The TechCrunch blog has asked “Is Cuil Killing Web Sites?” This was a post by Don Reisinger. Cuil has an indexing bot named Twiceler. Apparently some web site owners are complaining that Twiceler brings their sites down. It is almost like a denial of service attack. Some people are saying that Twiceler just guesses at random URLs and checks a web server if they exist.Cuil has said that Twiceler is in a developmental state. However it does obey the “robots.txt” file. And Cuil has also stated that there are Twiceler imposters out there doing damage. Some comments on the blog post include one that likens this to the early days of Google. Another poster asked where is the proof that Twiceler is actually doing all this damage.
Personally I thought that perhaps Twiceler was eating up some extra bandwidth on web servers. But the theory about it guessing URLs at random has to be bunk. Come on. Do you think anybody with some brains is going to write an indexer that guesses URLs randomly? No. You crawl the web using links from other pages right? You could spend all days guessing at random URLs on just one web server and get nowhere. Twiceler has to search the whole web.
There is a lot of FUD out there about both Twiceler and Cuil. It is best to get your facts straight. Hey I have posted about Cuil. And I did not have good things to say. However everything I wrote was backed up by hard facts. I did not go out and create some weird theories about the evil actions behind Cuil. Maybe Microsoft and Google got together and decided to spread some rumors about Cuil to shut it down? There. Do you see how silly it is to promote FUD about a company, new or otherwise?
To the people on the Cuil Twiceler team, good luck to you. You are going to need it. And you might want to spend some money on public relations damage control. Your name is quickly becoming mud in the blogosphere.
