CYBERSPACE – Every year British newspaper The Register publishes a list of the most jaw-droppingly stupid stunts to emerge from the heart of Silicon Valley during the preceding 12 months. This year, the list (http://tinyurl.com/7br694) included one that should be near and dear to the heart — or at least the funny bone — of the adult industry.Cuil (pronounced “cool”) was the brainchild of a trio of former Google masterminds. Promoted by its creators as the Most Perfect Search Engine Ever, at its July launch Cuil’s goal was to “go beyond today’s search techniques” and provide surfers “a richer display of results [such as] images to identify topics.” The images were designed to “help people visually check whether the result is something they want to click on.”
That’s laudable. Too bad the product didn’t work quite like its developers intended. Hours after the July launch, Cuil’s bad self was returning images for every search, all right… and many of them depicted random acts of hardcore sex.
Quantum computing research? No problem. One researcher complained that his name and data forevermore would be associated with the images Cuil returned: “little pictures of a U.S. serviceman and another guy masturbating over some other poor sap.”
Cuil’s vice president of communications blamed a server breakdown due to an unexpectedly high traffic volume.
“There was overload on servers, and when that happens — and you lose a machine for even a minute or so — the images that machine is going to provide can’t be used, and so you then have to choose from the remaining results you have,” he said. “And if that machine had key images, then the quality of your results are severely affected.”
Cuil later retracted the explanation and apologized for “a serious file corruption” error. Perhaps if the company hadn’t spent so much of its startup capital on perks for its 30 employees, it would have been able to afford bulletproof code. At the very least, it probably should have shut up an insider or two who spilled the beans about where the money went.
Even more amusing, Chief Executive Tom Costello, who claims to be of sturdy Irish stock, said the company took its name from the old Irish word “cuil,” which he averred means “knowledge.”
Turns out “cuil” is the old Irish word for “backside” or “rear.”
Maybe that’s even more appropriate.
