Shamebox, the Blog

Three days ago, several ex-Google employees who were fed up with the Google’s free meals, laundry service, massive gym complexes, nap times, and other perks, launched a brand new search engine named Cuil. The media, with nothing better to report, ranted and raved about Cuil’s coolness, claiming this startup was a serious threat to the search giant Google. Cuil’s CEO apparently had sold his product pretty well to desperate reporters at places like CNN. In addition to raging about how Cuil is going beyond “today’s search techniques,” their spokesman inisited, “Cuil maintains the largest collection of documents searchable on the web.”

Cool as it may sound, Cuil faced numerous difficulties at launch. Besides not being able to find very common popular websites like The Boy Genius Report, the people behind this search engine failed to do a half decent job at controlling the display of gay porno when Safe Search is turned on.

As The Register explains, some illicit content slipped by when one of their editors searched for a Grenoble-based quantum computing researcher.

“Cuil gives users a richer display of results [such as] images to identify topics,” reads the company’s press release. And as loyal Reg reader Jonathan Grattage points out, he and his quantum research are identified with “little pictures of a US serviceman and a guy masturbating over some other poor sap”:

Jonathan Grattage points out that those little pictures aren’t on his web site and have nothing to do with him. But he doesn’t know search like Cuil knows search. Costello researched search engines at Stanford University and IBM. His wife worked for Google. And so did two other Cuil founders.

Cuil has been chucked in the Shamebox. Promoting the spirit of parodies, give Yuil a spin.