What happened to Cuil?

to go with a completely different musical. Hey, you gave it away. Yeah, like that's a shock. Well it's it's because it had the word cool in it and we're gonna be talking about cool. I guess then West Side Story would have been too easy. Yeah, that would have been totally different cool. Yes, anyway, we are speaking of cool today, but we're talking about c U I L. Cool. Yes, the late but not quite lamented search engine. But I think it was mostly lamented while it was still around. Yeah,

sadly it was. If you're not familiar with cool, it's it didn't live very long. Um. Google just celebrated its tenth anniversary. Not too long ago. But Cool was only around for two just over just over two years. Yeah, but it was supposed to be, like many have been described, a Google killer, and unfortunately for them especially, it it wasn't. Yeah, it's it's an interesting story, and we only have a few details about that story. A lot of it ends

up still being behind closed doors. People weren't really you know, eager to talk about failures so much, I mean, understandably so. But the concept behind Cool was actually fairly sound. You know. It was a it was a really interesting take on the search engine model, right, and and to really get an idea of why this was at all a big deal And you may think, well, it can't be a big deal. I haven't heard about Cool for years. Um, the big deal was that when it was when it

launched back in July of two thousand eight. Yes, the big news behind it was that it was being headed by a former Google employee. Yes, there are actually many people who were involved with Google who moved on to Cool, right, Yeah, there were. There were three co founders, and two of the co founders formerly worked with Google. There was Anna Patterson and she was someone who worked on the Terra

Google indexing technology. Yes, And there was Russell Power who was part of Google's search indexing team, and he was another one of the co founders. And then the third co founder was Tom Costello, who was Anna Patterson's husband, um who's a Stanford employee who who studied and worked

on web search technologies. Though he was not not a Google play I do believe he was also involved with IBMS web Fountain yes project, at least according to Danny Sullivan of Search engine Land YEP and the other the other members of the team when it launched, and again this was back in July of two eight. We're Louis Monnier, who was the founder of Alta Vista, Yes, which if in case you guys aren't aware, I mean we have some young listeners, right. Alta Vista was an enormous search

engine pre Google. Yeah, there were a number of of I guess giants you could say. Right now, Google is such a big force in search engine world that it's kind of hard to think of it being different. But we had Alta Vista and lycos Um of course for a while. Um Hot bought web Crawler web crawler Yahoo of course, which was all done by hand at one point. Yeah, it was all It was all edited by people. It was not automated, and that at that actually sort of

plays into cools h realm in a minute. But yeah, I mean it was it was a lot different before Google came around with the its innovative technology based solution. Right. Yeah, Alta Vista was the dominant search engine among all the others we just listed before Google came around, and did not take Google too long to take that mental away from Alta Vista. So you might say that many had a an ax to grind Um. Actually he didn't stay with the company for very long though, because remember in July,

at launched. Now, granted there had been work on cool for for a couple of years before it launched. It's just that no one had really heard about it outside of the immediate team of developers until it went public. But the by went public, I mean the website launched, it was not it was not a public company, right, so it's a private company. Um. Well, Monier he he left the company in September of two thousand eight, so it'd only been live for a couple of months. And uh.

The crunch Base reported that the reason for leaving was due to differences air Quotes with the CEO UH. Then the other members, the other executive members of Cool included Vince Slido, who was originally the VP of corporate Communications with Cool. He left actually in August of two thousand eight, so the month after it went live he left. He left to join PayPal. Then later on he left PayPal to join Yelp. Then you had UH, Peter Szmanski who was a former attorney he actually joined as the VP

of Corporate Development and general counsel. And Bruce baum Guard who was formerly of the Internet Archive IBM and soft Ticks. He was the CEO of that for a while. Um he became the head of operations. So all these guys had a history in tech companies to extent before joining

with Cool. And it was really a big risk in a way, but was also just made a lot of news because suddenly you had these former Google employees and Google competitors all joining forces to create a search engine that they claimed, out of the gate was superior to Google. And UH, this got a lot of attention, I mean clearly in the tech industry and journalism. All the journalists immediately went to cool dot com to check it out and find out what what was the big deal? You know,

wasn't really better than Google? And they found out on that first day that it had crashed, yes, multiple times. Well it it in defense of Cool in this particular instance. Uh, there had been enough hype generated during its pre launch phase that apparently it attracted quite a bit of traffic um and that could be that could be hard for a new company when it first goes live with something like that, simply because that there, you know, they may

