Wow, it’s bad. Vanity search on myself took two pages in to find ‘me’. Searching for the company I work for brought up pages of crap, spam-laden links using the company name. Apparently, our female employees sell a lot of misspelled herbal Viagra.
Not impressed. Especially since the company name came up in the list of suggestions as I was typing; you’d think the links provided would be better than dubious online drug sellers.
I’ve oddly been on something like the Cuil side of things in this.
I was working for a company in Japan that wanted to do word ranking based on lexical analysis of blogs, so you could like, look up a book and it would give you a score based on what people had said about that book. So you had an instant review from normal people summarized into a single number, and then of course you could click through to see the blogs themselves.
The problem was that as a startup, while we knew what we wanted to do, we of course had little money and no real good programmers to do this with (except for myself, woo!) Plus, before they had hired us on, they’d hired a company to do the front end, webpages, which ended up being huge, half of it black boxed, and all of it buggy. And then management had decided up front of even hiring anyone that we’d have a product ready and on the web in two months. That was entirely unfeasible, but the issue was that they’d already gone out and announced the ship date and sold it to the investors and whatnot. So overall, the instant the thing worked well enough to generally display a result instead of an error message, we were told to make it public.
It sucked and was buggy and totally shouldn’t have gone out the door, but I guess when you’re running on borrowed money, there’s a pretty strict timeline that you’ve got regardless of any link to practicality. You just have to hope that it doesn’t ruin every prospect that you have when the first batch of viewers summarily trash the product. Ours was different enough from anything out there that we were able to carry on and get better (I think), but Cuil might be toast just based on this.
It seems to be improving. I did a vanity search last week, and found myself on about page three (from Google searches, I have a pretty unique name, only one guy in the world shares it). Today, I’m at the top of the first page.
The results still aren’t as good as Google’s, but it does seem to be getting better.
I re-did the searches I did earlier, and it’s a major improvment.
Before it found nothing for cyclingnews, now it found it on top of the list. When I searched for TTUHSC before, it only found inappropriate sites, now the the home page was the second on the list.
It seems to be working better now. It hinted ‘Straight Dope’ when I had typed ‘straight d’, and the resulting finds were mostly actual Straight Dope pages.
I put in my own name. I’m still an evangelist in Alabama, it seems, as well as an aspiring songwriter. No hints of my own web pages in the first page.
Check out this article: PC Pro Magazine | Subscription website
These folks really need to figure out how to move a sites main page to the top of the list.
I did a search on my employer.
Page 1: Link to our Hong Kong Branch.
Link to our investor relations page
Link to our China branch
Link to another random page from our site.
Wikipedia entry
Link to one of our divisions
Wikipedia entry for someone who’s last name is the same as the company name
Link to an artical mentioning the company, from an industry magazine.
I went through the first 4 pages of links. There are probably 20 links to pages on the company site, but none of those are the main page.
Ridiculous.
I just checked and it still blows.
I’m bumping this as an example of why I do not trust the media. This could be a case study in how easy it is to dupe major press outlets into giving you millions and millions of dollars of free promotion regardless of how half-baked, almost sociopathically-unprepared, your alleged business is.
On the bright side, if any of you have a legit startup, by all means take this as an object lesson in how to get free front-page advertising.
Heh. I just tried it too. What a disaster area!
Weird. Still shows the same made-up image for our site, that doesn’t even exist on our site.
Searched for: google chrome. Results very disappointing. Google results for same search are relevant.
Ridicuilous.
D&R