Cuil - An Over Hyped Money Pit
Cuil, what was dubbed to be the search engine that finally takes down Google. Everything sounded great; a team of ex-Google employees, $33,000,000 in venture capital, no IP addresses recorded and even a funny name.
Cuil went live on the 28th of July 2008, it has a really rocky start. The pages loaded slow, but this was because they had over 50 million searches which is more than Microsoft’s Live Search gets.
I tried out a few searches. I came up first for my own name, which is a good sign, but some of their results are somewhat lacking. I found a few spam results, bad ebooks and just keyword pages designed to trap spiders. Now, they claim to have the most indexed pages out of any search engine in the world. However, this is probably because of the immense number of spam and bad quality pages, which Google doesn’t have.
Cuil doesn’t have an image search, but this may be because they have combined image and web search. If you search in Cuil you will be greeted with both normal results alongside normal results. The results page is tabular, with results not going straight down like Google but across and down. So in Cuil you get a page of results that go vertically and horizontally, but in these results are also images and small thumbnails.
The idea of image and web search combined it good, but sometimes on a slow connection you don’t want to see images and sometimes you will only want to see images.
So, Cuil have spent $33 million on a search engine. It is ok, but needs some changes made to make it anywhere near a threat to Google.
WiredTree Review
Recently I move this site, along with a few other sites including CompuTalk to a new VPS (virtual private server).
A VPS is almost exactly the same as a dedicated server, except that they are typically slightly smaller and cheaper. Using virtualization software, VPSes mean that you can have your own OS, root access and everything, without having to buy a big, expensive dedicated server.
I got my VPS courtesy of WiredTree. I am currently on their “VPS384″ plan, which costs $49/month ($34.10/month when using the coupon “10percentoff”). This is a medium priced VPS. It is their smallest plan and comes with 384 Mb of RAM and includes cPanel/WHM, 40 Gb of disk space, 600 Gb bandwidth and 4 dedicated IP addresses.
This is a fairly reasonable price, it isn’t dirt cheap, but it is 110% worth it. I decided to get my VPS after learning some Ruby on Rails things, and because my websites on my shared HostGator account were getting quite big. I asked the live chat some questions, many of them fairly complicated, and got fast replies. Unlike many hosts, the live chat was able to answer my questions without referring me to an email address.
I talked to the live chat for a while, and was very happy. I then placed my order through PayPal. WiredTree verify all their accounts by phone (this is a good idea, keeps out bad people that will overload servers). I talked to the live chat again and was told by the live chat rep that he would give me a call within 20 minutes. Sure enough, 18 minutes later, I got a call from that live chat rep. He basically just verified my phone number and said he would get my account set up.
About 20-30 minutes later, I got a welcome email containing server details and the login details to WiredTree’s “grove” system, it is essentially an amazing support system with other brilliant features including server statistics, server monitoring, service monitoring, bandwidth usage and loads of other stuff. It is easy to use and all the custom tools mean that you can monitor your server and do many other things from within one system.
WiredTree have a nice selection of PDF documents that explain how to do a large amount of things. I followed their guide to set up private nameservers (ns1.calumneilson.com & ns2.calumneilson.com). I wasn’t sure that I had done it quite right, so I opened a support ticket. About 16 minutes later I got a reply to say I had done everything right and it should be working once it has updated.
I also opened another ticket about Ruby on Rails setup. My FCGI install wasn’t working right. Again, within 20 minutes I got an advanced reply from someone who really new their stuff. They advised me to run RoR through Mongrel, instead of FCGI, because FCGI runs through lighttpd but cPanel needs Easy Apache.
He asked me to call if I needed help, because he would be able to help very well over phone.
Pro’s:
- Lighting fast support
- Fairly low prices
- Reliable & fast servers
- Very nice client support portal
- Server monitoring tools
- Helpful live chat
Con’s:
- None!
So, to cap it all off, I have an amazing & fast server with WHM/cPanel included. WiredTree have a brilliant customer support system where I can get replies in just 15 minutes, compared to 6 hours+ on other hosts. I can’t find any faults, everything was perfect.