We’ve received a few reports of spam comments on various blogs that “advertise” Cuil, among other sites. We at Cuil would like to assure everyone out there that we have nothing to do with this. We have not and would not engage in this activity. It is likely that someone is posting links to sites such as ours in an effort to disguise their true intent and trick comment filtering systems. Search engine guru Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land has commented on one post agreeing with this line of thinking.
So, to put the record straight: it’s not cool, and it’s not us. We use the Web too, and these kinds of things annoy us as much as they annoy you.
As a side note, we encourage webmasters to use the nofollow attribute for links in their comments and forums. Google (and others) indicate they use this as a signal to ignore links. If this practice becomes more common, perhaps we can discourage these people from bothering with these posts in the first place.
Happy searching and enjoy the holiday season!
Mihaela Lica · Dec 16, 04:03 PM
Anna, I am so glad to see this disclaimer. FYI, the spam in Cuil’s name continues. I saw another four today in my pending comments. I wonder if there is any way for you to report and block the IPs – but then… I am sure they’ll continue the practice from other IPs.
What I don’t understand is why they chose Cuil? Why not yahoo, Google, hakia or anything else? I still think this is someone with a grunge.
About “nofollow” – I do not write for the search engines, I write for the readers and my readers follow links. They don’t care about nofollow attributes, they don’t care about the likes of dislikes of Google. If I don’t like a link on my site, I just delete it.
www.q2down.com · Dec 17, 08:38 PM
Anna, I am so glad to see this disclaimer. FYI, the spam in Cuil’s name continues. I saw another four today in my pending comments. I wonder if there is any way for you to report and block the IPs – but then… I am sure they’ll continue the practice from other IPs.
Matthias · Dec 21, 06:36 AM
It’s quite obvious that Cuil is not behind this. I’m surprised anyone even considered the possibility.
I got about 150 of these spam comments on one of my sites within just a few hours. Thankfully my spamfilter eliminated them all.
Clearly these spammers are trying to poison the well.
selvaraaju · Dec 22, 03:20 AM
Hi,
I am using Cuil as search engine from the day you launched Cuil.
I feel that is is good. I feel that competition is more in search engine market and I very well believe cuil is trying to capture small share of market.
I really like your privacy policy where you dont log any records about user queries.
Keep your hopes high and I will also recommend your search engine to some of friends
stephen · Dec 23, 01:07 PM
Very interesting. I completely agree about having no follow attributes to links, there are a lot of webmasters especially forums and social media sites that make it far to easy for anyone to write whatever they like with no consequences, the no follow attributes will at least not credit the links.
d_johnny · Dec 24, 10:26 AM
Learnt about Cuil from Internet marketing associates, UK. I ‘ld love it since then.
Now about SPAMMING! No Idea…Could it be an ‘Old Bot’ trick to discredit this New ‘STAR’.
John · Dec 30, 04:05 AM
Yes, a “no follow” will take effect!, so do not take care about that. BTW, i found cuil from a tv program.
John
Everfluxx · Jan 4, 03:40 AM
Hi, Anna.
What about Cuil? How does Cuil treat links with the “rel=nofollow” attribute? I couldn’t find the answer anywhere in your site.
By the way, I think it would be great if you could expand your Webmaster Info
sectionpage a bit. ;-)wellness · Jan 4, 03:52 PM
Great new search engine! I especially like the 3-column results layout.
I miss, however, German language support, just as in all other important search engines.
Without these, my search results are not really relevant …
Vince · Jan 5, 04:56 PM
@Everfluxx: Cuil does not crawl links with the “rel=nofollow” attribute, which helps us not crawl pages that are linked to in forums. (Although, of course, if the same link comes up elsewhere on the Web without such an attribute, we would crawl it then.) We also use this “nofollow” tag to help with spam detection and other ranking if the link does get crawled from elsewhere.