Sure it was bad - but was every decision* they ever made so fundamentally wrong that they couldn't possibly have improved? The world wrote them off completely 8 minutes after they launched, and they were a meme like the next day. (* in search, not their ridiculous perks etc)
When I search for online games on DDG I get stuff like this in the first 'page' of results:
Did DDG and Blekko both independently, really stumble upon formulas that beat Google, or are we actually open to the possibility of not using Google for search now?
Anything can be improved — but in Cuil's case, yes, it would have required reversing pretty much every decision they made (or at least implementing them on such a different level they would be unrecognizable). It was just breathtakingly ill-advised. DuckDuckGo is more clear about the benefits it offers, modest though they may be, and it follows through on its boasts. And Blekko is just modest all around.
I said at the time and still say that Cuill released a very early stage experiment that still hadn't worked out what it wanted to do and called it a search engine.
Thx for the specific example, always very helpful! But in this case, I'm having trouble reproducing. Do you have a region set or something? I'm looking at http://duckduckgo.com/?q=online+games and don't see those domains. I'm not saying the other domains are good :), but I just want to understand what you're seeing. We definitely have a problem right now of over-weighted the domain name in the url.
When I search for online games on DDG I get stuff like this in the first 'page' of results:
- http://onlinegames.innovative-solutions-group.com/
- http://onlinegames.webfreehosting.net/
- http://online--games.com/
Did DDG and Blekko both independently, really stumble upon formulas that beat Google, or are we actually open to the possibility of not using Google for search now?