Kevin Scott - Comments

Kevin Scott posted a link

Gay-rights advocates to challenge Proposition 8 -- chicagotribune.com

November 5 at 5:12 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

"Research and polling showed that many voters were against gay marriage but afraid that saying so would make them seem "discriminatory" or "not cool," said Flint, so proponents hoped to show them they were not alone." Guess what all of you folks who voted 'Yes' on 8? You are in fact discriminatory and not the least bit cool. And you've made me ashamed to be a Californian. - Kevin Scott via Bookmarklet

+1. - Vinod Marur

Matt Cutts posted a message on Twitter

“Sounds like Mary Meeker believes mobile is the single biggest opportunity in the tech space right now.”

November 5 at 4:31 pm - Link

Isaac Hepworth and Ed Shaz/NextInstinct liked this

I couldn't agree more. :-) - Kevin Scott

Matt Cutts posted an entry on Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

My Halloween 2008 Costume

October 31 at 1:54 pm - Link

Serena, Tony Ruscoe and Paul Wilcox liked this

Agh! Rickrolled! - Laurence Gonsalves

Your costumes are always the best! - Tony Ruscoe

Not quite as good as Inigo Montoya, but among your finest. - Kevin Scott

Kevin Scott posted a link

Should you use a SAN to scale your architecture? | High Scalability

October 26 at 1:01 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

"A better solution is to use commodity hardware, directly attach storage on servers, and partition across servers to scale and for greater availability." Good advice. - Kevin Scott via Bookmarklet

Joel Webber posted a message

“Anais Emma Catherine Webber, born Oct 24th at 8:34 pm. W00t!”

October 24 at 8:33 pm - Link

MikeAmundsen, AJ Kohn, Bret Taylor and 4 other people liked this

OMG congrats!! - Erica Baker

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I love when babies are born! Congrats (and what an awesome name!). - Derrick

w00t. Congrats Joel. - j1m

Congratulations! - Jim Norris

Congrats!!!!! - Karen Padham Taylor

Congrats! - Bret Taylor

Congrats Joel! - Kevin Scott

GigaOm posted an entry on GigaOM

AdMob Raises $15.7M in Series C Funding

October 21 at 7:27 pm - Link

Nicholas James, kamla bhatt and Robert Scoble liked this

hmmm. We tested this extensively and got zero results. Testing Google offering now. Will keep you posted. ACEdge - Alan Edgett

Alan, if you're willing, we'd be very interested in chatting with you about what didn't work out in your testing of AdMob. I'm VP of Eng @ AdMob BTW, and am always interested in hearing thoughts on how we can improve our product. - Kevin Scott

Kevin...happy to...just followed you on twitter. DM me, I believe we still have some inventory with you left. We're thinking "branding" now in lieu of commerce. Possibly the problem is on our end, but Mobile may be different beast as well... - Alan Edgett

michael arrington posted an entry on TechCrunch

AdMob Closes $15.7 Million Series C Round Led By Sequoia

October 21 at 8:08 pm - Link

Nicholas James, Jonathan Betz, foxmachia and 4 other people liked this

Video with AdMob is here: http://www.fastcompany.tv/vide... so you can see why this company gets funding. - Robert Scoble

Congrats, Kevin! - Bret Taylor

Thanks Bret. - Kevin Scott

Louis Gray shared an item on Google Reader

Keeping Count: The TechCrunch Layoff Tracker

October 17 at 1:49 pm - Link

fbrunel, joneilortiz, Bill Sanders and 8 other people liked this

ouch - Tris Hussey via twhirl

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until they start a Hiring Tracker i'm not interested. - Jeremy Toeman

I don't want to sound Pollyana... but why not cover the hires with the same fervor? FACEBOOK HIRES 15 IN WEEK (for example) - Louis Gray

Exactly. This is my point on putting it on Tip'd http://tipd.com/Tech/layoff-tr... Can't we talk about companies cutting costs and maybe growing? How about ways to help and build biz? There are always opportunities. - Tris Hussey

Yet more proof - TechCrunch is F'd Company 2.0 - Rex Hammock

To be fair ebay has been gearing up for a layoff for a while now. - todd

Why does TechCrunch do stuff like that? I found TechCrunch mid year when they were tracking Yahoo employees -- where they were before Yahoo and where they were going after Yahoo. I mean... this is people's lives, not just 'news'. It's tactless and makes me sick. I stopped reading them after that. - Mona N.