not be prepared to handle that kind of traffic. But as it turns out, that was sort of an ill omen Yeah, actually that was here's the thing, Okay, that here's how I see it. All right, So the launch date was July. By July twenty nine, there were already tons of reviews about Cool. But but but the reason why I bring up the crash is because you have a legitimate point, I mean a very legitimate point in that new companies often cannot handle a mass of traffic

all at once. They may have been able to que a with a fraction of that number, but it's hard to que a big rushes in traffic because you have to you know, create all this, You have to create the traffic to test it, right, So you really don't know how your system is gonna hold up until it's hit by that demand. However, one of the claims they that the founders made was that Cool indexed three times

as many web pages as Google. Goal right, The claim was that Google had indexed around forty billion, that's billion with a B web pages, and that Cool had indexed one twenty billion. Now, Google later on came out and said, hey, guys, come on, we've scanned over two trillion pages. We just index the ones that are important, that are that actually

have something of value on them. So, yeah, you can go ahead and say you've indexed a hundred billion, but we've indexed the forty billion pages that actually have stuff on them worth seeing. You've got a lot of garbage in there. That was essentially the message kind of I delivered in a much more overt way than Google did.

That was that was me being snarky. But yeah, I had read reviews that suggested that that some of the others had had posed the question according to whom I'm paraphrasing here, you know, how do you know how many pages the competition is indexed? Um, and you know it's hard to say. I mean even even cool hedged its own and said it had run across a hundred and

eighty six billion pages. But you know, due to spam and duplicate content, some of those have been excluded from those that was actually carrying UM that was that was one of the things that was a differentiating factor. At least one of the things that Cool was using as a differentiating factor was the number of pages index. Another

is the way it was was ranking content. And we've talked several times about it, and Jonathan's written an excellent article about the Google algorithm on the website, which I would encourage you to go look at because it's really really awesome. It's called why is the Google Algorithm So Important? And before we talk about how Cool does it, it probably would behoove us to say, talk a little bit about what Google does to to rank web search results.

I agree, I feel like it's um you can't really compare one service to the leader saying it's a Google killer with out knowing how Google is doing that. So Google judges relevance on search results based upon how popular a particular web page is. So the more popular web pages, the more relevant Google assumes that search result is to whatever query you use. So let's let's take an example.

Let's say that there's let's let's pick um dungeons and dragons. Okay, so you've done a web search on dungeons and dragons. And what Google will do is it will look at its index of websites and look for the pages that have that are the most popular. And the way Google measures popularity is by chiefly the number of links other pages have to that web page, right, And in addition to that, it looks at the quality of the content whether these the pages linking to it are considered reputable

sources as well. Right. So if if you have a lot of high ranking pages linking to you, you in turn will be very high ranking. Now that's one of the interesting things about Google is that the algorithm takes a lot of different things into account. It takes the quality of the pages that are linking to you into account. So let's say that you write a blog post and CNN links to your blog post. That's gonna boost your

popularity quite a bit. And or but let's say you've written another blog post and a hundred smaller blogs have linked to you. That might not boost you as much as that one CNN linked did for the other blog post. So yeah, there's a lot of different fiddling around with the algorithm, and no one has it besides Google. That is, no one has it perfectly figured out, mostly because Google changes it up pretty frequently to make sure that you get at what they considered the most relevant results to

your query. Now, Cool did it a totally different way. They said that this is the wrong way. You're basing it on popularity. Popularity and UH and being correct are two different things. Yes, that just because something is popped uler doesn't mean it's right. I think there was The example I read was something along the lines of and this was a journalist who was writing this who said, well, I mean it is true that the most popular restaurants

are not necessarily the best restaurants. So in that sense, you don't want necessarily what's popular, you want what's most relevant. So cool The claim was that cool search engine results were contextually based. They could they were looking for relevance based on context. So you would put in your Dungeons and Dragons query. It wouldn't look for the pages that

had the most links to them. It would look for the pages that seemed to be about dungeons and dragons the most like that was the primary, uh focus of that web page and those that's how it would deliver your results. Yeah. I believe the article you mentioned with the restaurant was Anita Hamilton's review in Time magazine. Yes, in July two thou I ran across that as well. That's a good, good review. Yeah it starts off with

rest easy goog goal. Yeah, that pretty much. But I'll go ahead and say this too, because um, really Cool got lambasted by by journalists, I mean even journalists who are not typically critics. I feel a sense of sympathy towards the executives at Cool because I felt like they really got judged harshly right out of the gate, and then they had no chance to recover. Um. And part of that might be releasing a little too early, releasing something that is, you know, one way or another half baked.

