Mashable is popular on many social networks. As of December 21, 2009, it has over 1.8 million Twitter followers, over 90,000 fans on Facebook, and over 330,000 RSS subscribers.

Established in 2003, Taobao is China’s largest Internet retail platform , taking up about three-fourths of the market share, according to domestic research firm iResearch. Platforms within Taobao also include Alibaba (www.alibaba.com), an online advertising exchange and affiliate network for hundreds of thousands of publishers in China, and Koubei.com (www.koubei.com), China’s leading classified listing website.

Cuil’s privacy policy, unlike that of other search engines, says it does not store users’ search activity or IP addresses

Cuil is managed and developed largely by former employees of Google: Anna Patterson, Russell Power. The CEO and co-founder, Tom Costello, has worked for IBM and others. The company raised $33 million from venture capital firms including Greylock.

Name

The Irish ancestry of Anna Patterson’s husband Tom Costello sparked the name Cuil, which the company states is taken from a series of Celtic folklore stories involving a character called Finn McCuill. The company says that Cuil is Irish for knowledge and hazel.

Some linguists are unsure of this derivation and pronunciation, and note that the modern Irish word for hazel is spelled coll (coill or cuill in genitive form, the former spelling having superseded the latter as a result of the Caighdeán Oifigiúil reforms of the mid-twentieth century). Foras na Gaeilge, the official governing body of the Irish language, doubted the assertion that ‘cuil’ means ‘knowledge’. “I am unaware myself of the meaning ‘knowledge’ being with the word ‘cuil’ in Irish,” Stiofán Ó Deoráin, an official on Foras na Gaeilge’s terminology committee, said.

The company name had previously been spelled Cuill.

Launch

Cuil’s launch (with an index of 121,617,892,992 web pages) received widely critical press coverage. Concerns were expressed about the website’s slow response times, irrelevant or wrong search results and in at least one case, inappropriately pornographic images displayed alongside search results. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch questioned the validity of Cuil’s claim that it had the world’s largest search engine index and criticized it for focusing on size rather than relevance. Despite reported problems with search results, Net Applications reported that for the last three days of July, Cuil beat Google and Yahoo in the amount of time spent on a site after referral from a search engine, a key metric for relevancy of search results.

According to an interview with a Cuil representative, while other Web 2.0 launches using massively parallel processing might fail with a slow down or crash, Cuil’s architecture was responding with incomplete, “less-than-relevant results that then appear at the top of users’ pages.” Cuil’s VP of communications Vince Sollitto said the search engine was experiencing heavy first-day overloads and they were “busy putting out fires.” Sollitto said Cuil “will only improve with time. It’s day one. Traffic is massive. We’re new. There are bugs to fix, results to improve.”

After the initial critical press coverage Cuil was alleged to have caused issues for some websites, owing to how the Cuil indexing robot polled certain sites. Website owners were reportedly saying the method was not “scientific in any way” and “actually quite ‘amateurish.’”

According to the Alexa web information company, the site reached a peak of just over 0.2% of worldwide internet users in late July 2008 and by September 12, 2008, it had dropped to 0.02% and ranked as the 5,340th site by traffic. By October 13, 2008, it had dropped to 0.005% and ranked as the 21,960th site in traffic. About one month after launch, Cuil’s Product VP and renowned search technologist, Louis Monier, quit the company citing disagreements with the CEO, Tom Costello.

Criticism

Since launch, Cuil’s search results tend to display seemingly random images. This was noticed by several bloggers. Even months after its launch, incorrect images appear with some web sites as they did at launch. A Gmail logo is still shown for a blogging site, TechCrunch.

Contact Information

• Type of site  search engine
• Available language(s)  English
• Owner  Cuil, Inc.
• Launched  July 28, 2008

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