@Mona N agreed seems like Arringtons had it in for Yahoo/Yang 4eva. - adolfo foronda

This is the same Arrington who got his panties in a bunch over Dare Obasanjo calling him out for turning TechCrunch into the new F*ed Company, right? - Sprague D

Does Mike want Denton to buy TechCrunch? - Cyndy

ebay should not be on that list. tc jumped the sensationalism shark on that one. - Carlos Ayala

+1 louis gray, There are tech companies hiring - they just may not be in silcon valley, Example: Exact Target here in Indy announced plans to add 300 over five years. http://indy-biz.com/2008/10/02... - Lorraine Ball

@Carlos, I know people laid off from eBay. - Louis Gray

There are still companies hiring in the Silicon Valley. - Kevin Scott

i'm hiring. only 1 person, but it's still a net positive! :) - Jeremy Toeman

I remember not too long ago when the first big drawdown in Internet companies happened. A particular magazine reported each layoff; each closure - with glee - until said magazine's employees themselves got fired and said magazine closed down. Be careful about gleefully reporting someone else's demise - you could be next. - ScottBourne

@Louis my comment was not in reference to it not happening. it was in reference to ebay being clumped into the whole startup/layoff issue to sensationalize the article. i think that you and i would agree that ebay: #1 is not a startup and #2 the layoffs were not a shocking turn of events that were caused as a result of a lack of vc funding. it is no secret that the business has been suffering for a long time and its infrastructure is in turmoil as we speak. - Carlos Ayala

Jess Lee posted a link

Ex-Google Employees - The Google Diaspora - Esquire

October 1 at 2:53 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Jagtesh Chadha, Rob Kniaz, sirish and 25 other people liked this

Includes some interesting quotes from Salman, like "Tell them to go fuck themselves" and "With the white guy, I know he's stupid. Whereas with the brown guy, he better be fucking brilliant." - Jess Lee via Bookmarklet

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Wow. - Bret Taylor

You can take the man out of Microsoft but you can't take the Microsoft out of the man. (i'm ex msft too) - peter

I really want to "like" Peter's comment. - Jess Lee

so ex-googlers, what did you think of the article? (as an ex yahoo I thought they spent too much time on the google-formed VC firm....providing the choice quotes above)....what ex-googlers (outside of FF and Polyvore) should we be on the lookout for? - Adam Kazwell

In case if anyone wonders about the "Indian Diaspora" article on the side, yes, apparently it's the Big Diaspora Issue. http://www.esquire.com/feature... - Richard Chen

I can't believe that people are still writing articles about people leaving Google... - Kevin Scott

"Any large company, especially one that went public four years ago and is beginning to see its first generation of pre-IPO employees become fully vested..." --- This didn't make sense to me. Are they confused how vesting works? Are employees who started before 2003 not being counted as part of a generation? - Chris White

rarely do i read something that evokes such a strong feeling of the essence of salman! - Charles Hudson

OMG!! no way... awful! - Susan Beebe

There is a fine line between being realistic, sharp, challenging, even skeptical, and being an asshole. I sometimes worry that late arrivals to Google didn't get to experience the earlier culture where we pushed each other to think hard but it never got personal. - Christopher Sacca

Ah, the old "say 'fuck' a lot and act like a huge racist dick and it'll make me seem important" strategy. Funny how people can spend years at Google but not pick up an ounce of Googlyness. - Benjy Weinberger

Amen, Benjy. Goes for any company, actually. - Rob Schonberger

@sacca: I arrived sorta late (Jan '06) and definitely got to experience the good culture... and I think it still exists though by nature it's fragile. Oddly, in contrast to Peter's comment, some of the most Googly people I've worked with are ex-msft. - Moishe Lettvin

Why couldn't they find some engineers to interview? You know, doers? Instead we get to hear about the latest posturing from some MBA dudes. - Gregor J. Rothfuss

Aren't good VCs supposed to add some value to a venture besides the cash? Anyone can sign a check, after all. These guys sounds like they actually subtract value! - Benjy Weinberger

In my experience, it's rare for a VC to add any "value" other than writing a check. In fact there are some great examples of .coom startups which were ruined when the VCs took executive control and screwed up the company's direction. - Dave Saunders via twhirl

This was bad PR, but I've only had good interactions with Salman. - Chris White

Salman's a great guy, and has assembled a great team over there. It's good to inject some pragmatism into the VC world every now and then. =) - darren

Ana posted a link

Schwarzenegger outlaws text-messaging while driving - Los Angeles Times

September 25 at 12:27 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Il'ya Ash, Dustin, Eugene and 14 other people liked this

"Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has banned motorists from sending, writing or reading messages on electronic devices starting Jan. 1." - Ana via Bookmarklet