But in some cases I really felt like it almost became a one upsmanship game among journalists to see who could write the most snarky critical account of Cool and what it could do. A lot of that also comes from the fact that you know, there was a lot of boasting on Cool's part, So in a way, it was kind of a come up and thing. You know, they claim all these things, but this is what the actual results are, as both parties are to blame. But I just wanted to puint that I think I even

wrote a blog post. I didn't even look this up, but I'm pretty sure I wrote a blog post on Cool when it came out. And I don't remember if I was snarky or not knowing me probably a little, but I don't think it was quite as as harsh as some of the journalists were. Yeah, one of the things that they also got hammered on was the fact that they had the Cool executives had said, well, you know, we're ranking things differently than Google does. We're not necessarily

using popularity as one of our criteria. But as Danny Danny Sullivan said, well, it's not all about the content there. They are factoring in popularity. Um. He actually, in his article, which is quite lengthy and in depth, Um went into how he'd be put in a search for Harry Potter

and and uh used the name of his house. If you're not familiar with Harry Potter, it's a UM it's said, in a school in which there are four different houses and the Potter yes, I know, well, there are some people who haven't read it the movies or seen the movies. And he put in the name of Harry Potter in the house he was in in his school, and it brought up the name of the most recent movie. That house,

by the way, was Griffin Door. Yes, and so he said, uh, you know, the first thing that came up on Cool was the latest movie. And he said, this shows that they are using that popularity is factoring into the Cool search algorithm, despite the fact that they have claimed that

it doesn't. They also said that Cool was faster, although whether they meant that Cool was faster at indexing new pages than Google was, or that Cool was actually faster at generating search engine results after a query that kind of that was one of those things that was always confusing. Um I would imagine they meant indexing, because really, at this point, the weight that you you have to see

search engine results is minuscule. It's you know, you can usually you can't even count to one, much less two before you get them unless you've got a really slow connection. Um So I would imagine they meant that they were faster at indexing new pages. Now, of course, Google has really ramped up on that itself recently. Uh yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, Google's Google has entire departments developed just to increase the speed of indexing new content so that it shows up

in Google search results. The cool thing I thought. The interesting thing I thought about Cool's results pages were that they it would divide up your search into categories. You had tabs across the top of your search results, so of course you had three columns of results to start with. And that's sort of confused some people because they were sorry, um no, because people were expecting traditional search results pages,

which are still pretty much the same. You have, you know, the top results at the top of the page, and you scroll down and there are other things there maybe, um you know, Google and Being and a lot of the others have incorporated news and blogs and things like that,

but they're usually grouped somewhere in the middle. Um. But but cool search engine results pages or serups um would bring up three columns information and if you are in a hurry and looking for the number one link, you're going, okay, so I guess it's the top left. Is that the one in the middle you know which one is it, which is the top one? And you couldn't break out search results by things like news and blogs and stuff

on Cool. But what you could do is it would have tabs at the top of your page that would have categories that your search query would fall into. Let's say again, let's say you did dudgeons and dragons. Your your categories might be something like dungeons and dragons, game, dungeons and dragons, movie, dungeons and dragons, gear, that kind

of stuff. And then by clicking on a tab, you would bring up a new set of search results that are specifically towards that category, and you would get new tabs that would go into subcategories, so you can start digging deeper and deeper into your subject, getting more and more precise. But it meant that you had to click

to get to those deeper, more precise results. I think that may, over everything else, may have been Cool's downfall because it required the user to put in more effort to find specific results pertaining to his or her query. And I can tell you from the user experienced perspective, that is a killer. Yeah. Now with Google, the same

thing sort of holds true. You may not see what you were looking for when you put in your first search result, and then you go back in and you're like, well, maybe I'll add in another term to kind of narrow it down a little more. So you're essentially doing the same thing with Google. It's just doing it in a different way. You don't have to navigate through tabs and click through. You're actually having to type a new thing.

You could even argue that it's actually more work intensive to do it the way Google does, But I think it's more natural to the average user than navigating through tabs and trying to to narrow your search down that way. And and part of the problem is that people didn't take the time to learn Cool's method of organizing information to really use it to its its most, to its full potential. Another part of that problem is that for several really well known terms, Cool just didn't seem to

bring back good results period. Now, maybe if you had dug down you would start to find them, but on that first initial page of results, where you don't expect to have to dig any further, you should be able to see it right there. People were reporting that they were searching for terms often names, but not always just names,

and not getting relevant search results at all. I've heard the same complaint levied against Wolf from Alpha because people think it's a search engine when it's really not designed to do that. But it bears such a resemblance to a search engine that people plug in search terms and expect to get results. They don't get it. Clearly they

didn't listen to our podcast episode Wolf from Alpha. Alpha is not a search engine, yes, um, and I still highly recommend that that site, but it's not something that you plug Harry Potter in and get results. Um well, I think there probably is some kind of result, but you're not. It's more of a scientific site. I won't be satisfied until Wolf from Alpha can write a new Harry Potter novel just by typing in Wolf. You type in Harry Potter eight and it generates a novel for you.

