Reviewing Fooky

Well after the furor that was caused by Ed Dunn calling Michael Arrington from TechCrunch a racist I thought I'd see what all the fuss was about. For the record, I've met Michael several times and I've never seen any indication that he's in anyway racist. Michael defends himself here.

After looking at Fooky I think that the reason that people may have been "snubbing" it is because they followed the rule if you don't have anything nice to say - Don't say it.

I've decided to break this rule.

Fundamentally I think that Fooky is a broken product. Here are just a few of the issues I ran into in my first 10 minutes of using the site.

1. I can't hit enter to submit my search.
2. Having a link called command aid is confusing. After clicking on it a series of pictures pops up. Even more confusing. You need to click on a picture for it to do something.
3. I shouldn't need to have a link for how to use this text box. The commands need to be self explanatory.
4. I need to type in a weird set of commands to get the results I want. For example I have to type - get stock quote for msft. On google I just need to type msft.
5. Things don't work on the site - if I type get weather for 94110 I get a message that there's not any data there. Don't put things up on your site that don't work. At least warn me that it's beta or that its not going to work.
6. Search results have no descriptions. After typing something in and clicking enter none of the sites I found had descriptions.

I think that Fooky at one point may have been an interesting idea but the big search engines have certainly not stood still.

Ed, maybe you were better off when people weren't reviewing Fooky?

Comments

[Rob Poitras]

I agree that fooky.com isn't that great of a search. Took me a while to even figure out what it was. Huge deal breaker is the enter key doesnt start the search like you said. When I am on my laptop I use almost all short cuts to navigate.

I agree with you about the search results looking bad.

Fooky still needs lots of work. He would have been better off staying low and working on his product instead of getting really really bad attention. The bigger bloggers like scrivs and avalonstar have already brought it up and if they bring it up, then it means tons of others are reading about it.

Not sure if you read scriv's post, but he was saying how 9rules hasnt got any big media attention. 9rules IMHO is the best content network on the web by a far lead. It just shows its not easy to get media coverage from traditional media when you are on the web.

[Chris Law]

I think Fooky would have been much better off if they had stayed under the radar and kept improving their service before launching. It just doesn't have enough there to make someone want to switch search engines.

As for 9rules. A very interesting site and idea. Next time they have an opening I'll have to sign and up and see if they find me worthy!

[Ed Dunn]

Personally I have not read any of the comments/postings on this topic and personally don't care. The only thing it appeared to do is prove my point that African-Americans are not taken seriously and contributions are always viewed in an condescending role. You personally never saw me anywhere on Dream and Hustle called Michael Arrington a racist yet you made up that conclusion yourself. In fact none of you even bothered to get my side of the story. I explain what he was doing and I had my reasons that you don't even know - just took it as you read it, huh?

I bet he didn't mention the real issue I had was about his comments in the Wall Street Journal two days before he played the race card on his blog about Fooky.com. He didn't have to mention this BS and the fact he did it and the way he did it only proves I'm right. And please spare me the he is not a racist crap, you don't know anybody and can't judge how anybody view a certain group of people. I know people that like certain black people but hate the so-called 'other kind' with a passion. Do you know how many 'you are not like the rest of them' comments I get from people in this tech industry?

Now in regards to Fooky.com, thank you for your feedback. To be honest, the kind of feedback all you guys gave me for a web service that been out for serveral months tells us that we are on the right track. At least I haven't heard of any scalability problems or outages from the search response time and that's good. Now regarding the other items everyone including you said, we all know those can be fixed and addressed and they are.

Overall, you are no different by clouding Fooky.com which is a diverse operation by focusing on the 'black guy' racist crap you heard somewhere else. But you guys played yourself - nothing but positive came out of this and you made yourselves look really stupid rehashing stuff you read somewhere. You said it exactly right - when it comes to African Americans there is simply nothing nice to say.

[Chris Law]

Ed - I have to say that you have utterly twisted what I wrote in your last paragraph. I don't care what color your skin is. I care what your product does and doesn't do. I promise to focus on the product side if you do.