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"reading messages from electronic devices"? How about my GPS in the car? How about my car itself that has a digital readout to tell me what radio station I'm on or that I need gas? I hope the details of this bill are well written. - Brian Johns

http://www.votesmart.org/issue... - "A person shall not drive a motor vehicle while using an electronic wireless communications device to write, send, or read a text-based communication", which they define as "using an electronic wireless communications device to manually communicate with any person using a text-based communication". - ⓞnor

Good. As long as I'm still free to crash my car while I'm tuning the radio, then I'm fine with it. :-) - Brian Johns

What about emoticons? Do those count as text? - Jim Norris

Don't some cars display text messages on the nav system via bluetooth? Is that illegal too, I wonder? - Robin Barooah

At least this make MUCH more sense than banning talking while driving - brendan

"For purposes of this section, a person shall not be deemed to be writing, reading, or sending a text-based communication if the person reads, selects, or enters a telephone number or name in an electronic wireless communications device for the purpose of making or receiving a telephone call." I'd like to know how the hell they plan to enforce this law. By the time a cop pulls someone over, can't they just exit out of their e-mail or text screen and claim they were attempting to dial a number? - Kevin Scott

Good. - Jason Kaneshiro

Hands-free texting? - Daniel Shaw

This might provide yet another good reason to implement better voice recognition to mobile devices as it could be used to "write" text message. Yes, that might have limited usability and high amount of errors but didn't people also say that about text messages? - Daniel Schildt

Outlawed, eh? I think we now know what steel horse Bon Jovi's cowboy was riding and what he was wanted for. - Scott Loganbill via twhirl

KevinScott, if in good faith a cop witnesses you writing, sending, or reading a text message, or perhaps after a crash even if you are not at fault, i suspect this law would give probable cause to seize your device and scroll your list of messages, and collect it as evidence. Has anyone thought about the ramifications of this law? - John Lam

I've tried doing this on an iPhone. I've nearly got myself in too many accidents... so this will be for my own good. - Dustin

You probably mean he signed that bill into law, CA is pretty whacked out but you don't have a dictator yet. - Claude Betancourt

Can you still carry a gun, though? - Rob Schonberger

Bret Taylor posted a link

Not from The Onion: The Teenage Put - Marginal Revolution

September 28 at 10:31 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

Shannon Jiménez, Anne Bouey and Amit Patel liked this

"Parents are abandoning teenagers at Nebraska hospitals, in a case of a well intentioned law inspiring unintended results. Over the last two weeks, moms or dads have dropped off seven teens at hospitals in the Cornhusker state, indicating they didn’t want to care for them any more. ...Under a newly implemented law, Nebraska is the only state in the nation to allow parents to leave children of any age at hospitals and request they be taken care of, USA Today notes. So-called “safe haven laws” in other states were designed to protect babies and infants from parental abandonment." - Bret Taylor via Bookmarklet

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You guys really need to implement un-like. - Kevin Scott

What the hell? - flammable

I suspect some of those teenagers would have preferred to drop off their parents. - j1m

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... - Larry Greenfield

Kevin Scott posted a link

AstroLand Park: Coney Island's AstroLand Park Closing, A Victim Of The Real Future

September 9 at 6:12 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

AstroLand is awesome. Such a shame to see it go... - Kevin Scott via Bookmarklet

Eric Holland posted a message on Twitter

“My bionic is now pythonic”

September 4 at 4:04 pm - Link

I suspect that I should be frightened. - Kevin Scott

michael arrington posted an entry on TechCrunch

Mozilla Fights Back With New Firefox Benchmarks

September 3 at 8:52 am - Link

Varun Mahajan, Jeff P. Henderson, Eric @ CS Techcast and 8 other people liked this

Competition increase quality - Kerem Ozkan

I think Google will push Firefox to improve much more than IE has...especially if Google stays on top of Chrome and keeps improving it. - Chris Rossini

I call this a good thing. Your main browser will now be fast. Your backup browser will also be fast. They'll both rock. As it should be! - Jaemi Kehoe

Another set of benchmarks: http://waynepan.com/2008/09/02... - Kevin Scott

Leo Laporte posted an entry on leolaporte

leolaporte: The bookkeeper is coming in tomorrow to help me finish my 2007 taxes and I haven't got anything in order yet. -sigh-

August 27 at 9:10 pm - Link

Funny enough, I'm doing the same thing tomorrow. I feel your pain Leo. - Kevin Scott

Kevin Scott posted a link

Chloe Elizabeth Scott

August 16 at 9:59 pm - Link

Born Saturday at 2:50p weighing in at 9 lbs and 14 ozs (!!!). Mother and baby are healthy, resting, and in general doing just fine. - Kevin Scott

Congratulations, Kevin! - Bret Taylor

w00t! Glad to hear all involved are doing well. - Joel Webber

Thanks Bret and Joel! - Kevin Scott

Kevin Scott posted a link

FT.com / Home UK / UK - 'My piano almost dreams with me'

