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by benologist 5620 days ago
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:

- 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?
2 comments
chc 5619 days ago
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.

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epi0Bauqu 5619 days ago
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.
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benologist 5619 days ago
I'm in latin america (Nicaragua) which might hurt a lot if it's trying to pull localized results from this little corner of the world heh.

http://playtomic.com/ddg.png is what I'm seeing.

Edit:

I'm doing a search from one of my US-based servers and seeing those same sites?

http://playtomic.com/ddg2.png

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epi0Bauqu 5619 days ago
Ahh, thx. Turns out I was the one with the settings set :). Duly noted!
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