Sounds and feels a bit like censored IRC. I don't fooping get it.

By the way, you had mentioned in a previous article about the lack of AdWord ads associated with "cringely". Well when I setup my AdWords account last week for my site I added the keyword "cringely" to my list and found out the reason why - your minimum CPC for the week I had it as a keyword was $10.00.

As an experiment I went ahead and added all the names of NerdTV season one guests. With the exception of Winer, with whom you tie, you have the highest CPC. Most of the others fall in the $5.00 range.

Speaking of which, where's season two?

Sorry about the late column posting, folks. PBS had a database meltdown last week that locked us out until Monday morning.

I have a high CPC? I think that's a Google vendetta.

NerdTV is returning, I promise, and very soon.

Always great to hear that one good programmer can build a business, or at least have some fun and maybe in the process give some execniks heartburn.

A very inspirational column. Nice to hear the web is not dead and all the money isn't pouring into mobile devices with the VC herd.

How we don't need Goggle.

http://www.cuil.com/

Just tried it on Firefox 3.1, Windows XP. Firefox gave a message "script not responding" and my whole machine slowed down to practically zero with much grinding of the hard drive. I had to re-boot.

I guess it still needs some work.

How much better did Google have to be than Alta Vista to replace it in the minds and mice of most users? I donno how much better will CUIL have to be. Cuil is really COOL.

Cuil must be some magic thing only for other people. I just went to their web site and reran my 10 most recent google searches. In all 10, cuil got no results. Google, on the other hand, had the answer as its first response.

Cuil must be some magic thing only for other people. I just went to their web site and reran my 10 most recent google searches. In all 10, cuil got no results. Google, on the other hand, had the answer as its first response.

Cuil searched my user name. In Google, I'm right on the front page. Third page in Cuil. Couldn't even find my high school gf on Cuil, either.

I like this quote from NYTimes:

“It looks like they should have spent another million or two and waited to launch the site. Not only did it not find difficult terms, like the name of my business (which is also the name of my website!), but even the easiest, saddest, of searches such as "hot girls" yielded no results. If you can't find porn on the Internet you have real problems with your search methods...”
— Michael L.
Cuil's New Search Engine: Cheaper Than Google, but Not Better

Maybe I'm old school, but I fail to see the need for a new chat client. Have you taken a look at the chats occurring on most blogs? Useless drivel. (Yes, I'm aware of the irony in posting this message on a blog.)

What I'd be more interested in is some sort of filtering feature that would post only the 0.01% most interesting, thoughtful comments. Ditto for other Web 2.0 content, i.e., YouTube.

Cuil's results are pretty wretched. I own a website which is in position 1,2, or 3 for relevant keywords on google. On cuil it is nowhere in the first 20 pages. Most of the links were to link farm pages that google is smart enough to ignore. Even putting my domain name in cuil without the www. or the .com part returns many pages of junk. More indexed pages doesn't mean better. They are not ready for prime time.

I could be missing something here, but does Talkinator leave itself open to spam?

Let me see, I will make my page also part of the Apple group, or the Hanna Montana group! Where is the control?

I will have to check.

Is it just me or does this sound like an IRC client that you can imbed in with filtering turned on to eliminate profanity and some translation services built in?

Take a look at www.backnoise.com ... same idea, cleaner implementation.

If Talkinator is soo great, why isn't it implemented on the Cringely page to allow all of us fans to chat?

Me thinks it might be harder to integrate with an existing site than we are led to believe.

what's up?

Bob's wrong about the 5% difference between AltaVista and Google. When Google arrived, I tried both. AltaVista and Google were neck-and-neck on search results.

So why did I switch to Google:

- Google didn't have obnoxious ads, so it loaded much faster than AltaVista.

- Google had search results you could trust. AltaVista deliberately blurred the line between paid and non-paid search results.

Those are major functional differences, not 5% performance differences.

What? No swearing? How is that going to be successful?

Mailinator is pretty a pretty neat toy, but if you read the architecture doc that the engineer wrote, you'll see that it's not a fully implemented SMTP server. It cannot send mail. Worse, it drops attachments/images, etc. Finally, it stores all email in memory and deletes old messages. Now, I'm mighty impressed with this java hack, but it's not a high-performance, general purpose SMTP engine. Sendmail, postfix and Qmail are all beasts, but they are full of features that serious organizations need. Thanks for highlighting this developer's work.

I think it's fairly easy for people argue without swearing. It'd be nice if you could block IP addresses.

If I were to put this on my website, people could either spam or troll my potential customers and current users.

So now Captchas and their problems.