Slashdot Mirror
New Search Engine Cuil Takes Aim At Google
theodp writes "CNET reports that Cuil (pronounced 'Cool'), a startup founded by the husband-and-wife team of Xift creator Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson, is launching a new search engine today that claims to index three times as many Web pages as Google." Running a few searches left me underwhelmed with the content of the results (hitting the next-page button on a search with a listed 62,200,000 results — for "seattle" — got me the unexpected error message "We didn't find any results for 'seattle.'"), but pleased with the actual layout of the results when it worked, so I hope the kinks are worked out. Update 7/28 18:30 GMT by SM: corrected Tom Costello's accreditation, he wasn't a professor at Stanford as the linked story suggests, just did some research there as a grad student. Thanks to the Stanford CS department for pointing this out.
Well it sure looks nice, puting pictures along with the results is a cool touch. It's a pity that the usefulness of the returned links is not on par with google.
sheep.horse - does not contain information on sheep or horses.
A few observations:
* "Cuil" is a really dumb name. "Google" is a dumb name too, but at least its pronounciation is obvious to anyone reading the name. Can't say the same for "Cuil".
* It's unlikely that this new search engine even approaches Google in its comprehensiveness, or ever will
* Cuil has some weird bugs. I searched for my name, found a link to a Gallery page I have about my son's birth earlier this year, and they have a little thumbnail icon next to the search result for that. But it's a random map of the United States completely unrelated to the page it links to. Bizarre.
* Cuil's results come back more slowly than Google's (but this is from New Zealand, maybe it's faster from the USA), and their page re-renders in odd ways (at least on my oldish Firefox install) as results come in.
* Cuil seems to give the most favor to any page that has the word "is" after the search term. Invariably, the first result for almost any single word search will be whatever page starts out with "[Search Term] is ...".
* Google is really bad for Silicon Valley. So many good software developers in SV got sucked in by Google. Too much of the top talent in the area is now working for Google, doing almost completely useless stuff, and it's not healthy for the industry. Is there any software company in the bay area that hasn't had at least a couple of engineers sucked away by Google? Are algorithms for pushing targeted ads and useless web applications that never get out of beta really worth depleting the industry of so many of its best? I predict that when Google comes crashing down (and it will - anyone who has seen the ridiculous excess of the Google campus cannot help but realize this), the net result will have been to set back innovation in the software industry a great deal, by tying up so many people who would otherwise have done something useful.
* For the above reason, I wish Cuil all the success possible, because I'd love to see some actual competition in the search engine world.
Anyway that's how I see it.
what I miss most is any sort of 'advanced' search, like the restriction on TLDs etc.
Idha khatabahum lijahiluna qalu salaman
Isn't the column-based layout much more inefficient than a linear one, especially when skimming through many pages of links?
Good luck with that? I can.
And I typically got relevant results with little spam, but that may depend on what you are searching for.
The number of search results does not mean anything, relevance is what is important - if what I want is not in the first 5 pages of search results I assume it doesn't exist (and I expect to find what I want on the first page 95% of the time).
Is it me, or does page count seem like a poor metric to compare search engines by? Somehow I don't think Google is failing to notice 2 trillion pages, so either the numbers are off or Cuil is somehow spidering a lot of redundant pages. In either case I would find it hard to believe that there would be something on Cuil that's not on Google unless it's brand-new or spam.
While its clearly in its early days i do think it looks promising. If Cuil can eliminate the problems of rampant search "optimizing", unrelated paid for adwords and make it easier for casual users to klick their way towards what they search for i think they can take a chunk out of the search engine userbase.
HTTP/1.1 400
seems to be fixed.
I also tried Tiananmen and was returned a blank face (I'm in China). This is many Chinese people's first benchmark at a new search engine. For me, the result is expected, since the Great Firewall is a hybrid of generic and Google/Yahoo/etc-targeted implementations.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
i thought the word "cool" was supposed to be spelled "kewl" on the intertubes...
The layout is pretty, the related results is nice, but the main function... the results... they suck. I was searching for an uncommon sailboat and there were 0 pages returned. Google returns results for the same query... On other searches, the domain name no longer resolved, there were 404s, I got a page that was last visited in 1997, just junk. The results summary needs to be cleaned up also, lots of funky symbols in the results are just noise.
This is the same reason I stopped using Altavista way back when. I don't buy this 120 billion pages thing. You know you can get every article on slashdot on games.slashdot.org, tech.slashdot.org, politics.slashdot.org, etc... I bet they include all those, and every other site that allows you to view message threads 8 different ways. But no results for my first query!
