Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
Speaker 1: tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello, everyone,
Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff. My name is Chris Poulette and
Speaker 1: I'm an editor at how stuff works dot Com. Sitting
Speaker 1: across from me, as he always does, is senior writer
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland, the Pink Lady's pledge to act cool, to
Speaker 1: look cool, and to be cool till death to us
Speaker 1: part think pink. Really, I expected that you were going
Speaker 1: to go with a completely different musical. Hey, you gave
Speaker 1: it away. Yeah, like that's a shock. Well it's it's
Speaker 1: because it had the word cool in it and we're
Speaker 1: gonna be talking about cool. I guess then West Side
Speaker 1: Story would have been too easy. Yeah, that would have
Speaker 1: been totally different cool. Yes, anyway, we are speaking of
Speaker 1: cool today, but we're talking about c U I L. Cool. Yes,
Speaker 1: the late but not quite lamented search engine. But I
Speaker 1: think it was mostly lamented while it was still around. Yeah,
Speaker 1: sadly it was. If you're not familiar with cool, it's
Speaker 1: it didn't live very long. Um. Google just celebrated its
Speaker 1: tenth anniversary. Not too long ago. But Cool was only
Speaker 1: around for two just over just over two years. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it was supposed to be, like many have been described,
Speaker 1: a Google killer, and unfortunately for them especially, it it wasn't. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's an interesting story, and we only have a
Speaker 1: few details about that story. A lot of it ends
Speaker 1: up still being behind closed doors. People weren't really you know,
Speaker 1: eager to talk about failures so much, I mean, understandably so.
Speaker 1: But the concept behind Cool was actually fairly sound. You know.
Speaker 1: It was a it was a really interesting take on
Speaker 1: the search engine model, right, and and to really get
Speaker 1: an idea of why this was at all a big
Speaker 1: deal And you may think, well, it can't be a
Speaker 1: big deal. I haven't heard about Cool for years. Um,
Speaker 1: the big deal was that when it was when it
Speaker 1: launched back in July of two thousand eight. Yes, the
Speaker 1: big news behind it was that it was being headed
Speaker 1: by a former Google employee. Yes, there are actually many
Speaker 1: people who were involved with Google who moved on to Cool, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there were. There were three co founders, and two of
Speaker 1: the co founders formerly worked with Google. There was Anna
Speaker 1: Patterson and she was someone who worked on the Terra
Speaker 1: Google indexing technology. Yes, And there was Russell Power who
Speaker 1: was part of Google's search indexing team, and he was
Speaker 1: another one of the co founders. And then the third
Speaker 1: co founder was Tom Costello, who was Anna Patterson's husband,
Speaker 1: um who's a Stanford employee who who studied and worked
Speaker 1: on web search technologies. Though he was not not a
Speaker 1: Google play I do believe he was also involved with
Speaker 1: IBMS web Fountain yes project, at least according to Danny
Speaker 1: Sullivan of Search engine Land YEP and the other the
Speaker 1: other members of the team when it launched, and again
Speaker 1: this was back in July of two eight. We're Louis Monnier,
Speaker 1: who was the founder of Alta Vista, Yes, which if
Speaker 1: in case you guys aren't aware, I mean we have
Speaker 1: some young listeners, right. Alta Vista was an enormous search
Speaker 1: engine pre Google. Yeah, there were a number of of
Speaker 1: I guess giants you could say. Right now, Google is
Speaker 1: such a big force in search engine world that it's
Speaker 1: kind of hard to think of it being different. But
Speaker 1: we had Alta Vista and lycos Um of course for
Speaker 1: a while. Um Hot bought web Crawler web crawler Yahoo
Speaker 1: of course, which was all done by hand at one point. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was all It was all edited by people. It
Speaker 1: was not automated, and that at that actually sort of
Speaker 1: plays into cools h realm in a minute. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it was it was a lot different before
Speaker 1: Google came around with the its innovative technology based solution. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Alta Vista was the dominant search engine among all the
Speaker 1: others we just listed before Google came around, and did
Speaker 1: not take Google too long to take that mental away
Speaker 1: from Alta Vista. So you might say that many had
Speaker 1: a an ax to grind Um. Actually he didn't stay
Speaker 1: with the company for very long though, because remember in July,
Speaker 1: at launched. Now, granted there had been work on cool
Speaker 1: for for a couple of years before it launched. It's
Speaker 1: just that no one had really heard about it outside
Speaker 1: of the immediate team of developers until it went public.
