What Is Cuill?You may have seen a crawler from cuill.com in your referrer logs. So what is Cuill.com? It appears to be a new search technology, that can crawl the web at 1/10 the cost of Google. And they’re founded by ex-Google employees. But shouldn’t any ex-Google employee be forbidden by non-competes from working for another search company, even a startup? Something’s fishy here. What’s more, technorati only digs up one link even mentioning Cuill. And Google basically only brings up the cite itself. Something’s not right here… |
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22 Responses to “What Is Cuill?”
August 2nd, 2007 at 12:09 pm
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?
August 2nd, 2007 at 12:12 pm
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.
August 2nd, 2007 at 12:16 pm
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.
August 8th, 2007 at 9:35 am
[...] 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 [...]
August 12th, 2007 at 8:54 am
been hammering our site for the last 12 hours, i agree the misspellings on this name are going to be a nightmare..
August 12th, 2007 at 10:24 am
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?
August 15th, 2007 at 9:34 am
i saw it too crawling my site today.
August 15th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
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…
August 21st, 2007 at 2:24 am
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.
August 21st, 2007 at 9:55 pm
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…
August 22nd, 2007 at 4:30 am
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.
August 22nd, 2007 at 7:23 am
This page has been censored by Google now?
August 22nd, 2007 at 8:32 am
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.
August 22nd, 2007 at 8:34 am
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…
August 22nd, 2007 at 7:44 pm
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
August 22nd, 2007 at 7:56 pm
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 “directory.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 “featured listing results� 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 Google’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 “More Featured Listings� links are not. For this reason, I think that Cuill Bot is serving this directory its data
August 22nd, 2007 at 7:57 pm
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 “directory.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 “featured listing results� 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 Google’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 “More Featured Listings� 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
August 22nd, 2007 at 10:54 pm
Cuill fetched over 3000 pages from my site today… way more than google does
August 31st, 2007 at 11:55 am
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.
September 1st, 2007 at 12:26 pm
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…
July 28th, 2008 at 9:18 am
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