Comments on: What Is Cuill?

By: Webmasters Beware: Cuil's Debut Failure Doesn't Mean Your Websites Are Safe. | Single Throw Blog

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:06:19 +0000

[...] a light bulb went of in my head. After quick search I found a post I made last year on samaBlog and remembered where I knew their name from. When I made that post, I didn’t know who they [...]

By: this is the samaBlog » Blog Archive » Mystery Solved

this is the samaBlog » Blog Archive » Mystery Solved — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 13:18:19 +0000

[...] Previously on Cuil. [...]

By: jsrfded

jsrfded — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 16:26:28 +0000

Someone is crawling from a botnet and masquerading as the Cuill robot.
The real Cuill bot always comes from *.cuill.com, but the bad one
comes from a bunch of scattered IPs…

By: Eli

Eli — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 15:55:21 +0000

Yeah, I had to block this stupid bot. It’s been hammering all my sites from a variety of IP addresses and requesting — exclusively — tens of thousands of garbled, gibberish URLs that result in a 404.

Methinks they have a ways to go if they want to overtake Google.

By: Tomt

Tomt — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 02:54:20 +0000

Cuill fetched over 3000 pages from my site today… way more than google does

By: Alexander Higgins

Alexander Higgins — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 23:57:47 +0000

This page still shows up on the second page search for directory.kr3at.com. See: http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&rlz=1T4GGIH_enUS229US229&as_qdr=all&q=+%22directory+kr3at+com%22&btnG=Search

Back to the “Cuill” topic, I am still beginning bombarded with requests from this Bot. Interestingly enough my site is relativity new, less than a month old, and do not appear yet in the Yahoo or MSN index. However, when searching for â€œdirectory.kr3at.comâ€? on yahoo, I noticed I was listed in the business.com directory here:
http://www.business.com/popular/pr_firm_ID

This site, which seems in some way affiliated with Google (see why below), also has several other pages of my web site listed in there directory. I wonder if there â€œfeatured listing resultsâ€? are from the Twiceler / Cuill bot. For example see:

http://www.business.com/search/rslt_default.asp?type=web&stype=google&set=1&StartAt=10&query=directory.kr3at.com
http://www.business.com/popular/directory.kr3at.com

Why do I think they are related to Google? There web results are pull directly from Googleâ€™s Index as XML, something I have been looking for. After looking at the business.com source code, I saw this line of code:

Using query = http://www.google.com/search?num=0&safe=high&adsafe=high&channel=BDC002,BDC034&output=xml_no_dtd&client=business&ip=68.46.132.117&ad=w6n6&q=directory%2Ekr3at%2Ecom&useragent=Mozilla%2F4%2E0+%28compatible%3B+MSIE+7%2E0%3B+Windows+NT+5%2E1%3B+%2ENET+CLR+1%2E1%2E4322%3B+%2ENET+CLR+2%2E0%2E50727%29&adpage=1

If you open that link in a browser you get an access denied error. Yet somehow, business.com has permission. I any case, although there web results are being pulled from Google, the â€œMore Featured Listingsâ€? links are not. For this reason, I think that Cuill Bot is serving this directory its data.

Ps. Your comment verification page is displaying some PHP errors. You should have it fixed before some one decides to take advantage of it

By: Alexander Higgins

Alexander Higgins — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 23:56:15 +0000

http://www.business.com/search/rslt_default.asp?type=web&stype=google&set=1&StartAt=10&query=directory.kr3at.com
http://www.business.com/popular/directory.kr3at.com

By: Alexander Higgins

Alexander Higgins — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 23:44:10 +0000

The page still shows up on page 2 for a search of directory.kr3at.com on google. See: http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&rlz=1T4GGIH_enUS229US229&as_qdr=all&q=+%22directory+kr3at+com%22&btnG=Search

By: Rob Sama

Rob Sama — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 12:34:36 +0000

Actually, on second glance, it’s grabbing the page for the month of August, not the standalone page for this post. Maybe they did censor it…

By: Rob Sama

Rob Sama — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 12:32:56 +0000

This post seems to have been pushed from #2 search result for “Cuill” to somewhere in the middle of the second page. I don’t think it’s been censored though.