It could be a while before someone is going to beat google at searching. I really do like the alternative approach to displaying search results, so I will at least keep my eye on it.
We didn't find any results for "cuil pronunciation"
Some reasons might be...
* a typo. Please check your spelling.
* your search includes a term that is very rare. Try to find a more common substitute.
* too many search terms. Please try fewer terms.
Finally, try to think of different words to describe your search.
About Cuil | Your Privacy | Add Cuil to Firefox
---------------------
Well, that sucks...
--
BMO
is kind of stuipid.
There's a lot of talk about how Google is in decline, and I won't comment on that, because every company has its tipping point. But for them to have been a invaluable (and in many cases incomparable) tool in my life for the best part of a decade and to have remained almost invisible as an agent in that process takes some doing.
In fact, the most insidious thing about Google may well be that any new attempts at reorganizing the layout of a traditional search engine, such as cuil is now attempting, seem like deliberate contrivances. And probably are.
The best they can hope for anyways would be to be bought by Google. Either that or they'll stagnate due to scalability issues or even suffer a slow death.
Besides, "Search 121,617,892,992 web pages" and none from my website? Allow me to remain sceptical..
You just got troll'd!
...until Microsoft puts in an offer?
I just "cuiled" the phrase "problems with linq to sql".. and it suggested there were no pages at all. Google however knows there are TERRIBLE problems with LINQ to SQL and served me 3,180,000 results. To say there are no problems with linq to sql is not very cuil at all.
Goddammit Slashdot, you broke it already.
"We'll be back soon...
Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity.
Thanks for your patience."
Hmm, something tells me Google probably aren't THAT worried.
Too much interest and they are adding capacity.
Nice one.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Tried a few searches.
D700: first page full of some crappy Samsung phone, no word about new hot Nikon camera.
Olympics: no word about Beijing on the first page.
$My_vanity_search_string: no results. Google returns all the relevant pages (they're not in English though).
I've tried to do some more searches, but then the servers melted down.
"former Google search architect Anna Patterson"
Someone's going to sue somebody.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
Why does Cuil claim to have "2,784 results" to my search yet display only one? Does it mean we have to divide the impressive 121,617,892,992 claimed index web pages by 2,784 to obtain the astoundingly round number of 43,684,588? What are the odds that the result of this division would be an integer number?
1 out of 2,784.
You just got troll'd!
Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity.
You do that..
I didn't like the interface anyway.
Remember, there are no stupid questions. But there are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
I for one hope it improves rapidly... I am tiring of google.
However, while it was available, I found it not to be very user friendly, due to lack of advanced search, due to lack of negative keyword option (that is in order to exclude sites containing certain word(s) ) and due to unfamiliar design. The final one seems to be subjective, but as Altavista, Google and Yahoo has a common baseline design, a new search engine (IMHO) should conform that visual...
Just get someone to submit it to slashdot.
Oh, and thanks for all the hits too.
So is this search engine HOT or NOT?
I just tried to doublecheck the results for "cuil pronunciation" (sic!) with "cuil pronounciation".
What I got was
C - the footgun of programming languages
Cuil is going no where when i searched for the word PLAYSTATION 3 on Cuil i got 3,200,000 look at my other results.
1. Yahoo 440,000,000
2. MSN 152,000,000
3. Google 109,000,000
4. AOL 17,400,000
5. Ask 16,120,000
6. Cuil 3,200,000
Cuil
We'll be back soon...
Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity.
Thanks for your patience.
some of your database are belong to slashdot
All your database are belong to U.S.
The problem isn't that it's hard to find the most relevant content, the problem is that the content often just isn't out there in the first place. Sure, maybe some facet of what you're looking for exists on the web, but the context in which you want to use the information is crucial, and I find that oftentimes this kind of contextual information, which really is given a sort of second-class treatment in our culture, is just not stored in a convenient or easy-to-get-to format online. Sometimes it's not even found in paper form! I think this is in large part due to the fact that it is still very costly to catalog and interpret most kinds of information. It's not something that we do without thought or effort. Until we have better tools for recording and cataloging this kind of information (rock-solid voice recognition might help (?)), I think there won't be any real revolutions in this space.
looks like they turned off images to keep it running...
How long before someone produces their "search results with thumbnails" patent, sues 'em in Texas, and shuts the whole thing down?
What mechanism will bring about this Google crash? Unlike the famous companies in the .com bubble, Google is actually making money. And lots of it. More than a billion dollars a quarter, to go along with their $12 billion in cash and zero debt.
This is not to say that Google will remain eternally dominant, of course not, but the rules of the game favor the incumbent, especially in a lobbyist economy.
