I forgot to blog about it but in case you didn’t notice we started the official beta testing period last week and we even had a press release distributed through PRWeb.
Thanks to the press release we had about 400 extra visitors on last Thursday and Friday, most spending more than the average number of click on site.
The number if visitors isn’t exactly earth shattering but nevertheless it was great to have you all here and I hope many of you will be back for more searches.
The Beta testing period is planned to run all year and end in a public launch in January 2011 with the target of having over a million relevant pages indexed by then.
I also want to take the opportunity to apologize if you have stumbled upon some less than relevant results. We had a bit of a Cuil experience when in anticipation of a stampade of visitors from the press release we added a new cache database to speed up searches.
Yes the searches are now about 30 times faster with most searches ready in less than half a second.
The downside is it will take a whole month before the cache is fully populated with data and in the meantime the search results are based only on a subset of the whole index. For some search terms this means junk and garbage from the bottom of the barrel will show up.
Please enjoy the new super quick search results and check out the ping tool in the webmaster tools section.