Cuil Proves the Bubble Is Back 496
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?"
How many employees do they have? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
..and? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Re:Cuil Proves Nothing (Score:5, Interesting)
Cuil? No. True Knowledge? Yes! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The bubble is back! (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Where did this come from? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Cuil Proves Nothing (Score:2, Interesting)
Not for long (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:I'm not sure this is as good as it sounds (Score:1, Interesting)
When the hell did "carrot and stick" meaning "providing an incentive to perform" (the proverbial carrot at the end of a stick) start being so widely misused as "the combined use of incentives and punishments" (be good get a carrot, be bad get beat by the stick)? This is a bastardization on the order of taking "turn the other cheek" to mean "look the other way".
Re:If the bubble's back, it will burst soon (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Is this unusual? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Cuil Proves Nothing (Score:5, Interesting)
Try comparing like with like:
http://www.google.com/search?q=aes+zip+linux [google.com]
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=aes+zip+linux [cuil.com]
Anecdotal evidence Cuil sucks (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [cuil.com]
http://www.google.com/search?&q=jeff%20harlow%20motorcycle%20preacher&sourceid=firefox [google.com]
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.
Perks, yes. Headcount, no. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Cuil Proves Nothing (Score:3, Interesting)
[...]then sell the book rights to "How You Can Legally Steal $30 Million from VC Suckers".
No, it would be more like "How do you get VC suckers to give you $30 Million". And that, my dear friend, is an art that I'd love to master.
Re:This isn't that unusual (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes I do and about 2 dozen other "real" computer languages. There is nothing wrong for javascript it is good for solving particular problems that need to be solved most particularly handling UI for a web page. While saving the server the job of handling the data. As the Non-Javascript alternatives would be a plugin based languge, or having the server handle everything on post backs (slow for you, slow for the web server and slow on the database server (having to requery information that it already has gotten).
HTML is one of the few widely acceptable and easy to use methods for running applications remotely (remote X connections are not common as you need special software installed on windows, and it is not normally easy to setup (for the average user)) Using Javascript with HTML offers better load balancing solution as the Desktop usually has a lot of CPU that is barely utilized while the server is usally running at higher levels.
Back in the 1990's bubble Web Development was separate from application development for the most part. Today it is becoming more and more integrated and the line between web developer and application developer is far more blurred.
Re:Cuil Proves Nothing (Score:3, Interesting)
You know what this tells me?
In other words, it is search engine that has a hard time finding relevant results, is vulnerable to spam, and has a confused index.
I won't be buying stock.
Re:The bubble is back! (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a married man, and I haven't had a conjugal visit in 6 months.
I don't get this, unless both of you have agreed to be celibate. I hear this a lot, and my wife and I have discussed this, and she doesn't understand it either. I knew a couple that each privately said to me that they wished they had more sex, and yet they couldn't ask their partner. It's crazy!
IANAP, but it seems that discussing this with your partner would be your best bet. Of course, I may not be in a typical relationship, as I don't have a bad word to say about my in-laws, or about my wife or the amount of sex my wife and I have. So YMMV.