August 3 at 3:32 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

"It's like a declaration of love. If you intend to tell a person in the evening that you love her, you don't spend the afternoon in front of the mirror watching what your lips do when you form the words, 'I love you.' You don't need to. And I don't need to play the piece at home. I will tell them that I love them in the concert hall. And that's enough." - Kevin Scott via Bookmarklet

DeWitt Clinton posted a link

NBC Olympics On The Go -- powered by TVTonic (aka, screw you, web)

July 31 at 6:30 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Mahdi Ebrahimi, Erhan Erdogan and Ⓒⓗⓡⓘⓢ ᴷᴵᴹ ᴬ liked this

System Requirements: operating system — Windows Vista Home Premium or Windows Vista Ultimate - DeWitt Clinton via Bookmarklet

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I honestly thought that by 2008 we were past that. - DeWitt Clinton

How completely unnecessary. How can a site like YouTube exist and we still get sites like this? - Bret Taylor

Microsoft is a sponsor. Ubuntu isn't. - DeWitt Clinton

Just for this news item alone, we need a "Hate" choice besides "Like" ... - Clarence Chiang

Just making it easier and easier to personally boycott the events all together. And they were just saying how China's censorship of the media was going to make it difficult to cover. Maybe they're offering viewing access to this year's games as a consolation prize for Vista users. - Ⓒⓗⓡⓘⓢ ᴷᴵᴹ ᴬ

http://tvants.en.softonic.com hopefully that will work for watching something other than swimming here in Aus. - Tai

And we are also talking about NBC: the world's lamest producer of sports programming. I'm surprised that they didn't make their "online" viewing option a 24-7 channel of Bob Costas features on the emotional struggles of Olympic badminton players on their journeys to Beijing. - Kevin Scott

NBC Olympics online videos will be available for both mac and windows. You should be able to use it on Ubuntu with Moonlight. http://visitmix.com/blogs/News... This TVTonic thing appears to be about offline, not online. - Joshua Allen

Thanks for the update, Joshua. Let me link to that as well. - DeWitt Clinton

@tai: PPLive works plenty good for me; I use it every day. If you want NBC instead of CCTV, though, the NBC Silverlight player should work in Australia (and support both Mac and PC) - Joshua Allen

@Clarence/Kevin, what if the More> menu included an option called Suxor? - j1m

Matt Cutts posted a message on Twitter

“@ajkohn2001, nothing stops other companies from doing 20% time. Doing it at Google makes it more likely you'll really do it and launch it.”

July 31 at 6:15 pm - Link

Deepak, Piaw Na, Frankie Warren and 3 other people liked this

But it's Google's product then, not your own. I like the idea, but it creates more value for Google, less for the person. - AJ Kohn

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@AJ But, during that time... Google is paying you. - Jake

@Jake: Oh, I know it works out for a lot of folks. You get to create while getting paid. It's a form of risk aversion. But if you did your stuff on the weekends, over time you could try to do something on your own. Maybe that's not for everyone, but why hand over your best creativity when you could sell it yourself? - AJ Kohn

The idea that creativity is somehow consumed is exactly backwards. A more creative job will increase your creativity levels. - Paul Buchheit

@Paul: Would you have wanted FF to launch under Google? I'm not saying you stop having creative ideas because you're in a creative environment. But ownership (in all senses of the word) is something else. - AJ Kohn

AJ, if you're going to start your own company, then go for it. All I'm saying is that if you're not, don't "save up" your ideas or creativity. - Paul Buchheit

There are also lots of creative ideas that are not too difficult to implement at Google that would be prohibitively expensive in terms of both development effort and operating cost if attempted as bootstrapped, nights-and-weekends efforts. - Kevin Scott

@Paul: Agreed. If you're not going to do something with your ideas for yourself, then take advantage of the outlet Google is providing. I just think too many people (anywhere, not just at Google) are scared to fail, scared to take the risk on their own ideas. So, in this way, Google makes it easier not to take the risk on yourself. - AJ Kohn

@Kevin: Absolutely agree. Not every idea is one that you could take and run with yourself. - AJ Kohn

My favorite of these is the search wild card operator, e.g., [barack obama was born on *] implemented by Hiyan Alshawi. Technically it wasn't a 20% project. But it was something that he thought was cool, so he just implemented it. Obviously not something you can do without infrastructure like Google and not the sort of thing that you could do at a company where you have no time to work on stuff just to scratch a personal itch. - Kevin Scott

@Kevin: Wasn't aware of the wild card operator. Very interesting and a good project to support your point. - AJ Kohn

Re: scared to fail. Failure is still failure whether it's in Google or outside. There's a lot of overhead to starting your own company too, that I for one have been glad that google covers for me. Also, many products die because they're never seen, and Google solves that. No panacea, just a tool in the toolbox. - Daniel Dulitz

Kevin Scott posted a message on Twitter

“OK. New 3g iPhone is pretty nice. I'm still happy that I didn't wait in line for it.”

