Adam McFarland

To the Cuil Management Team:

Earlier this week it was brought to my attention that you launched your new search engine.  With an index of some 120 billion web pages, you claim to be the largest and most relevant search engine around.  So I just took a spin over and executed a few queries.  And I must say - the results are horrible. 

How can a search for “SportsLizard” result in a link to my old blog that was moved over here a year ago?  SportsLizard does happen to be one of the more popular collectibles sites on the web.  Wouldn’t want to actually return the SportsLizard.com home page or anything…

Then a search for “sports card price guide” showed up in your auto-suggest box but yielded no results!  There are only like 10 legit online sports card price guides, many of which have been around since the dawn of the internet.  Don’t have those in your 120 billion pages huh?  While we’re on the topic:  why does a search for my name not yield this domain?  Umm, this is Adam-McFarland.net?  At least return the tool over on Adam-McFarland.com!

I’ll admit, you impressed me by showing PureAdapt.com when I searched “Pure Adapt”.  I mean, five minutes ago that wouldn’t have done anything for me, but your results were so bad that I was actually shocked to see some accuracy.  Then again, you do display a totally irrelevant skull next to our name.  Wtf is up with that?

In short - your search engine sucks.  Google is still FAR more relevant for 99.9% of queries.  Stop hating on my company.

Sincerely,

Adam McFarland
Co-Owner, Pure Adapt Inc
www.PureAdapt.com

I’ve decided to hold off on promoting Music Alerts for a while for a few reasons. Primarily because I’m in the middle of ramping back up our client services after the launch of DI and I’m swamped, but also because I wanted to give it some time to be tested in the field. There’s no way to predict when an album will be added to Amazon, so I just sat back and waited.

Today I got my first real alert. It worked perfectly - Google Reader saw that the feed had been updated and notified me of the new item. I looked, saw the release of a new album (albeit an international release of an album already out), and I was like “wow, this is pretty cool”.

I also noticed that Music Alerts comes up #3 on a Google search of “music alerts”. Pretty cool to be just behind MTV and MSN after just a few weeks. I also find it satisfying that I’m now ahead of that stupid service Barnes and Noble offers where you can sign up for alerts for a whopping 30 artists.

Anyway, I’ll hopefully get some time towards the holidays to promote it. As long as it keeps working well for me, I’m going to be supremely confident in it and be as aggressive as I can with pushing it. We’re obviously not going to spend a lot of money on a side project (i.e. none), so I think the only real chance it has is to catch the “viral” bug and get caught up on the tech sites and blogs - certainly a possibility, but obviously not an easy accomplishment. We’ll see.

Remember MyLiveSearch, the company that Google supposedly has had their eye on since its inception?  They’ve taken a lot of crap the past few months for delaying launch and for garnering a ton of hype without anyone actually seeing what they’re working on.  They promised “real-time indexing” of the web as you search.  Naturally with a claim like that we’re all pretty curious and a bit skeptical at the same time.

Well supposedly today they are supposed to launch so I figured I’d give my $.02 on whether or not I thought it was worth using.  I’ve been a beta tester for a little less than a week now, and I’ve got mixed feelings on the whole thing:

What they claim to be:  “The world’s first true live search engine.  Searching the internet will never be the same.”

What they actually are:  A browser plug-in that starts with search results from Google, Yahoo, or MSN (your choice) and then indexes the pages on the domain of the top results “live” using your computer to expand upon and re-order the results.

What I like:  It’s an interesting way to look at the web.  For example, a Google Search for “Custom McFarlane” returns 2 results from SportsLizard and 3 results from articles linking to SportsLizard that I wrote.  Clearly we dominate that niche.

A search on MyLiveSearch starts with SportsLizard at the top, but ends with eBay dominating the rankings because there are hundreds of custom McFarlane figures being sold on eBay. SportsLizard is the second site that appears, but it takes a bunch of scrolling (or some refining of the results) to find SL.  As MyLiveSearch crawls the sites “live” it re-orders them based upon what they find.

You’ll notice that it does a poor job of sorting which pages are most important.  Clearly the Custom McFarlane home page is most relevant to the query, but it shows other SL pages ahead of it when I narrow the results to only show pages from our site.  MyLiveSearch also shows you who indexed the site and when - so they start with a page Google indexed a few days ago and then index and sort the rest “live”.

I personally think they did a bad job on this query, ranking eBay ahead of us because of the quantity of content.  However, it’s still pretty cool to watch and I can at least relate to where they are coming from and appreciate their attempt at innovation.   There are a handful of features that allow you to focus results more on news results (i.e. Google News) and group the results by site, but nothing that really does much for me.  Overall for other queries I got solid results, but nothing I’d say that was that much better than Google.

What I don’t like about it:  In order:  installing a plug-in to run a search sucks, having to login to perform a search sucks, the time to run a search is annoying (I had searches take up to a minute to complete…eh), and the false promise that you actually index the web live doesn’t sit well with me.  I suppose you are technically indexing live, but it would be a lot more convincing if the live indexing was being done on a central server and not on my CPU.

Bottom line:  MyLiveSearch is  creative and different, but not so creative and so different that Google couldn’t copy it in a few days.  I’m pretty sure that if you gave me a few months I could program something similar…and I’m not even that great of a programmer.   In the end, the login and plugin crush any chance I have of using it with any regularity.  Fun to toy with, but Google still rules.