Is Cuil The New Google?

Buzzing about Cuil this week reminds me of when Google first came out and all the frenzy this small search engine made. But I think Gregory Sullivan may have summed it up - "Cuil Launch Just Proves Google Is A Big Deal"

Cuil may be a victim of its own hype. Being touted as the next great search engine that ex Google engineers were going to show that big bad Google what they could do...I guess they showed them aye?

Now another much less talked about but decent search engine would be Mrs. Dewy at least Dewy is entertaining and gives half way decent results that make sense.

Much of the results I got from Cuil didn't have anything to do with my search and made little sense in context. If you want to build a competitor to Google at least make it work better...otherwise you're just wasting bandwidth.

Trademark Infringement & Search

There's been a lot of buzz the last week of so about the case of Rescuecomm vs. Google over the around the not-so-simple question of whether bidding on trademark keywords is considered a use in commerce, thus violating trademark law.

As a Google program manager in the past I've seen both sides of this particular conundrum. When managing a Google Adwords program I've used both trademark keywords and misspellings of them that were my clients and those of their competitors'. I've also been on the side of companies running affiliate marketing campaigns where I monitored publishers to be sure they weren't using the trademark keywords in violation of their publisher agreements.

Part of me sees this as a free market economy...users are searching for products and services and everyone wants to get their attention and whatever words will get them there is what it takes.