Speaker 1: But the by went public, I mean the website launched,
Speaker 1: it was not it was not a public company, right,
Speaker 1: so it's a private company. Um. Well, Monier he he
Speaker 1: left the company in September of two thousand eight, so
Speaker 1: it'd only been live for a couple of months. And uh.
Speaker 1: The crunch Base reported that the reason for leaving was
Speaker 1: due to differences air Quotes with the CEO UH. Then
Speaker 1: the other members, the other executive members of Cool included
Speaker 1: Vince Slido, who was originally the VP of corporate Communications
Speaker 1: with Cool. He left actually in August of two thousand eight,
Speaker 1: so the month after it went live he left. He
Speaker 1: left to join PayPal. Then later on he left PayPal
Speaker 1: to join Yelp. Then you had UH, Peter Szmanski who
Speaker 1: was a former attorney he actually joined as the VP
Speaker 1: of Corporate Development and general counsel. And Bruce baum Guard
Speaker 1: who was formerly of the Internet Archive IBM and soft Ticks.
Speaker 1: He was the CEO of that for a while. Um
Speaker 1: he became the head of operations. So all these guys
Speaker 1: had a history in tech companies to extent before joining
Speaker 1: with Cool. And it was really a big risk in
Speaker 1: a way, but was also just made a lot of
Speaker 1: news because suddenly you had these former Google employees and
Speaker 1: Google competitors all joining forces to create a search engine
Speaker 1: that they claimed, out of the gate was superior to Google.
Speaker 1: And UH, this got a lot of attention, I mean
Speaker 1: clearly in the tech industry and journalism. All the journalists
Speaker 1: immediately went to cool dot com to check it out
Speaker 1: and find out what what was the big deal? You know,
Speaker 1: wasn't really better than Google? And they found out on
Speaker 1: that first day that it had crashed, yes, multiple times.
Speaker 1: Well it it in defense of Cool in this particular instance. Uh,
Speaker 1: there had been enough hype generated during its pre launch
Speaker 1: phase that apparently it attracted quite a bit of traffic
Speaker 1: um and that could be that could be hard for
Speaker 1: a new company when it first goes live with something
Speaker 1: like that, simply because that there, you know, they may
Speaker 1: not be prepared to handle that kind of traffic. But
Speaker 1: as it turns out, that was sort of an ill
Speaker 1: omen Yeah, actually that was here's the thing, Okay, that
Speaker 1: here's how I see it. All right, So the launch
Speaker 1: date was July. By July twenty nine, there were already
Speaker 1: tons of reviews about Cool. But but but the reason
Speaker 1: why I bring up the crash is because you have
Speaker 1: a legitimate point, I mean a very legitimate point in
Speaker 1: that new companies often cannot handle a mass of traffic
Speaker 1: all at once. They may have been able to que
Speaker 1: a with a fraction of that number, but it's hard
Speaker 1: to que a big rushes in traffic because you have
Speaker 1: to you know, create all this, You have to create
Speaker 1: the traffic to test it, right, So you really don't
Speaker 1: know how your system is gonna hold up until it's
Speaker 1: hit by that demand. However, one of the claims they
Speaker 1: that the founders made was that Cool indexed three times
Speaker 1: as many web pages as Google. Goal right, The claim
Speaker 1: was that Google had indexed around forty billion, that's billion
Speaker 1: with a B web pages, and that Cool had indexed
Speaker 1: one twenty billion. Now, Google later on came out and said, hey, guys,
Speaker 1: come on, we've scanned over two trillion pages. We just
Speaker 1: index the ones that are important, that are that actually
Speaker 1: have something of value on them. So, yeah, you can
Speaker 1: go ahead and say you've indexed a hundred billion, but
Speaker 1: we've indexed the forty billion pages that actually have stuff
Speaker 1: on them worth seeing. You've got a lot of garbage
Speaker 1: in there. That was essentially the message kind of I
Speaker 1: delivered in a much more overt way than Google did.
