Gawker
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venture capital
Google resumes valued at $200 million by Wal-Mart heirs
A new report reveals that when the Walton family, heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune, invested in Cuil, a search engine, they valued ex-Googlers Anna Patterson, Russell Power, and Louis Monier's startup at a ridiculous $200 million. With Monier leaving, does that mean it's worth 33 percent less? The search engine's sloppy launch has likely proved more damaging to the founders' paper wealth. But Cuil's outsized funding should hearten every Google customer-service rep: The stock may be down, but the value of putting "Google" on your LinkedIn profile remains overinflated. Just tell the investors about the time you beat Larry Page at foosball, and their wallets open right up. -
exits
Cuil product VP searching for new job
Cuil, the would-be Google killer backed by Wal-Mart family money, has lost one of its highest-profile executives, Louis Monier. Monier, Cuil's VP of product, founded AltaVista and previously worked at eBay and Google. and VP of product Louis Monier just a month after the site's public launch. "We’ve heard but haven’t confirmed that he and CEO Tom Costello just couldn’t agree on the Cuil product road map, and that the botched launch didn’t help things much either," TechCrunch reports. Cuil had a road map? It must have pointed to a dead end. In August, Hitwise reported Cuil had 0.007 percent of the U.S. search market. -
cubicle culture
Cuil shows the Irish how to spend it like Beckham
[UPDATE: Sarah Carey wrote to say that her post was removed temporarily because of traffic overload. It's back up now.] More »
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By Paul BoutinComment by Shadowlayer: @Passerby: I was just going to mention game programmers too. Anyway, didnt had an idea the irish had a counceling agency... more » | Other threads
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blogging for dollars
Tech insiders learn the outside sucks
"I am really trying to get off of the PR bandwagon," declares the formerly PR-friendly Robert Scoble. "We write something is amazing in the morning and then total junk in the afternoon," gripes Web 2.0 event regular Sarah Lacy. You see, neither Scoble nor Lacy got one of the secret advance "pre-briefings" from overhyped search engine Cuil prior to the site's launch on Sunday night. So they didn't get to lead the charge of Cuil is kewl! announcements, nor the backwash of Umm, maybe not retractions. Don't dismiss the pair's lengthy posts as sour grapes. More »
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By Paul BoutinComment by macbeach: Don't they teach this in journalism school?: Everyone has an opinion. Being in the PR business (being mouthpiece for someone else's... more » | Other threads
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politics
Google is blue, Cuil is red
Here's a special bonus for conspiracy theorists: Vince Sollitto, Cuil's PR chief, previously worked as a Republican political operative and spokesman for California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Google executives, as one would expect for a bunch of Bay Area liberals, have donated heavily to Democratic candidates and causes. Cuil is backed by Wal-Mart family money. See a pattern?
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By Owen ThomasComment by colonelpanic: Sorry. Lobotomies have fallen out of favour lately. more » | Other threads
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search
Yahoo VP shows how Cuil could be cooler
Sam Pullara, a vice president at Yahoo, has come up with a brilliant strategy: Rip off new search engine Cuil's three-column layout, and substitute in Yahoo's much more relevant search results. A sample test on "Cuil" yields much better information than the would-be Google rival offers. I'm guessing "yuil" is Gaelic for "humiliation."
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By Owen ThomasComment by tillman: That says you guys haven't yet used [in.search.yahoo.com] It is way cooler than cuil or goog. more » | Other threads
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Greg Penner
Wal-Mart moneyman backing Google rival Cuil
Silicon Valley's press corps is wringing its collective hands over the botched launch of Cuil, a Web search engine. Instead of complaining about Cuil's piss-poor search results, why is no one asking who paid for this debacle? The surprising answer: Wal-Mart. More » -
great moments in pr
Cuil's 3 big mistakes
It's Gaelic for "trainwreck." The launchpad implosion of Cuil on Monday is a lesson for startup founders. Cuil had a solid hook: A search engine with more pages than Google, built at a fraction of the cost. But by Tuesday, Cuil was The Little Search Engine that Couldn't. What did they do wrong? I can't believe I'm saying this, but the company would have done better with a more traditional product launch — the kind that usually bores me stiff. Here's what they missed: More »
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By Paul BoutinComment by SuffolkHouse: The layout sucks, and it does NOT search deeply. There are searches I do often on Google, and I... more » | Other threads
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domain names
Look.com available for only $2 million
Hard to believe it's been 37 years since the oversized, photo-driven Look magazine folded. (Bonus trivia: Stanley Kubrick got his start there as a photographer.) Today, I think the guy trying to raise two mil for the look.com domain is aiming too high. The whole world has proven they can learn to spell Google, eBay and Amazon. What do you think a look.com site would be in 2008? It seems perfect for a search engine — hey, isn't look Gaelic for knowledge?
