The “fern bar and random crap on walls” concept was dealt a blow today, as corporate-owned Bennigans shut its doors, when parent S&A Restaurant Group filed Chapter 7. Bennigans has been struggling in the face of stiff competition from the T.G.I. Friday’s® juggernaut, who for years has been been making new discoveries in “flair” research– and according to their Forty Three Years of Fun FAQ, is credited with:
- Popularizing the term Happy Hour with the young singles set in the 1960’s.
- Inventing the Long Island Iced Tea and Loaded Potato Skins.
- Popularizing frozen and ice cream drinks.
- Pioneering non-alcoholic Smoothies and Flings in honor of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
Along with its flagship, Metromedia is shuttering Steak & Ale, Ponderosa Steakhouse and Bonanza Steakhouse locations. (Could this be an end to 60s TV Western-themed meat joints?) [Note: these are apparently franchised through a different division of Metromedia.)
Apparently orphaned franchisees are said not to be affected by the bankruptcy– although how useful is it to hold a franchise whose restaurants are apparently abandoned by employees?
Posted in Current Affairs |
A new search engine launched today aims to play David to Google’s Goliath… but shows up without a slingshot. Cuil.com (supposedly pronounced “cool” for a Gaelic word for “knowledge” but which others contend is derived from Irish hero Fionn mac Cumhaill) pumped out some major PR this weekend, getting impressive media coverage on Monday which lead to an apparent flood of curious visitors– who just as quickly dried up.
In my view Cuil has three major strikes against it from the start: a terrible name, a disastrous launch and a clearly outdated indexing model.
First off, using a cutesy homophone with non-standard spelling means potential users will have difficulty finding the site or remembering it, right off the bat. Some commentators have even noticed that a slight typo turns it into the the Spanish and Italian slang for a certain body part — the domains for which point to porn sites. A far better name would have been “cull.com” — which, although it may still be similar to a particular body part at least means something relevant to search engines.
Server issues at launch were likewise Cuil’s own making. Had its ex-Google engineers rolled the site out in stages (ala the various ‘beta’ Google products), to meet potential demand, it would have garnered a better reaction. Instead, due to so much media attention on its first day, potential users are getting “no results because of high load.” That doesn’t make me particularly enthused to go back. If they can’t manage the server requirements or forecast the load of casual bleeding-edge users checking out the site on a first day, how can they plan for the constant mainstream usage?
The strike-out is Cuil’s falsely claimed “world’s biggest search engine” — a boast so blatantly inaccurate, many reviewers are already taking the site to task for its obvious indexing shortcomings. Cuil’s info page lays it on thick: “Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.” Its goal is nothing less than “solving the two great problems of search” indexing the entire Internet and making pages relevant to users. In my own search tests, it fails miserably on both accounts: many of the sites I pulled up a limited selection of pages, usually outdated– some from months ago– in seemingly random order of usefulness. Amusingly, a search for “cuil” fails to pull up their own site!
In short, Cuil is clue-less.
See:
Posted in Online culture |
Somehow, I managed to get completely distracted for nearly the last year… and didn’t post any blog-like updates. Probably, because I’ve been working…for, um, a nonprofit.
Not that said work has been occupying all my time. In fact, I have plenty to allow for other projects. But, since what I do revolves around computers, spending even more inordinate amounts at home, staring at a screen became, well, less fun. I even cut back on my emailing and other online activities (e.g. Wikipedia-a-holic no more!)
I did, however, revamp another site six months ago, which is what’s been vying for my Web attentions.
Posted in Self-reference |