Speaker 1: That was that was me being snarky. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: had read reviews that suggested that that some of the
Speaker 1: others had had posed the question according to whom I'm
Speaker 1: paraphrasing here, you know, how do you know how many
Speaker 1: pages the competition is indexed? Um, and you know it's
Speaker 1: hard to say. I mean even even cool hedged its
Speaker 1: own and said it had run across a hundred and
Speaker 1: eighty six billion pages. But you know, due to spam
Speaker 1: and duplicate content, some of those have been excluded from
Speaker 1: those that was actually carrying UM that was that was
Speaker 1: one of the things that was a differentiating factor. At
Speaker 1: least one of the things that Cool was using as
Speaker 1: a differentiating factor was the number of pages index. Another
Speaker 1: is the way it was was ranking content. And we've
Speaker 1: talked several times about it, and Jonathan's written an excellent
Speaker 1: article about the Google algorithm on the website, which I
Speaker 1: would encourage you to go look at because it's really
Speaker 1: really awesome. It's called why is the Google Algorithm So Important?
Speaker 1: And before we talk about how Cool does it, it
Speaker 1: probably would behoove us to say, talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about what Google does to to rank web search results.
Speaker 1: I agree, I feel like it's um you can't really
Speaker 1: compare one service to the leader saying it's a Google
Speaker 1: killer with out knowing how Google is doing that. So
Speaker 1: Google judges relevance on search results based upon how popular
Speaker 1: a particular web page is. So the more popular web pages,
Speaker 1: the more relevant Google assumes that search result is to
Speaker 1: whatever query you use. So let's let's take an example.
Speaker 1: Let's say that there's let's let's pick um dungeons and dragons. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you've done a web search on dungeons and dragons.
Speaker 1: And what Google will do is it will look at
Speaker 1: its index of websites and look for the pages that
Speaker 1: have that are the most popular. And the way Google
Speaker 1: measures popularity is by chiefly the number of links other
Speaker 1: pages have to that web page, right, And in addition
Speaker 1: to that, it looks at the quality of the content
Speaker 1: whether these the pages linking to it are considered reputable
Speaker 1: sources as well. Right. So if if you have a
Speaker 1: lot of high ranking pages linking to you, you in
Speaker 1: turn will be very high ranking. Now that's one of
Speaker 1: the interesting things about Google is that the algorithm takes
Speaker 1: a lot of different things into account. It takes the
Speaker 1: quality of the pages that are linking to you into account.
Speaker 1: So let's say that you write a blog post and
Speaker 1: CNN links to your blog post. That's gonna boost your
Speaker 1: popularity quite a bit. And or but let's say you've
Speaker 1: written another blog post and a hundred smaller blogs have
Speaker 1: linked to you. That might not boost you as much
Speaker 1: as that one CNN linked did for the other blog post.
Speaker 1: So yeah, there's a lot of different fiddling around with
Speaker 1: the algorithm, and no one has it besides Google. That is,
Speaker 1: no one has it perfectly figured out, mostly because Google
Speaker 1: changes it up pretty frequently to make sure that you
Speaker 1: get at what they considered the most relevant results to
Speaker 1: your query. Now, Cool did it a totally different way.
Speaker 1: They said that this is the wrong way. You're basing
Speaker 1: it on popularity. Popularity and UH and being correct are
Speaker 1: two different things. Yes, that just because something is popped
Speaker 1: uler doesn't mean it's right. I think there was The
Speaker 1: example I read was something along the lines of and
Speaker 1: this was a journalist who was writing this who said, well,
Speaker 1: I mean it is true that the most popular restaurants
Speaker 1: are not necessarily the best restaurants. So in that sense,
Speaker 1: you don't want necessarily what's popular, you want what's most relevant.
Speaker 1: So cool The claim was that cool search engine results
Speaker 1: were contextually based. They could they were looking for relevance
Speaker 1: based on context. So you would put in your Dungeons
Speaker 1: and Dragons query. It wouldn't look for the pages that
Speaker 1: had the most links to them. It would look for
Speaker 1: the pages that seemed to be about dungeons and dragons
Speaker 1: the most like that was the primary, uh focus of
Speaker 1: that web page and those that's how it would deliver
Speaker 1: your results. Yeah. I believe the article you mentioned with
Speaker 1: the restaurant was Anita Hamilton's review in Time magazine. Yes,
Speaker 1: in July two thou I ran across that as well.
