplomacy strategy and general information sites online. Second page was still pretty relevant, and including more sites you can play on, including the site I play on (http://phpdiplomacy.net/), third page had more useful Diplomacy related resources, and so far none of them appear to be dupes, or only tangentially related to the game of diplomacy or playing online. Basically Google still gets me much more useful and relevant results than Cuil. Now maybe that'll change, but for now, I'm not likely to use Cuil, except to mess around with every so often to see if they've improved. They may have indexed more of the web than Google, but that's pretty worthless when the results aren't helpful. Googles big claim to fame back in the day was that they gave you more relevant and helpful results, not that they had indexed more of the web than any of their competitors.
I've played with Cuil a bit and i don't like it at all. First off, it's too dark and doesn't appear to offer any services beyond search. The results pages are horrendous, i don't care how many of them there are. I welcome a competitor to Google always but i'm not giving up my Google-lifestyle for this new search engine, that's for certain.
Google has absurd perks, far greater than anything I say during the tech boom. Citrix is also very well known for treating their employees well. I've worked for a number of companies with similar cultures.
The fact is, this model (which revolves about having the "best of the best" talent) works for many companies. These companies tend to have elaborate hiring processes because of the "best of the best" mentality.
Maybe...but was google "perfect" when it first hit the web? (I don't know)
When I found out about google, it was already getting to be top on the block...
altavista was best before it, I think...but everyone has to start somewhere...
CERTAINLY, Google needs some competition ... As "benign" as they appear to be, a little competition can still help them keep focused on improvements...
No competition -- no strong push to "grow"....too much competition, you get squished, but some competition can be good for users/consumers as well as the company and furthering the technology...