July 30 at 10:30 pm - Link

It would have been so much more awesome if you'd waited in line for it. - j1m

Bah. If I had wasted a bunch of time waiting in line for one, then every little minor annoyance with the device would become a major ranting opportunity. "They made me wait in line for 4 hours AND I had to delete and re-create my Mobile Me account on the phone in order for my calendars to sync! An outrage!!" Without the line, it's just "eh." You have to understand how much I hate lines. :-) - Kevin Scott

Matt Cutts posted a message on Twitter

“Marissa on the Green Bay Packers: http://tinyurl.com/5hlpac”

July 31 at 12:35 pm - Link

Andrew Smith, AJ Kohn, Brian White and 2 other people liked this

"50% of what Google launches comes from 20% time." - Kevin Scott

"Viking Purple" refernce to what she's wearing as parting comment. Vintage FOX! - Brian White

20% time creates new Google products. What if these same people did it on their own time? Let's face it, this isn't selfless. - AJ Kohn

Kevin Scott posted a link

AdMob - Mobile Analytics

July 31 at 9:44 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

Just launched our public beta. - Kevin Scott via Bookmarklet

hooray! loopt's been anticipating something like this. - Min Liu

Paul Buchheit posted a message

“Maybe Cuil isn't supposed to be good. They must know that the results are bad, but they launched anyway. Maybe they aren't trying to build a full search engine, but just want to demo their crawling+indexing technology with the expectation that someone will buy the company and plug in better ranking.”

July 28 at 11:20 pm - Link

Alexander Oelling, Torsten Eckert, ~C4Chaos and 86 other people liked this

Where "someone" = MSFT, who has already shown that they are willing to pay a lot for non-functional search engines. - Paul Buchheit

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That is what I was thinking, too. - Robert Scoble

You'd think they'd work toward getting something relevant if you search on "cuil launch" - Michael Markman

It's the only thing that makes sense when you look at how bad the results are. You don't roll out something like unless you are just showing off the interface. - Kevin Bondelli

Would also explain the weak branding. Who cares, if it's just going to get plugged into something else? - Chris Baskind

Not very good results at the moment I will say - shinchi via twhirl

It must be so hard to launch something in a realm where there isn't much tolerance/patience for incremental improvement. The bar in this space is high and consumers are very picky. Look at Yahoo. Their search is actually pretty damn good. However, they keep losing share. - Christopher Sacca

agree with Sacca - also, I thought the people behind Cuil had already sold some search technology to Google and hence they wanted to try it out on their own this time - so if anything they'd have more intent than others not to flip. - Adam Kazwell

100% agree with Paul .... what they have launched really sucks and I don't think I would be going back again to search .... Sacca seems to be right that the bar is really high in this space and whatever gets launched really needs to work well or it will fail - Raza via Alert Thingy

It is also strange that Cuil has no presence on twitter or friendfeed. There is no friendfeed.com/cuil. There is a twitter.com/cuil account but no twitters there. It would be interesting to hear from someone at Cuil on the FriendFeed/Twitter as to why they launched with the poor results... - Atul Arora

Yahoo's crawl speed is not close to GOOG. - Michael

It's something, and a reasonable first step. Yes, the results aren't that great but they seem reasonably comprehensive. Their make-or-break will be showing continuous visible progress - if they don't, sure, they're just a $XXXm dog and pony show for another company too scared of Google to see straight, but if they do improve, there may be potential for even more upside than that. - David Weekly

Google Killer? I do not even need to look to know the answer - Mike Reynolds

maybe there could be business in opening up their index? - Alex Gawley

I'm not saying that the results are good, but people seem overly critical. I saw one piece on how their name is too hard to spell. But if they did become popular, this would not remain a problem. - Clare Dibble

It's embarrassing IMO. The results are thin and the images completely wrong. Not good is one thing ... Cuil seems a cut below not good right now. - AJ Kohn

There results aren't -bad- but they are in no way great. Worse yet, anytime you start throwing around X-killer, you are pretty much setting yourself up for destruction. - Steve Spalding

can a startup beat google with a link-based algorithmic search engine? msft's cashback.com is an example of changing the game. trovix.com's deep semantic indexing is changing the game. same for thefind.com. mahalo human-powered engine is too. Who else? - Tim Connors