Speaker 1: That's a good, good review. Yeah it starts off with
Speaker 1: rest easy goog goal. Yeah, that pretty much. But I'll
Speaker 1: go ahead and say this too, because um, really Cool
Speaker 1: got lambasted by by journalists, I mean even journalists who
Speaker 1: are not typically critics. I feel a sense of sympathy
Speaker 1: towards the executives at Cool because I felt like they
Speaker 1: really got judged harshly right out of the gate, and
Speaker 1: then they had no chance to recover. Um. And part
Speaker 1: of that might be releasing a little too early, releasing
Speaker 1: something that is, you know, one way or another half baked.
Speaker 1: But in some cases I really felt like it almost
Speaker 1: became a one upsmanship game among journalists to see who
Speaker 1: could write the most snarky critical account of Cool and
Speaker 1: what it could do. A lot of that also comes
Speaker 1: from the fact that you know, there was a lot
Speaker 1: of boasting on Cool's part, So in a way, it
Speaker 1: was kind of a come up and thing. You know,
Speaker 1: they claim all these things, but this is what the
Speaker 1: actual results are, as both parties are to blame. But
Speaker 1: I just wanted to puint that I think I even
Speaker 1: wrote a blog post. I didn't even look this up,
Speaker 1: but I'm pretty sure I wrote a blog post on
Speaker 1: Cool when it came out. And I don't remember if
Speaker 1: I was snarky or not knowing me probably a little,
Speaker 1: but I don't think it was quite as as harsh
Speaker 1: as some of the journalists were. Yeah, one of the
Speaker 1: things that they also got hammered on was the fact
Speaker 1: that they had the Cool executives had said, well, you know,
Speaker 1: we're ranking things differently than Google does. We're not necessarily
Speaker 1: using popularity as one of our criteria. But as Danny
Speaker 1: Danny Sullivan said, well, it's not all about the content there.
Speaker 1: They are factoring in popularity. Um. He actually, in his article,
Speaker 1: which is quite lengthy and in depth, Um went into
Speaker 1: how he'd be put in a search for Harry Potter
Speaker 1: and and uh used the name of his house. If
Speaker 1: you're not familiar with Harry Potter, it's a UM it's said,
Speaker 1: in a school in which there are four different houses
Speaker 1: and the Potter yes, I know, well, there are some
Speaker 1: people who haven't read it the movies or seen the movies.
Speaker 1: And he put in the name of Harry Potter in
Speaker 1: the house he was in in his school, and it
Speaker 1: brought up the name of the most recent movie. That house,
Speaker 1: by the way, was Griffin Door. Yes, and so he said, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the first thing that came up on Cool
Speaker 1: was the latest movie. And he said, this shows that
Speaker 1: they are using that popularity is factoring into the Cool
Speaker 1: search algorithm, despite the fact that they have claimed that
Speaker 1: it doesn't. They also said that Cool was faster, although
Speaker 1: whether they meant that Cool was faster at indexing new
Speaker 1: pages than Google was, or that Cool was actually faster
Speaker 1: at generating search engine results after a query that kind
Speaker 1: of that was one of those things that was always confusing.
Speaker 1: Um I would imagine they meant indexing, because really, at
Speaker 1: this point, the weight that you you have to see
Speaker 1: search engine results is minuscule. It's you know, you can
Speaker 1: usually you can't even count to one, much less two
Speaker 1: before you get them unless you've got a really slow connection.
Speaker 1: Um So I would imagine they meant that they were
Speaker 1: faster at indexing new pages. Now, of course, Google has
Speaker 1: really ramped up on that itself recently. Uh yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Google's Google has entire departments developed just to increase the
Speaker 1: speed of indexing new content so that it shows up
Speaker 1: in Google search results. The cool thing I thought. The
Speaker 1: interesting thing I thought about Cool's results pages were that
Speaker 1: they it would divide up your search into categories. You
Speaker 1: had tabs across the top of your search results, so
Speaker 1: of course you had three columns of results to start with.