By: Willo

Willo — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 11:23:37 +0000

This page has been censored by Google now?

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 08:30:56 +0000

I blocked Twiceler / Cuill a while ago. I wouldn’t be surprised if those “Cuill Founders Bios” are fake. Something’s definitely off with that site. Their “Cuill” little Twiceler nearly crashed one of my servers with too many requests. Screw that. I’ll take my chances. Have fun with your 403′s Twiceler and ‘Stay Cuill’… how tacky…. I mean, Jesus.

By: Lim

Lim — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 01:55:40 +0000

We’re seeing an increase in Cuill Twiceler robot traffic at http://www.petschannel.com recently.

The funny thing about this robot is it seems to be visiting links with prematurely terminated URL string. Hence URL parameters are not called completely thereby capturing an error on our technical reporting.

The prematurely terminated string does not seems to be human mistake. I wonder why? Google don’t come in with such terminate URLs…

By: Alexander Higgins

Alexander Higgins — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 06:24:23 +0000

Tons of hits on my log as well. All in all, if they are indexing my site this fast, I don’t think that I can complain as a web master. Yahoo and MSN are relatively slow at indexing sites, and while google is faster at crawling, my site http://directory.kr3at.com has been up for a couple of months, and google only has about 2000 pages indexed and seems to be only crawling 100-200 new pages a day.

I consider this slow. Especially due to the fact that after they crawl the site it can take several months to add the pages to their index if they choose to do so. I think an engine that can crawl this fast, may have an actual shot at competing with the big 3.

By: ViaVirginia

ViaVirginia — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 16:54:36 +0000

This little bot has been adding quite the mess to my log today. Just searching for some hacks and then “cool” becomes the discussion of the hour. Strange…

By: B-X

B-X — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 13:34:23 +0000

i saw it too crawling my site today.

By: Willo

Willo — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 14:24:15 +0000

Just started to hammer away at our forum this morning.. strange behavior too compared to Googlebot.

Ahh well, they’ll be interesting.

Cuill cuill cuill… the name could work?

By: MarieLu

MarieLu — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 12:54:51 +0000

been hammering our site for the last 12 hours, i agree the misspellings on this name are going to be a nightmare..

By: schweizweit.net » Blog Archive » Wer ist Cuill?

schweizweit.net » Blog Archive » Wer ist Cuill? — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 13:35:31 +0000

[...] die Zukunft zeigen. Vielleicht handelt es sich aber auch um Konkurrenz aus dem eigenen Haus. Auch Rob Sama vom samaBlog findet die Sache “leicht komisch”. Ich bin mal gespannt, was in dieser Sache noch [...]

By: calzone

calzone — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 16:16:29 +0000

One more reason why the name cuill SUCKS BALLS: it’s impossible to type. Marketing 101: when inventing a new word for trademarking it should be easy to write and remember!

Cruilla Deville wouldn’t be so mean as to make me type something like that.

By: calzone

calzone — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 16:12:28 +0000

One more thing: the name cuill really stinks. It’s just lame. They say it’s supposed to sound like “cool” — I think that makes it even stinkier and lamer.

It’s like it’s a parody of dotcom or web 2.0 excesses and stupidity that you would read about in the Onion. I think something’s afoot and cuill is not really going to be a new search engine company at all.

By: calzone

calzone — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 16:09:55 +0000

I have seen cuilll’s bot hammering my site lately.

What is interesting is that search bot activity had dwindled quite a bit over the past year to only the occasional hit. Now all of the sudden, I see cuill coming in multiple times every single day for a week or so now.

And here’s the most interesting part: for the first time ever, I now see Microsoft’s Live bot hitting my site.

So one might think that somewhere, a new link to my site has popped up. But if that’s the case, why not all the search engines? And more interestingly, why not google?

Is cuill feeding live? Is there an ms-orchestrated coup against google in the planning?