Like Cuil. But with no funding, no style and no data.
August 2nd, 2008 | by Sean |
- Mandelbrot
I’ve been working so late recently, I’ve been early. It’s silly, working late. I’ve been sitting here working at a glacial pace, thinking “I must go to sleep”, until I can hear birds singing, the window starts to get bright again, and the neighbours start frying something that might smell tasty if I’d had a long night’s sleep.
I was gutted to see Cuil launch to great fanfare recently. It looks fabulous, though like plenty of others are writing, I’m not at all convinced by the tabular layout of the search results. But it does look nice.
Hey! I keep looking at the design of the homepage and thinking “Mandelbrotty…”, but maybe it’s just a sign I should sleep more. Is it just me?
- Cuil.com
Here’s an image stolen from Wikipedia for comparison…
Remember, you read it here first!
The reason I’m gutted is that I’ve been writing a search engine ‘for kicks’ and I’ve been expecting to tell people it’s ready to submit sites to “this Friday“. I’ve been telling my friend Ekompute over at Dummipedia “this Friday” since early June. There’s a world of difference between personal code and production code – I don’t mind picking up the pieces when my projects fall apart, but visitors to a website have higher expectations.
That point about “high expectations” is why I won’t be batting my eyelids at Venture Capitalists any time soon. Cuil may look pretty, and it does seem to have some genuinely new ideas, in its presentation, at least. Have you used it though? It may have “more pages than Google“, but when you try a few searches, you’ll quickly see that size is not the only issue.
- Spider.my
My project is not really ready for serious use. In fact, it may steal ten minutes of your time and you won’t even think it’s funny. My spider (and search engine (and DIY webserver)) is at spider.my!
I’m not selling it, am I?
2 Responses to “Like Cuil. But with no funding, no style and no data.”
By luqmanx on Aug 20, 2008 | Reply
haha. i like your writing style. Found your blog through the WM forum. How’s the search engine coming along?
By Sean on Aug 20, 2008 | Reply
Thanks! Spider.my… just got the search result text fragments good enough to ignore for a while. Much more to do. Still only spidering owner-submitted blogs – want to add yours?
Nice site yourself. I particularly enjoyed seeing how many of your “Don’t Damage Your Professional Image” rules I’m breaking!