Speaker 1: And that's sort of confused some people because they were sorry,
Speaker 1: um no, because people were expecting traditional search results pages,
Speaker 1: which are still pretty much the same. You have, you know,
Speaker 1: the top results at the top of the page, and
Speaker 1: you scroll down and there are other things there maybe,
Speaker 1: um you know, Google and Being and a lot of
Speaker 1: the others have incorporated news and blogs and things like that,
Speaker 1: but they're usually grouped somewhere in the middle. Um. But
Speaker 1: but cool search engine results pages or serups um would
Speaker 1: bring up three columns information and if you are in
Speaker 1: a hurry and looking for the number one link, you're going, okay,
Speaker 1: so I guess it's the top left. Is that the
Speaker 1: one in the middle you know which one is it,
Speaker 1: which is the top one? And you couldn't break out
Speaker 1: search results by things like news and blogs and stuff
Speaker 1: on Cool. But what you could do is it would
Speaker 1: have tabs at the top of your page that would
Speaker 1: have categories that your search query would fall into. Let's
Speaker 1: say again, let's say you did dudgeons and dragons. Your
Speaker 1: your categories might be something like dungeons and dragons, game,
Speaker 1: dungeons and dragons, movie, dungeons and dragons, gear, that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. And then by clicking on a tab, you
Speaker 1: would bring up a new set of search results that
Speaker 1: are specifically towards that category, and you would get new
Speaker 1: tabs that would go into subcategories, so you can start
Speaker 1: digging deeper and deeper into your subject, getting more and
Speaker 1: more precise. But it meant that you had to click
Speaker 1: to get to those deeper, more precise results. I think
Speaker 1: that may, over everything else, may have been Cool's downfall
Speaker 1: because it required the user to put in more effort
Speaker 1: to find specific results pertaining to his or her query.
Speaker 1: And I can tell you from the user experienced perspective,
Speaker 1: that is a killer. Yeah. Now with Google, the same
Speaker 1: thing sort of holds true. You may not see what
Speaker 1: you were looking for when you put in your first
Speaker 1: search result, and then you go back in and you're like, well,
Speaker 1: maybe I'll add in another term to kind of narrow
Speaker 1: it down a little more. So you're essentially doing the
Speaker 1: same thing with Google. It's just doing it in a
Speaker 1: different way. You don't have to navigate through tabs and
Speaker 1: click through. You're actually having to type a new thing.
Speaker 1: You could even argue that it's actually more work intensive
Speaker 1: to do it the way Google does, But I think
Speaker 1: it's more natural to the average user than navigating through
Speaker 1: tabs and trying to to narrow your search down that way.
Speaker 1: And and part of the problem is that people didn't
Speaker 1: take the time to learn Cool's method of organizing information
Speaker 1: to really use it to its its most, to its
Speaker 1: full potential. Another part of that problem is that for
Speaker 1: several really well known terms, Cool just didn't seem to
Speaker 1: bring back good results period. Now, maybe if you had
Speaker 1: dug down you would start to find them, but on
Speaker 1: that first initial page of results, where you don't expect
Speaker 1: to have to dig any further, you should be able
Speaker 1: to see it right there. People were reporting that they
Speaker 1: were searching for terms often names, but not always just names,
Speaker 1: and not getting relevant search results at all. I've heard
Speaker 1: the same complaint levied against Wolf from Alpha because people
Speaker 1: think it's a search engine when it's really not designed
Speaker 1: to do that. But it bears such a resemblance to
Speaker 1: a search engine that people plug in search terms and
Speaker 1: expect to get results. They don't get it. Clearly they
Speaker 1: didn't listen to our podcast episode Wolf from Alpha. Alpha
Speaker 1: is not a search engine, yes, um, and I still
Speaker 1: highly recommend that that site, but it's not something that
Speaker 1: you plug Harry Potter in and get results. Um well,
Speaker 1: I think there probably is some kind of result, but
Speaker 1: you're not. It's more of a scientific site. I won't
Speaker 1: be satisfied until Wolf from Alpha can write a new
Speaker 1: Harry Potter novel just by typing in Wolf. You type
Speaker 1: in Harry Potter eight and it generates a novel for you.
