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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?"
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!
I think that the bigger proof is that their product sucks ass. Go try and use it. I looked for "aes zip linux" and got 0 results. 0 results? Really? You index *more* than google and you can't find ONE reference to "aes zip linux"? I tried to use that thing, but it doesn't seem to enjoy providing me with any results. To me *that* is proof that they are a bubble company. Where's the beef?
You'll have that sometimes...
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.
But if we are smart, we can still make money. I recommend selling short on Google now.
I recommend not taking stock tips from /.
Unless of course enough of us get together and actually move the market in the direction we want. /.ers don't have that kinda cash on hand.
But I suspect
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
Not unusual, no. Mine you, I've only been working in this company 10 years...
We have a subsidised restaurant and sandwich bar. The coffee bars take the piss out of Starbucks.
Free coffee and soft drinks from machines in each corner of each floor in each building.
Um, stale sandwiches and fruit left over from long meetings..?
Fully stocked gym, several trainers, but only one working at a time, one physiotherapist. Open 24/7. Treatment room looks well equipped although I've never needed to used it.
Doctor is in his office 5 times a week. Two nurses are always there.
90% of us are on personal contracts. I'm supposed to do 37 hours a week, I'll only do 35 this week though as I want to go home early on Friday. Do my work and everyone's happy. We refuse to talk about people being 30 minutes late in the mornings - it's not productive. If anything, we'll complain when others are coming in at 8am and not going home until 8pm. People working long hours is not productive, it creates a bad atmosphere, if there's work for two people, employ a second person.
This is a massive company in the UK. My site alone employs 2,000 people.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Try comparing like with like:
http://www.google.com/search?q=aes+zip+linux
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=aes+zip+linux
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
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.