I was taken aback tonight as I went on my gmail to find this, which appears to be spam from Cuil:
This is a contact form that was submitted from my father's old website.
And then with a quick search on a more useful search engine, I found that this is not an isolated incident. Apparently, someone else has already written about this. I agree with what the post says. There are several possibilities here:
1.) Cuil wants to get any press it can get.
2.) Cuil decided to hire a bozo to do their ‘social media marketing’.
3.) Someone really does not like Cuil.
In any case, the company should send out a press release soon if it does not want to be further ridiculed.
Update: Also noticed these posts from September. This is nothing new apparently, contrary to what I had assumed.
Update 2: Okay, turns out Danny Sullivan once again has all the answers. He says in a Sphinn comment that this is being done by a spammer to mask their other activities.
Final update: I am renaming this blog post “Cuil Spamming? Not really.” so that i will not be misleading if it comes up in any searches.
Final update 2 (lol): Brad Kellett from Cuil just posted a comment below saying that it is clearly not them doing the spamming. It is nice to see the responsiveness. Me like.
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Alhan, you should come back to see what Cuil had to say about all that. LOL. They should really hire someone to deal with their PR – since they launched they make one mistake after another. I see two possible scenarios:
- the mysterious Cuil spam attacks will cease
- if they don’t, many other bloggers will blog about the spamming search engine.
Hey Alhan – rest assured that it is most certainly not us (Cuil) doing the spam. We are totally against these practices, and will be doing a blog post shortly to clear everything up.
A more likely reason for this spam is that linking to some legitimate domains makes it hard to automate a system that recognises some pattern in the formatting or origin of the spam and puts the linked domains in some sort of blacklist.
I’m not sure that cuil on it’s own is the most obvious choice for this, but as part of a strategy of using many 2nd tier popularity sites it makes some sense. Using only the most popularly linked sites (google, youtube, etc) makes it too easy to use whitelists, so the net needs to be cast a bit wider.