Speaker 1: Um well, as it turns out, h J k Rolling
Speaker 1: maybe doing that on her own. However, Cool was supposed
Speaker 1: to be a search engine and it you know, there's
Speaker 1: really there really was no good answer from Cool uh
Speaker 1: for them to say, well, we can't explain why this
Speaker 1: isn't in there. Um, But there was one area at
Speaker 1: which Cool really excelled, and everybody seems to agree that
Speaker 1: it was a really positive step. I'm assuming it's privacy, Yes, privacy.
Speaker 1: They they they were very good about not logging um,
Speaker 1: identifiable information about about the people who use the site.
Speaker 1: No I P information that's Internet protocol um, no cookies,
Speaker 1: those kinds of things were not uh, we're not part
Speaker 1: of it. And and that was one area that just
Speaker 1: about everybody who reviewed it, all the research I did,
Speaker 1: everybody spoke at least a little bit about the privacy
Speaker 1: issue and how they felt the Cool was doing that
Speaker 1: part of it absolutely right. It almost became a backhanded thing, though,
Speaker 1: would be like, you know, I don't get any decent
Speaker 1: search results, but at least they're not tracking me. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: in a way, I think that may have actually hurt
Speaker 1: cool as well. And the reason why I say that
Speaker 1: is Google's not tracking you in order to violate your privacy.
Speaker 1: Google's not really Google really. Google has no specific interest
Speaker 1: in you or what you do, apart from the fact
Speaker 1: that you are potentially going to be valuable to some advertiser, Right, Google,
Speaker 1: Google will, I don't know what they're thinking. I'm thinking,
Speaker 1: all right, this is this is sell me to use
Speaker 1: critical thinking, Johnathan, this is my arm chair. This is
Speaker 1: my armchair analytical mode here. So Google tracks information in
Speaker 1: parts so that it can sell advertising space to advertisers.
Speaker 1: That is true. That that much I agree with. So
Speaker 1: that means that that information has an actual value. And
Speaker 1: you've heard us talk about this about Facebook and other
Speaker 1: companies as well. So Google wants to have this information
Speaker 1: and again not necessarily tying it specifically to you, but
Speaker 1: to a user that you happen to be. Sounds kind
Speaker 1: of weird, but in a way they're they're not. They're
Speaker 1: not concerned about the individual. They're just they know that
Speaker 1: someone is interested in blah blah blah. So they can
Speaker 1: sell that information to an advertiser. Uh, that blah blah
Speaker 1: blah happens to be your interest neither here nor there.
Speaker 1: You know it's interested in blah blah blah. It's written
Speaker 1: all over your face. So anyway, the idea here is
Speaker 1: that Google could sell this information advertisers. Well, Cool did
Speaker 1: not collect this information, which meant it was more it
Speaker 1: would be more difficult for Cool to create a revenue
Speaker 1: model based on advertising. Now that's not to say that
Speaker 1: Cool wouldn't base wouldn't create a revenue model based on
Speaker 1: some other method, but at least the traditional search engine
Speaker 1: method is to to make money through ads. So it
Speaker 1: would have been harder to do that without having the
Speaker 1: the data to fall back on and say, hey, look,
Speaker 1: this is what our user base is like, this is
Speaker 1: the kind of stuff they're interested in, this is the
Speaker 1: sort of demographics they fall in. With other information, you
Speaker 1: can't really go to advertising companies and and get the
Speaker 1: same amount of money that say Google could, Right, So
Speaker 1: that brings us kind of tow Cool's revenue, which was
Speaker 1: essentially investments, private investments. They raised around thirty three million
Speaker 1: before it launched in two thousand and eight, and I
Speaker 1: could find no record of subsequent rounds of funding. Right.
Speaker 1: They didn't try another project though, called c PDA. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in a way, CPDA was almost a relaunch. It was
Speaker 1: some people saw it that way. It actually said that yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: In fact, the final tweet from Cool's Twitter account, and
Speaker 1: I apologize to everyone out there who hates using tweet
Speaker 1: as a noun, but the for Twitter anyway for for
Speaker 1: the final one said it was on April eighth, two
Speaker 1: announcing the launch of CPDA, the automated encyclopedia then had
Speaker 1: a link to it. So if you went to cool
Speaker 1: dot com after on April eighth or afterward up until
Speaker 1: it was shut down, we'll get to that in a
Speaker 1: little bit. You went to CPDA and it was a
Speaker 1: it was a really innovative, bizarre product. Do you want
Speaker 1: to talk about what CPDA did a little bit. Um, Well,
Speaker 1: I honestly had never used it myself, and I had
Speaker 1: been unaware. I had forgotten about cool by the time
Speaker 1: it was debuted. It was it was supposed to be.
