The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of Software/Service Launches

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Some very exciting services and applications launched today including a new search engine Cuil.com and Adobe Lightroom 2. Having used Adobe Lightroom 2 Beta I’ve been very impressed and opted to buy Lightroom 2 at the first notice of its availability. Unfortunately after purchasing the Lightroom 2 Upgrade per the install PDF I was unable to get the program started. I was not given the option to reference my existing install and my Lightroom 1.0 serial number was not considered valid. Later I received an email that provided the upgrade serial number. Once entered then my old serial number was entered and then the application loaded. If only the install notes set my expectations correctly. Adobe gets the Good and the Bad reference in my post.

The Ugly is reserved for the new search engine Cuil. Cuil was getting tons of press today and was being blindly praised as the new kid on the block to challenge Google. As most found out today who tried Cuil it was far from impressive and probably could be considered to have one of the worst Web 2.0 lauches of all time. Why the hate on Cuil?

As noted in my first observation of the search engine via my post on FriendFeed:
â€œNot very impressed with Cuil.com and the seemingly random association of photos to results. Very confusingâ€

I wasn’t alone in thinking so. Later as I delved into the search engine even more I became even more troubled. When searching for my name in Cuil I knew it wouldnâ€™t be pretty. There are two other Jim Goldsteinâ€™s that come up often when searching my name. Lucky for me! One is Jim Goldstein and his Band of Angels. Doh! The other is an eccentric Jim Goldstein with a house often featured in architecture magazines and in sports magazines due to his fanatical attendance to various pro basketball games. Flip a coin as to which is most inappropriate to my photography oriented web site. Sure enough the architecture/basketball Jim Goldstein has his image associated with my web site in Cuil search results. Even worse someone elseâ€™s photo of the Golden Gate Bridge is associated with a commercial site of mine.

My two biggest complaints…
First I don’t want another persons photo associated with my web site. The last thing I need is someone confusing my site with that of some eccentric.

Second I don’t want my commercial efforts being negatively impacted because inferior photography is being displayed and randomly associated with my commercial site.

I wrote Cuil about my concerns and due to the frenetic nature of their launch today they never wrote back. If and when they do I’ll follow up on this post. I later found out through another post that they were blaming much of what was being perceived as inaccurate results on technical problems due to a larger than expected spike in traffic.Â See Cuil shows us how not to launch a search engine via CNET

Today definitely wasn’t dull. Upgrade problems aside Lightroom 2 is worth a look and if you’re a glutton for punishment check out Cuil.com to see what kind of whacky results are being tied together for your site or photography.

Technorati Tags: Cuil, Lightroom, upgrade, search, technology, software

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Posted by Jim on 07.28.2008 at 11:56 pm
Tagged: Links & Articles, News & Current Events, Photography, Software, Technology, Web , Adobe, Lightroom, Technology

http://archshrk.com archshrk

Wow, that cuil site is pretty bad. I searched for my top keywords and didn’t even show up. Then I searched for my name and got some very interesting results including other people – namely a bikini-clad super model in a provocative pose (I’m a one-piece kind of guy). Try searchme.com for a new kind of search engine with good results.
http://www.gdanmitchell.com Dan Mitchell

Boy, I’m with you on the comments about cuil. I searched for myself and it came back with, of course, a bunch of unrelated sites in addition to my own. But two unfortunate things struck me.

First, and most significant for someone with photography web sites, my listings were accompanied by what seem to be random images that are not mine and have no relationship to my site. (The image accompanying my main listing features four people posing – I have no idea who they are, it isn’t my photo, and it has nothing to do with me or my web site.)

Second, the first search return – at the top of the page – was a spam site…

Very, very inauspicious start for this service. I’m not simply unimpressed, I have an extremely negative view of them.

Dan
http://archshrk.com/2008/07/how-not-to-search-the-web How NOT to search the web | archshrk

[...] I was over at JMG-Galleries reading about a couple of software launches. one was for a photoshop product called Adobe Lightroom 2. Jim had some good and not so good opinions about that but what he really had a problem with was a new search engine called cuil.com. The Ugly is reserved for the new search engine Cuil. Cuil was getting tons of press today and was being blindly praised as the new kid on the block to challenge Google. As most found out today who tried Cuil it was far from impressive and probably could be considered to have one of the worst Web 2.0 lauches of all time. Why the hate on Cuil? – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of Software/Service Launches. [...]
http://www.rwongphoto.com/fieldreport Richard Wong

Your name was actually pretty good aside from that guys house, as most of the first page was your photoshelter stuff, assuming those were your images.