Paul, maybe they launched because they believed gathering data and feedback from the public would help them improve their ranking and other aspects of their service? I don't think that their ranking is anywhere near as good as Google's right now. But, there's no a priori reason to believe that Cuil ranking won't improve quickly. Anna, Russell, et.al. are actually pretty sharp. I for one am excited to see another player in search with new ideas about infrastructure and user experience. - Kevin Scott

They of all people should have known to release with fast results (latency).. The fact that they did not surprises me, and had the exact effect I would expect.. I have no plans on going back, good results or not.. :) - Derek Collison

Does "launch early" work for search engines? Don't think so.. - Jing Lim

One of the nice things about Google is the speed they index. Consider the indexing of a blog post made yesterday: Google already picked up the post and Cuil has not. http://www.cuil.com/search?q=C... VERSUS http://www.google.com/search?h... Google shows 367 results and that is trouble for Cuil. They'll need to work on that quickly to convince people they are being serious. - LPH™

it's about as useful as Archie(Gopher ref) - clarke thomas

considering I got server overloaded errors when I tried it at first, I'd have to say launching early was a big error in judgement. - sean808080

The indexing speed of Google and other search engines is pretty good, but another area that needs fixing is when content moves. It takes a long time for Google to catch up. Example: Let's say you move your blog or an early well-praised site goes stale, many search engines have trouble adjusting their rankings to the new site or to push down the older one. - Loren Heiny

Trouble is that indexing and ranking are closely linked. If all you return is a hitlist there's no good ranking that can be done. Can't yet tell whether they're in that situation. What I don't get is why the rush to launch now. - Daniel Dulitz

I read similar thoughts on Reddit yesterday and they made some sense... is there any chance all the negative buzz right now is going to hurt their buyability though? - Philipp Lenssen

IMHO there have to be better ways to show off your very own crawling+indexing technologies than opening up to the public and getting thrashed for not delivering what people expect when you dub your service search engine. I have a hard time believing that the cuil/cuill guys did not know what they were doing though ... Were they pushed to release by financiers? Were they in dire need of usage data? - Mustafa K. Isik

I do think they built Cuil to be bought. The reason they launched is they hoped their valuation will go up with all the press blitz... Which seems pretty well planned.... I think they went overboard selling themselves to the press and did not expect some of the back-lash. Of course, the saying goes - "All press is good press :)". So who knows this might indeed increase their valuation to 100s of millions :). It all depends on what the folks over at MSFT think/know about search :)) - Bindu Reddy

someone cough microsoft cough - Sarah Perez

M$ bait! ah ha!! Bindu and Sarah, you're on to something there!! - Susan Beebe

I liked this thread so much that I blogged it: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008... - Erick Schonfeld

As of yesterday, they didn't even have their own name indexed: http://www.flickr.com/photos/b... - Brady Brim-DeForest

actually, they are off to a decent start. They have a nice interface that needs work, and some results are good and many others bad. I can tell you it takes about a year to getting your feet under you and figure out where you can fit in the search ecosystem. They are funded for a three year run it seems, so I would give them a year and see where the product is at. - Jason Calacanis

grabbing contextual images process is too weird! (o_O) - Pınar Yanardağ

great discussion. the more I've read about the various GRAVE screw-ups (with porn images being linked to some people's bios, etc.), the more I tend to agree that they must have known that things weren't ready. It just feels too much like a prototype... Thus the buy-out scenario seems plausible. Who knows, buying their indexing technology could actually give a boost to MSFT or even Yahoo, given that they have a hard time keeping up on the tech/scale side of search. One thing we do know is that Google... - Alex Schleber

... isn't going to buy them :) I wrote a post on the branding aspect of the Cuil debacle earlier today -> http://businessmindhacks.com/p... but now I'm not so sure anymore if they were even serious about the whole thing. Maybe they're having a hearty laugh right now that no one is getting the joke. If they are serious though, it's a horrible launch and horrible branding. - Alex Schleber

Is it possible that they might be taking advantage of the disconnect between mainstream and social media? Cuil has made it in the news but to what extent has the negativity made it to the mainstream? If people get their news outside of the social media circle (which, as we are all quickly discovering, is a vast majority) and only hear that "Google killer Cuil has launched today" but don't dig deep enough to discover its faults, won't Cuil get some real attention? Maybe, but the funny part is that most of those people will be using Google to find it :) - Derick Valadao

I think it is tough doing a PR launch. I think the obsession with dropping a nuke over the PR is an helpful one. Mightily prefer to build it up over weeks and months of relationship building but most importantly great execution and a great product. - azeem

Matt Cutts posted a message on Twitter

“I love trying out new search engines. What do SEOs and search folks think of Cuil.com?”