Um well, as it turns out, h J k Rolling maybe doing that on her own. However, Cool was supposed to be a search engine and it you know, there's really there really was no good answer from Cool uh for them to say, well, we can't explain why this isn't in there. Um, But there was one area at which Cool really excelled, and everybody seems to agree that it was a really positive step. I'm assuming it's privacy, Yes, privacy.

They they they were very good about not logging um, identifiable information about about the people who use the site. No I P information that's Internet protocol um, no cookies, those kinds of things were not uh, we're not part of it. And and that was one area that just about everybody who reviewed it, all the research I did, everybody spoke at least a little bit about the privacy issue and how they felt the Cool was doing that

part of it absolutely right. It almost became a backhanded thing, though, would be like, you know, I don't get any decent search results, but at least they're not tracking me. Yeah. Um, in a way, I think that may have actually hurt cool as well. And the reason why I say that is Google's not tracking you in order to violate your privacy.

Google's not really Google really. Google has no specific interest in you or what you do, apart from the fact that you are potentially going to be valuable to some advertiser, Right, Google, Google will, I don't know what they're thinking. I'm thinking, all right, this is this is sell me to use critical thinking, Johnathan, this is my arm chair. This is my armchair analytical mode here. So Google tracks information in parts so that it can sell advertising space to advertisers.

That is true. That that much I agree with. So that means that that information has an actual value. And you've heard us talk about this about Facebook and other companies as well. So Google wants to have this information and again not necessarily tying it specifically to you, but to a user that you happen to be. Sounds kind of weird, but in a way they're they're not. They're not concerned about the individual. They're just they know that someone is interested in blah blah blah. So they can

sell that information to an advertiser. Uh, that blah blah blah happens to be your interest neither here nor there. You know it's interested in blah blah blah. It's written all over your face. So anyway, the idea here is that Google could sell this information advertisers. Well, Cool did not collect this information, which meant it was more it would be more difficult for Cool to create a revenue

model based on advertising. Now that's not to say that Cool wouldn't base wouldn't create a revenue model based on some other method, but at least the traditional search engine method is to to make money through ads. So it would have been harder to do that without having the the data to fall back on and say, hey, look, this is what our user base is like, this is the kind of stuff they're interested in, this is the

sort of demographics they fall in. With other information, you can't really go to advertising companies and and get the same amount of money that say Google could, Right, So that brings us kind of tow Cool's revenue, which was essentially investments, private investments. They raised around thirty three million before it launched in two thousand and eight, and I could find no record of subsequent rounds of funding. Right. They didn't try another project though, called c PDA. Yeah,

in a way, CPDA was almost a relaunch. It was some people saw it that way. It actually said that yeah. Uh. In fact, the final tweet from Cool's Twitter account, and I apologize to everyone out there who hates using tweet as a noun, but the for Twitter anyway for for the final one said it was on April eighth, two announcing the launch of CPDA, the automated encyclopedia then had

a link to it. So if you went to cool dot com after on April eighth or afterward up until it was shut down, we'll get to that in a little bit. You went to CPDA and it was a it was a really innovative, bizarre product. Do you want to talk about what CPDA did a little bit. Um, Well, I honestly had never used it myself, and I had been unaware. I had forgotten about cool by the time it was debuted. It was it was supposed to be. I think it was sort of a modification of its

search engine UH product in the first place. Um, you know, it was supposed to basically carve up content and reassemble it in one place. Yeah, the quote I read specifically said it will find everything on the web about your topic, remove all the duplication, and put the information on one page. Yes, So the idea here is that it was going to create in real time a UH an encyclopedia entry about

whatever the subject was in your query. Right, So if you were to write an UH Pearl Harbor bombing, it would as symbol an encyclopedia page about the Pearl the bombing of Pearl harbor Um based upon the information that was out there on the web already, it would it would pull that together in some way and put it together in what presumably was an understandable, uh narrative. And some people said even then that it was still tricky, like you could put in certain terms and the stuff

you got was misleading. Sometimes it was outright wrong, which Costello again, one of the co founders, defended, saying that you know, it takes time to get this right, and uh, those errors were intentional because the intentional in the sense that cpdo was grabbing information from the very from all