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By Paul BoutinComment by nojo: @Advertising Guru: I've got a copy from 1969, with a cover feature by Nat Hentoff on the Smothers Brothers'... more » | Other threads
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cuil
Doesn't anyone here speak Gaelic?
The website for overhyped Google competitor Cuil claims that cuil, which just happens to sound like the English "cool" but I'm sure that never crossed their minds, is a Gaelic word that means "knowledge." I'm not saying they made that up, but I'll feel better when I have a factcheck-quality reference for it. We've been poking around Gaelic dictionaries online, but the only definitions we've turned up are "rear" and "corner." I've emailed the company to ask for a source that would satisfy the typical research editor at a national mag or newspaper. Here's the FAQ version of Cuil's name: More »
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By Paul BoutinComment by swang: this says it means back end ... nothing to do with fionn mc cumhaill and the salmon of knowledge [www.focal.ie] more » | Other threads
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cuil
Search engine know-it-alls wanted for Slate article
My fellow semi-intellectuals at Slate want your input: "Monday's launch of Cuil, the latest search engine gunning for Google, brings us to this question: What queries can you give a search engine to quickly expose its strengths and weaknesses?" Leave them in the comments here, and I'll pass them on. More »
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By Paul BoutinComment by andyfox1979: cuil is just terrible. here's a blog post about it: [www.misanthropytoday.com] more » | Other threads
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your privacy is an illusion
New search engine doesn't log your searches
Holy Cory Doctorow! "We do not keep logs of our users' search activity," vows the privacy policy for Cuil, the overrated Google competitor getting way too much press today. Why isn't this their marketing slogan?
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By Paul BoutinComment by TuesdayDascylus: Cuil may not keep server logs, but it gives out third-party cookies like candy on Halloween. If you have your browser... more » | Other threads
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cuil
5 most likely Cuil misspellings, defined!
"Cuil? Isn't that French for 'ass'?" It's not, but you'll find that out soon enough when you can't remember the name of search engine Cuil.com. Here's a petite roundup of what other domains Cuil should have grabbed — and one they actually did — before launch. More » -
great moments in pr
Google afraid of Cuil? No. Google afraid of Cuil's press releases? Hell yeah
Now we get it: Publicists at Google knew that Cuil was going to launch today, with coverage in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. How did they know? Because reporters called them for comment last week, seeking a response to Cuil's claim that it has the largest index of any search engine. That's why last Friday, Google's flacks hastily typed up a blog post announcing that Google had reached the 1-trillion-URL mark, slapped the names of a couple of software engineers on it, and made sure the national media were aware of this awesome story. Normally, a milestone event like this — 1 trillion URLs!!! — would be announced on a Monday, not a Friday. As a former search engine builder myself, here's what I think: Cuil is a much better pop-culture media story than it is a search engine right now. But Google's image-wranglers are aware their company is now the Goliath to everyone else's David in journalists' simplified minds. It may be folklore, but that kind of story only has one ending.
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By Paul BoutinComment by Goose Spruce: 1 trillion URLs...Thats like having 10 URls for every man, woman and child. more » | Other threads
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cuil
Bored journalists hype yet another Google-killer
You'll see lots of articles today about Cuil — sophomorically pronounced "cool" — a new search engine built by former Google employees. Here's the smart response to anyone who brings it up around the office: "What specific search results on Cuil do you like better than Google's?" When Google launched a decade ago, it was easy to check off that (1) Google had no distracting banner ads, (2) Google results weren't clogged with marketing pages full of keywords, (3) Google served its pages much faster than the bloated "portal" layouts for AltaVista and Excite. Quick, why is Cuil cool?
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By Paul BoutinComment by Shadowlayer: Where did these ex-googler come from? the marketing dept? All I see is a last minute attempt to steal some thunder... more » | Other threads
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