July 28 at 12:38 am - Link

Internet Marketing NJ, G. Saunders, Mitchell Tsai and 14 other people liked this

First take: pretty interface, poor relevance = rapid oblivion - Bret Treasure

28 more comments

Well right now - "Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity." FAIL - Atul Arora

Matt - Following numerous threads since the launch. Almost all so far 'not even close to Google' - Charlie Anzman

Got the "We'll be back soon" message. +1 @ Atul - BeeLing

How does Cuil compare to Microsoft's search engine? - Adewale Oshineye

On the other end of the spectrum, do site:http://www.cuil.com/ in Google. It has crawled the new cuil pages and they appear in the index and search results (including the unvailable page. - Atul Arora

it doesn't seem very relevant. My blog is not indexed yet :( Is the database exhaustive enough to be meaninngfull? - Jnuk: acidweb.fr via twhirl

try searching for your name on Cuil. Charlie Anzman has a great photo up for that - Sidharth Dassani

Charlie/Sidharth, I don't know why some images don't match the search results. - Matt Cutts

Nice to see you on FF! I promise not to Ban/Block/Delete you! Enjoy! lmao - Igor The Troll

I actually quite like it, it sorts out stuff on the page in a more readable form than Google and quickly found stuff on other Sally Church's I didn't find in Google. Medical terms need writing out in full though, eg it returns zero for CML but useful stuff on Leukemia. I like the UI, it will get better with time. - Sally Church

Seems pretty crappy to me. My search returned results for sites that have not been in existence for a year (an old index maybe?), and one of the top two results on Google search for the same term wasn't even on the first page of results for Cuil. - Matt Devost

I really like the UI, the diversity of results, and the categories features. I think that I'll like the pictures as soon as they reliably match up to the correct search results. (I am not Kevin Scott Collins, for example.) Looks like they're having some issues crawling wikipedia given the number of broken wikipedia results I've seen. Overall relevance doesn't seem as good as Google. I'm guessing that will get better soon now that they've launched and are able to gather data from real users. My $0.02. - Kevin Scott

It's nice to see an alternative to the usual list of results. It's clean and easy to use. The relevancy of results however isn't very good compared to Google, and in fact it's also dished up some rubbish as well. The service has been down as well today. It feels like a beta to me. Mind you, maybe it's unfair to compare to Google results really, because this is us assuming only Google can deliver the right answer. - Ceejay

The interface is brilliant and truly fills a gap left wide open by Google (design can move beyond minimalism), Duplicate links need to be lumped together, this should improve the relevance of the searches dramatically. - Jamie Ginsberg

Most searches I did returned a bunch of porn despite beign in safe mode. When I turned off safe mode, the adult stuff went away. - Mike Seidle

i like the old way better - fijidaddy

My blog wasn't in it but fortunately a chinese spammer's copy of it is. - Sam Pullara

Matt - At this point, I'm just suckin' up all the different takes. It's already gone from interesting to just fun ?! :) - Charlie Anzman

The results are bizarre, even humorous at times, but we need to remember what yardstick we're using to measure the results. If it gives the exact same search results at Google, some will deem it a failure because it's unnecessary. If it gives different search results from Google, some will deem it a failure because they're "not standard." My only quibble is that in my vanity search, items in my blog seem to be drawn from last year. Perhaps a database refresh is all that is needed. - Ontario Emperor

Not impressed with cuil. Did some searches of my company keywords, results were not as smart/relevant as what I find with a google search. Also, I am not thrilled with the 3 column format, especially when the 3 columns are not aligned, which makes it hard to scan and find relevant links quickly. - Greg Bogdan

Very long way to go. There is no real regional specific search results. The world is a bigger place than just the US. To say that they have indexed 10 times the amount of pages is also silly. The good search engines will find the good/popular sites. If a site has not been found its fair to say that it just not that good (excluding brand new sites of course) More pages will not equal better results. - Shane Osborne

First take of cuil.com: they are not nearly prepared as they should have been at launch. It is irrelevant how many web pages they've indexed... if you can't respond to a user search query with relevant, useful results. In reality live.com does a better job than cuil.com. And we all know where live search stands. - Pre Priyadarshane

Results didn't match my expectation (which isn't neccessarily a bad thing), but the main gripe is the layout and point size of the results page. That blocky texty boxy results style isn't easy to scan and I think the point size is too small. Speed etc is something that can be fixed with hardware so just a temporary issue I'd say. - johan

I like the layout personally, and the categories on the right, except that the results are mostly rubbish and the categories don't actually work sometimes (links point to an error page saying there's no results). They say they're using contextual search...really? I'm not seeing it. For "Australian visas" the government website doesn't even show. The images are all mixed up, displaying logos from the wrong companies against the wrong result. Oh dear...what a catastrophe! - Ceejay

