Search

Overheard: Cuil will soon be a verb that nobody knows how to pronounce

The search engine’s launch was such a spectacular flameout that it may well go down as a verb. “What happened to that Eddie Murphy movie that was supposed to win him an Oscar?” “It came and went — it got totally Cuiled.” David Berkowitz, Do We Need Another…

There was tons of buzz this week — both in the media and in the office — about Cuil. The new search engine promised to index more sites than Google and it had some big industry names behind it. Everyone got all excited, hoping that Google finally had a real competitor. So what went wrong after the big reveal?

The engine works — it’s just not Google. And remember, Google is the supreme ruler. We build out sites for Google. We live and die by changes in the Google algorithm. Competing with Google is serious business. Literally.

Here’s how I knew that Cuil had disappointed and was already being dismissed. It hasn’t even been a week and there are already Cuil jokes.

Think about it. Have you ever in your whole entire life heard a Google joke?

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P.S.

David Berkowitz’s quote made me laugh, but the thing I REALLY wondered when I heard about Cuil was this — what the heck were these brilliant people thinking when they named their engine Cuil?

NEW RULE: Never name your product something you need to tell people how to pronounce. For those of you new to the buzz-swarm, the word cuil is gaelic for knowledge and it’s pronounced “cool.”

Overheard: Search industry uses every part of the pig but the squeal

It was said of the Chicago stockyards that they used every part of the pig except the squeal. The same can be said of the Internet search industry. Cameron Sturdevant, Redirecting Aging DNS Infrastructure

Overheard: Microsoft buys out FAST in hopes of nailing down enterprise search

With its planned $1.2 billion acquisition of Fast Search & Transfer, Microsoft is looking to become a player in one of tech’s next big growth markets — software that lets business users quickly troll through the reams of unstructured information that’s locked away in corporate databases. Paul McDougall, Microsoft’s Fast Search Bid Puts Heat On Google, IBM

Enterprise search “is for workers tomorrow what Internet search is for consumers today — an indispensable tool that helps them quickly find the information they need,” said Microsoft Business Division president Jeff Raikes, speaking Tuesday on a conference call.

And it could be a gold mine for the first big vendor that gets it right.

Overheard: Ask.com will trade you privacy for a cookie

“Now for the funny part. AskEraser will remain on until you click the AskEraser button again to turn it off, no matter how many times you visit the web site. How does the search engine remember your preferences? By placing a cookie on your computer that lasts for two years.” Brad Linder, Ask.com launches anonymizer tool

 AskEraser, an anonymizer that lets the user decide whether or not the engine is allowed to keep records of the user’s queries. Mark O’Neill was quick to point out that Ask.com has an advertising deal with Google and that AskEraser is not quite as private as it seems.