Barely more than a month after the launch of "Google Killer" Cuil, site owners are saying that its Twiceler indexing bot is causing mayhem on their sites with its overzealous indexing. One user even complained that the Twiceler robot visited "nearly 70,000 times" and in the process leeched off "nearly 2GB" of traffic prior to it being blocked. Others note that Cuil appears to repeatedly hit a site with pseudo-random URLs in attempts to find pages that are not linked directly to it. Cuil's Operational Engineer noted in defense of the search engine that Twiceler is an experimental crawler and it is important that robots.txt is obeyed. On a more sinister note, he also claimed that a number of crawlers appear to be masquerading as Twiceler. To be sure, site owners can consult the company's IP address page [1] to verify that it really is Cuil.
To find out more about the Cuil search engine:
- check out this TechCrunch article [2]
Links:
[1] http://www.cuil.com/info/webmaster_info/
[2] http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/01/is-cuil-killing-websites/