across the web, including the dredges. So yeah, it was an interesting idea that you could you could use the search engine as a way of generating a full page of information about whatever the topic was, and so instead of going to links to read about this stuff, you would have all the information presented to you right then and there. Now. Granted, that means that that information is difficult to verify because you don't necessarily follow it back to the source, and it could be that one paragraph

contradicts the next one. That's true. Um. The article I read in on giga Home about it quoted one user as sentence after sentence of automated nonsense was the quote like most of my articles except that one on the Google algorithm, that one was good. I didn't I didn't use cool for that one. Yeah, But as it turns out, um, it just really wasn't enough. And uh, for a couple of days before the rumors before that, the site went dark,

and it really went dark. There is no if you go to cool dot com now, there is nothing there to say, thank you very much, We're sorry we had to shut down. There was nothing. It went dark in a in a big serious way. In September of this year. September was the last day for Cool. Yeah, but it was a Friday. Well, there were rumors a few days before that they may be seeking acquisition by somebody else and that they may shut down if they couldn't get acquisition.

And apparently that's what happened. Yeah. Errington. Michael Arrington of of tech Crunch had reported on that saying that there were some stories about potential companies looking to acquire Cool. And I mean they were all like the regular usual suspects, right, like Google, Microsoft, I think even Apple at one point was a potential one being mentioned, although that would have shocked me as well. I think that was just thrown

in there because it was another big name. You know, well the Apple Disney rumors have been swirling for years too, So well you've got a guy who's sitting on the board of well, never mind people before that. So at any rate, so you've got the Yeah. The apparently the story was that on September, which was a Friday, the cool employees c U I L which you know what, we never said what that meant, did We didn't. It's

Gaelic for wisdom or knowledge. Anyway, the employees came in and then they were told go home, you know that we're shutting down, and so everyone had to clear out their desks and leave, and there was actually there's still some conjecture over whether or not they got paid for the last few weeks of work. The news reports I read, the most recent ones seemed to suggest they did not get paid. That the money. It looks like the money just ran out, which doesn't surprise me because as far

as I know, there was no revenue model. And again, after the initial thirty three million in capital, I don't see any other investments or at least none that are major investments. Can you get to remember these are expensive companies.

They're running lots and lots of servers which eat up a lot of power and plus rental space for the physical space the servers to then, so you know, those costs do start to skyrocket, especially as you ramp up anyway, So that same day they shut down the servers and it wasn't until September twenty, which was the Monday, that people started to really write about that, probably because again

it happened on a Friday, that Saturday and Sunday. It's the best time for you shut stuff down because you're going to buy yourself a couple of days grace period before all the snark starts up again. And that's exactly what happened. Everyone seemed to jump on the Cool is Dead bandwagon, so uh, they had to endure a lot of snark when they debuted and even more when they went dark. Yeah, I don't think critics ever really let up for the two years that Cool was out there,

and I never really caught on um. They certainly never changed their opinion. But I think also most of them just they took the opportunity to a size it, uh, and then forgot about it. I know, I did, you know I I'm no saint, you know. I. When I first used Cool, I thought, well, this is an interesting idea, but it just doesn't seem to be working for me. So I'm going to go back to Google, and I

never I never looked back. I never bothered to go back to Cool and see if they had improved their search results in any way so that it made it more navigable or more relevant, or that if the tabs thing really worked much better. I mean, it may have, but I just kind of forgot about it, you know, it just it wasn't It wasn't compelling enough when it debuted for me to stick with it, And as a result, when it went away, I was not surprised. Well, maybe

they're starting again for scratch. We'll find out, I'm sure eventually. And there's still some rumors that perhaps it'll come back in some kind of form, that either a company will eventually pay for the patents and the I p that Cool had the intellectual property. Yeah, exactly, intellectual property. Thanks um. Yeah, there's still some conjecture that we may see it return in some form. It may not be called Cool anymore.

In fact, I would be surprised if it were called cool, because I think that that name has a stigma attached to it at this point. But we'll have to wait and see. I'm sure someone somewhere will buy that technology just to if nothing else, just to keep it. Like if I were Google, I'd be like, maybe we should buy that just to make sure no one else gets hold of it. We might not do anything with it, but this way no one else will either. That kind

of thing. Um, I wouldn't be I wouldn't be shocked to see that, not that I know anything, which I think has become clear in the duration of this podcast. So do you have anything else to add before we all right, let's close up shop. If any of you guys have any questions or comments, If you have any other topics you'd like us to tackle, or you've got stories of your own about cool that you would like to share, you can share those with us on Facebook

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