Speaker 1: I think it was sort of a modification of its
Speaker 1: search engine UH product in the first place. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: it was supposed to basically carve up content and reassemble
Speaker 1: it in one place. Yeah, the quote I read specifically
Speaker 1: said it will find everything on the web about your topic,
Speaker 1: remove all the duplication, and put the information on one page. Yes,
Speaker 1: So the idea here is that it was going to
Speaker 1: create in real time a UH an encyclopedia entry about
Speaker 1: whatever the subject was in your query. Right, So if
Speaker 1: you were to write an UH Pearl Harbor bombing, it
Speaker 1: would as symbol an encyclopedia page about the Pearl the
Speaker 1: bombing of Pearl harbor Um based upon the information that
Speaker 1: was out there on the web already, it would it
Speaker 1: would pull that together in some way and put it
Speaker 1: together in what presumably was an understandable, uh narrative. And
Speaker 1: some people said even then that it was still tricky,
Speaker 1: like you could put in certain terms and the stuff
Speaker 1: you got was misleading. Sometimes it was outright wrong, which
Speaker 1: Costello again, one of the co founders, defended, saying that
Speaker 1: you know, it takes time to get this right, and uh,
Speaker 1: those errors were intentional because the intentional in the sense
Speaker 1: that cpdo was grabbing information from the very from all
Speaker 1: across the web, including the dredges. So yeah, it was
Speaker 1: an interesting idea that you could you could use the
Speaker 1: search engine as a way of generating a full page
Speaker 1: of information about whatever the topic was, and so instead
Speaker 1: of going to links to read about this stuff, you
Speaker 1: would have all the information presented to you right then
Speaker 1: and there. Now. Granted, that means that that information is
Speaker 1: difficult to verify because you don't necessarily follow it back
Speaker 1: to the source, and it could be that one paragraph
Speaker 1: contradicts the next one. That's true. Um. The article I
Speaker 1: read in on giga Home about it quoted one user
Speaker 1: as sentence after sentence of automated nonsense was the quote
Speaker 1: like most of my articles except that one on the
Speaker 1: Google algorithm, that one was good. I didn't I didn't
Speaker 1: use cool for that one. Yeah, But as it turns out, um,
Speaker 1: it just really wasn't enough. And uh, for a couple
Speaker 1: of days before the rumors before that, the site went dark,
Speaker 1: and it really went dark. There is no if you
Speaker 1: go to cool dot com now, there is nothing there
Speaker 1: to say, thank you very much, We're sorry we had
Speaker 1: to shut down. There was nothing. It went dark in
Speaker 1: a in a big serious way. In September of this year.
Speaker 1: September was the last day for Cool. Yeah, but it
Speaker 1: was a Friday. Well, there were rumors a few days
Speaker 1: before that they may be seeking acquisition by somebody else
Speaker 1: and that they may shut down if they couldn't get acquisition.
Speaker 1: And apparently that's what happened. Yeah. Errington. Michael Arrington of
Speaker 1: of tech Crunch had reported on that saying that there
Speaker 1: were some stories about potential companies looking to acquire Cool.
Speaker 1: And I mean they were all like the regular usual suspects, right,
Speaker 1: like Google, Microsoft, I think even Apple at one point
Speaker 1: was a potential one being mentioned, although that would have
Speaker 1: shocked me as well. I think that was just thrown
Speaker 1: in there because it was another big name. You know,
Speaker 1: well the Apple Disney rumors have been swirling for years too,
Speaker 1: So well you've got a guy who's sitting on the
Speaker 1: board of well, never mind people before that. So at
Speaker 1: any rate, so you've got the Yeah. The apparently the
Speaker 1: story was that on September, which was a Friday, the
Speaker 1: cool employees c U I L which you know what,
Speaker 1: we never said what that meant, did We didn't. It's
Speaker 1: Gaelic for wisdom or knowledge. Anyway, the employees came in
Speaker 1: and then they were told go home, you know that
Speaker 1: we're shutting down, and so everyone had to clear out
Speaker 1: their desks and leave, and there was actually there's still
Speaker 1: some conjecture over whether or not they got paid for
Speaker 1: the last few weeks of work. The news reports I read,
Speaker 1: the most recent ones seemed to suggest they did not
Speaker 1: get paid. That the money. It looks like the money
Speaker 1: just ran out, which doesn't surprise me because as far
Speaker 1: as I know, there was no revenue model. And again,
Speaker 1: after the initial thirty three million in capital, I don't
Speaker 1: see any other investments or at least none that are
Speaker 1: major investments. Can you get to remember these are expensive companies.