I tried searching for diggnation and the only result on the first page actually linking to diggnation webcast was a link to episode 57. The first 2 results were wikipedia. I think they have a lot to do as far as results are concerned. Maybe this is the next big failed launch after Wikia Search - Sidharth Dassani

The quality and depth of results seems thin and the images are just wrong. Now, if they can fix that then there are a few interesting issues, particularly from an SEO perspective. A left to right format may change the click yield for different positions. Is it as imperative to get to the first position, particularly with an F pattern eye-tracking standard. Conversely, the weight of the first page of results (text and images) makes me believe few would go deeper than page 1, increasing desire for page 1. - AJ Kohn

Some interesting observations from Bindu Reddy - http://friendfeed.com/e/f51e6f... - Atul Arora

Atul, good link. In my opinion, Bindu's absolutely correct that the "Explore by Category" entries are entirely from string matches with Wikipedia category pages. - Matt Cutts

In particular I found the description/page summary text poor. Google appears to have refined that well over the years. Cuil concentrates way too much on including the search term in the results as many times as it finds it, which makes the results look like scraped pages (even if they arean't). Truncating the titles and URLs also makes a difference to understanding what the page is about. The layout would work better if each result was the same height, with each horizontal result starting on the same baseline. And how about numbering them 1 to 10? All that said, I do like the more modern feel to it. I wish Google, etc. would mix it up a little more. - Richard Crocker

The only thing i like is their presentation of search results. The relevance goes for a toss most of the time. Its interesting if you try searching for "cuil" ...check the results http://www.cuil.com/search?q=c... - James Ramya Rajan J

Robert Scoble shared an item on Google Reader

AdMob: Mobile Web Use Doubled in Past 12 Months

July 28 at 12:57 am - Link

mhmazidi, Sidharth Dassani, Mike Seidle and 6 other people liked this

Why do i get the feeling that Google is going to buy them for 1-2 billion dollar ?!?! - Nir Ben Yona via twhirl

4 more comments

Nir: because they have 'Ad' in their name ?? ;) - Imran Hussain via feedalizr

Imran: hmmm...maybe, but also because they have something bigger than Google's. - Nir Ben Yona via twhirl

I'd really like to know how much of that increase is due to the iPhone. - Bill Sanders

my mobile web use has increased, I would say 100% since I got my iPhone. Before it was a razr, which was like 1995 internet viewing. - Alan Ashley

@Bill, you can find out by looking at our detailed metrics reports over at admob.com/metrics. Long story short: iPhone is still a relatively small percentage of our overall traffic. Growth has been impressive though and we expect it to pick up substantially following the worldwide 3G launch. - Kevin Scott

Maybe they can start a bidding war between Google and Microsoft. - Sidharth Dassani

Paul Buchheit posted a link

Michael Nielsen » Shirky’s Law and why (most) social software fails

July 25 at 2:15 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

Nikpay, Jo Vermeulen, Ryan and 25 other people liked this

"I’ve heard hackers brag that they could have built Twitter over a weekend. Underlying this boast is a misunderstanding of what is truly impressive. Coming up with Twitter required only a small amount of technical knowledge. The hard part was the social insight to realize such a tool would be useful. This is a social insight the bragging hackers didn’t have." - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet

12 more comments

The technical know-how required to write the 1st web browsers wasn't hard either... And on the business side, in successful companies, perhaps people like 10% of your product offering, but do you have the guts to give up 90% of your idea? Most beginning CEOs/founders don't. - Mitchell Tsai

The magic is in the "take up" of new services. I don't think anybody knows why some things take off, and others fail. The reasons seem to be changing too - towards crowdsourcing and so on. We can only sit, watch, and speculate. - Jonathan Beckett

@Jonathan: we could be doing something useful instead =) - Alex

@Paul, I hate when I hear things like "Twitter is easy to write". Yeah the base application is, but providing good searching, scalability and reliability are proven to be hard problems. It is so easy to complain, but hard to present solutions. - Rob Diana

Scaling and reliability aren't that hard either, if you pick the right tools. All the integrations and data feeds are proving to be tedious, though. - Jason Carreira

@Jason, when I say hard I mean few people have done it successfully and you need to build your applications differently than normal. Once you find the information, nothing seems that hard :) - Rob Diana

Lot's of people have done it successfully. Think about how many stocks, bonds, futures, etc. are traded every day. Some systems are doing literally 10's of thousands of transactions per SECOND. They're just not Web 2.0 or built on Ruby on Rails. - Jason Carreira

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