Perhaps you are familiar with Cuil, the search engine that was announced on Monday to the accompaniment of a lot of fanfare. People flocked to the site to find out more about this search engine that was designed by ex-Google employees and was going to knock Google off of the top spot. The site, naturally, collapsed.
When it finally did come back up, it was catastrophically bad. Searches for terms such as “rabbit” and “porcupine” returned zero results. It had other problems too (not safe for work).
We’ve all had a nice laugh about it during the last couple of days, but only this morning have I finally realised the truth.
Cuil was not designed by ex-Google employees. It was designed by current Google employees. It’s a covert operation that has been concocted to send out the following message to would-be competitors: “Do not try to beat us. You will lose.”