Is Cuil Killing Websites?
Don Reisinger
TechCrunch.com
Monday, September 1, 2008; 9:57 AM
An anonymous tipster wrote to us this morning to tell us that Cuil, the ill-fated"Google Killer," has unleashed its Twiceler indexing bot on websites across the globe and in the process, has brought many sites down.
"I don't know what spawned it, but when Cuil attempts to index a site, it does so by completely hammering it with traffic," the tipster wrote. "So much, that it completely brings the site down. We're 24 hours into this "index" of the site, and I've had to restrict traffic to the site down to 2 packets per second, while discarding the rest, or otherwise it makes the site unusable."
The Admin Zone forums are abuzz over Cuil's overzealous method for indexing. Countless posters on the site have said that their websites have been brought down because of the Twiceler robot and one user said it "leeched enormous amounts of bandwidth ¿ nearly 2GB this month until it was blocked. It visited nearly 70,000 times!"
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