Speaker 1: They're running lots and lots of servers which eat up
Speaker 1: a lot of power and plus rental space for the
Speaker 1: physical space the servers to then, so you know, those
Speaker 1: costs do start to skyrocket, especially as you ramp up anyway,
Speaker 1: So that same day they shut down the servers and
Speaker 1: it wasn't until September twenty, which was the Monday, that
Speaker 1: people started to really write about that, probably because again
Speaker 1: it happened on a Friday, that Saturday and Sunday. It's
Speaker 1: the best time for you shut stuff down because you're
Speaker 1: going to buy yourself a couple of days grace period
Speaker 1: before all the snark starts up again. And that's exactly
Speaker 1: what happened. Everyone seemed to jump on the Cool is
Speaker 1: Dead bandwagon, so uh, they had to endure a lot
Speaker 1: of snark when they debuted and even more when they
Speaker 1: went dark. Yeah, I don't think critics ever really let
Speaker 1: up for the two years that Cool was out there,
Speaker 1: and I never really caught on um. They certainly never
Speaker 1: changed their opinion. But I think also most of them
Speaker 1: just they took the opportunity to a size it, uh,
Speaker 1: and then forgot about it. I know, I did, you
Speaker 1: know I I'm no saint, you know. I. When I
Speaker 1: first used Cool, I thought, well, this is an interesting idea,
Speaker 1: but it just doesn't seem to be working for me.
Speaker 1: So I'm going to go back to Google, and I
Speaker 1: never I never looked back. I never bothered to go
Speaker 1: back to Cool and see if they had improved their
Speaker 1: search results in any way so that it made it
Speaker 1: more navigable or more relevant, or that if the tabs
Speaker 1: thing really worked much better. I mean, it may have,
Speaker 1: but I just kind of forgot about it, you know,
Speaker 1: it just it wasn't It wasn't compelling enough when it
Speaker 1: debuted for me to stick with it, And as a result,
Speaker 1: when it went away, I was not surprised. Well, maybe
Speaker 1: they're starting again for scratch. We'll find out, I'm sure eventually.
Speaker 1: And there's still some rumors that perhaps it'll come back
Speaker 1: in some kind of form, that either a company will
Speaker 1: eventually pay for the patents and the I p that
Speaker 1: Cool had the intellectual property. Yeah, exactly, intellectual property. Thanks um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's still some conjecture that we may see it return
Speaker 1: in some form. It may not be called Cool anymore.
Speaker 1: In fact, I would be surprised if it were called cool,
Speaker 1: because I think that that name has a stigma attached
Speaker 1: to it at this point. But we'll have to wait
Speaker 1: and see. I'm sure someone somewhere will buy that technology
Speaker 1: just to if nothing else, just to keep it. Like
Speaker 1: if I were Google, I'd be like, maybe we should
Speaker 1: buy that just to make sure no one else gets
Speaker 1: hold of it. We might not do anything with it,
Speaker 1: but this way no one else will either. That kind
Speaker 1: of thing. Um, I wouldn't be I wouldn't be shocked
Speaker 1: to see that, not that I know anything, which I
Speaker 1: think has become clear in the duration of this podcast.
Speaker 1: So do you have anything else to add before we
Speaker 1: all right, let's close up shop. If any of you
Speaker 1: guys have any questions or comments, If you have any
Speaker 1: other topics you'd like us to tackle, or you've got
Speaker 1: stories of your own about cool that you would like
Speaker 1: to share, you can share those with us on Facebook
Speaker 1: for Twitter. Our handle at both of those is tech
Speaker 1: Stuff h s W or you can shoot us an
Speaker 1: email if you like that addresses tech stuff at how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com and Chris and I will taught
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