When I typed in my name, my images showed up for the IMDB and some Indiana chiropractor in addition to my website.
http://www.rwongphoto.com/fieldreport Richard Wong

Not to mention that I think they are engaging in copyright infringement. I looked at the source of my images and they are hosted on Cuil’s site and doesn’t link to my own site. At least Google hotlinks and links back to my own site when you click on the image.
http://www.rwongphoto.com/fieldreport Richard Wong

Google links I meant, they don’t hotlink now that I checked.
http://fieldreport.wordpress.com/2008/07/29/cuil-new-search-engine-is-stealing-your-photos/ Cuil – New Search Engine is Stealing Your Photos « Field Report: Photographers

[...] soon because what they have released is utter crap at the moment. Jim Goldstein wrote on his blog that he emailed them to complain about misleading results that could potential tarnish his own name [...]
http://www.jmg-galleries.com Jim

@archshrk Great tip on searchme.com. From what I’ve seen it looks very slick. The image search looks like its pulling straight from Flickr though. I’ll need to take a closer look.

@Dan Mitchell They’ve not done a good job of parsing spam from their search results. The random images associated with content is very disconcerning.

@Richard Wong Yup Google does host thumbnails on their servers. This has been protected by the courts as the outcome of other court rulings. Culio isn’t doing anything alarming in that area. I think their logic of image association to results is where the biggest flaw lies… not to mention the lack of filtering content for spam.
http://virtualimpax.com Kathy @ Virtual Impax

I think Culi is so busy being the “anti-Google” that they missed the reason why Google became the 900 lb gorilla in search!

People started using Google because they could find the information they were seeking.

A lot of less technically savvy people will type in the domain name into the search at Google. Once your site is out of the sandbox, Google will deliver the website that most closely matches that search. That doesn’t happen with Culi.

What horrifies me is the blind praises surrounding this launch. Fortunately, the blogosphere will sink this wanna-be in quick measure.
http://beyondnichemarketing.com/2008/07/30/how-to-launch-a-dream/ How to Launch a Dream… | Beyond Niche Marketing

[...] engine continued out of the “tech lanes” of the blogosphere with posts like “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” on Jim Goldstein’s photography blog. Seems Cuil is especially bad for photography sites and [...]
http://www.zanzig.com/blog/ Mark Zanzig

Jim – could not agree more with you on the sad state of Cuil. What were they thinking (if anything at all) when they implemented that image thing? Seriously, here we have a team of people who should have the experience with the Internet business, and they come up with this service? A service that looks mediocre from every angle, be it name (turns out that cuil is a gaelic word but does not mean knowledge), size (just a marketing ploy), relevance of search results (not good), international aspects (umlauts and special characters show as “&”), and yes – that stupid assignment of images to search results.
FWIW, I did a quick search for a couple of very specific queries and was shocked to see dozens of my images next to results leading to other web sites. A serious problem is the question of how to find the infringing activity? You have to try phrases that may match your images and see what comes up in Cuil.
Very very very uncool.
http://www.grafphoto.com/wordpress Mark

A search on my name turned up similar results – a nice rustic looking couple’s pic next to my website. I suppose I am going to have to go buy a red hat now.

I upgraded my 1.4 version of Lightroom to 2 last night – no issues so far, but have read of others having the same problem with the beta. I recall there were issues in going from the original LR Beta to the 1.0 version – it pretty much convinced me to leave the Beta versions to those much braver than I. I hope you get resolution Jim. If you are as dependent on LR as I am, I can just imagine the frustration.
http://www.jmg-galleries.com Jim

@Mark no worries I was able to resolve the serial number issue pretty quickly. It just required the upgrade email from Adobe… something they had not mentioned in the install notes. My frustration was short lived. So far I’ve had no problems with Lightroom and am eager to post another follow up on it. Stay tuned. BTW too funny about the Cuil image results for you. When you get that red hat let me know.
http://blog.sduffyphotography.com/2008/08/01/friday-link-love-7/ Friday Link Love

[...] Galleries has some complaints about the new search engine [...]
http://www.karlonia.com/2008/08/01/100-quotes-about-power/ Karlonia – Power Quotes

Apparently Cuil was not quite ready for launch during the first day or two – many medium long tail queries did not return results at all, and even general queries returned way fewer results than they should have considering Cuil’s claims of having indexed so many pages already. They did improve somewhat afterward, however, and seem to be picking up more results and increasing relevance as more people have been testing out the engine.

In the long run, I hope they get things together and perform well enough to compete with the major search engines and then maybe do some advertising. I would like to see more serious competitors to Google in order to hold their power in check and encourage more transparency overall.