You say Google will come crashing down, yet you also say no one will "ever" be as good in search. So I ask again, what mechanism or event do you foresee in your crystal ball to bring about such an unlikely crash?
It may need a few bugs ironed out and a bit of patience to see if it will catch up with Google in its technical capabilities, but it's already better than Google in the privacy department:
"Privacy is a hot topic these days, and we want you to feel totally comfortable using our service, so our privacy policy is very simple: when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on this later). Your search history is your business, not ours.
More precisely:
Logs
We do not keep logs of our users' search activity."
I think this could be a real selling point over Google if they can also provide a comparable search.
It has some nice features, but in terms of recgonized keywords, it seems lacking.
I tested it out with my online name - other search engines have algorithms that can locate any website I've ever interacted with.
This one couldn't find me at all.
I initially got abysmal results (no result found for just about anything I searched for, like the very technical "implicit volumes" or "queyras")
Then I deactivated "safe search" and finally obtained some results. However I suspect my original good impression I had of having found "relevant" (authoritative?) results in the first place were due to the safe search being on.
. . . . . . .
may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
from http://www.cuil.com/info/features/
Feature # 4 : Search term suggestions:
When you type a query, sometimes you'll see a search suggestion with an icon representing a website. Click on this link and you will go directly to that website. We let you look before you leap, because not everyone feels lucky.
I tried the classic "search yourself" trick with it. Searching my last name (Charabaruk), I got 11,429 results (and for the first page, only one of them wasn't to do with me specifically).
Searching the short version of my name, Chris Charabaruk, turned up nothing! Strange, because Twitter knows me by that (well, as my real name, not as my account) and that shows up when searching my surname. I tried again, though, and got 11,997 results. Quoting didn't change a thing.
I searched again for Christopher Charabaruk and got 1,395,435 results. Quoting that got me nothing, and retrying with the quotes on ditto.
It looks nice and shiny, but there's a hell of a lot of work required before I'd try making serious use of it.
Christopher S. 'coldacid' Charabaruk -- coldacid.net
I saw these guys spidering my sites a while back and the lifted the deny directives for the ghetto old PSI netblock they used. Having just tried the search, I don't know why I bothered. The results are terrible and are presented with what must be the worst layout of any search engine in history.
Cuil is quite an accomplishment, I don't mean that in a good way.
By starting by insulting my intelligence it is unlikely I will even try it.
Cuil is not pronounced cool, no matter which way you want to slice the spelling.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Google has been around for years.
Cuil has only just opened. Already, it is pretty decent.
I for one would love to have options to Google.
Privacy Policy:
Way to go!
I think I would have done a closed, invite-only beta before going live with this thing... two of the four searches I just tried came back with nothing, and almost all the images that came back with the articles were not relevant.
What could be cool is the automatic synopsis they have going on... if they can make that work a little better, it could be a good place to go for some quick information on a topic.
They still have a long way to go, though.
Well it might be a good search engine, but it's not imune from slashdotting...it was down when I tried it.
Smivs on the intertubes!
The first time I encountered Cuil was when I blocked their "twiceler" spider from my site. It was hammering it with thousands of requests for non-existent pages. It seemed it was generating URLs at random. It then ignored the robots.txt for ages.
Don't blame Google for using job market and IT industry supply and demand forces to fill whatever positions they need.
Google found a niche, exploited it for all what is worth, and are so efficient at it that they can allow themselves to get the best talent money can buy.
Please grow up, that is how a job market is supposed to work. If the rest of the IT industry can't come with innovative ideas good enough to attract new investment and bright people, it is hardly Google's fault.
When Google comes crashing (yeah, we know, all companies do, thanks for the insight genius) it will be for more important reasons than treating well, even lavishly, their employees.
At the moment it seems to be working, so I really don't see why they should change. I am not saying that all companies should provide whatever Google provides, but I am sure that morale in many companies would be increased immeasurably if they put a few pool tables around and some comfy sofas were to nap or to have a chat.
Most companies forget their employees are human and that it is important to give a degree of human empathy to your employees.
When the bad times come all those extras can be taken away, but to do so at a time when business is brisk is nonsense. It just shows why they are billionaires and some around here are unsatisfied middle managers or angry technicians.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
This morning in work we've been playing with this ``semantic'' search engine:
http://www.hakia.com/
It's based on the Yahoo! BOSS API.
Asking questions such as ``How many atoms are there in four pieces of cheese?'' actually give some reasonable results ( though we didn't get an exact answer ).
There is also a split-view page that performs a simultaneous Hakia and Google search.
These are promising times for Web search.
It reminds me to this cellphone I bought, it was all "web 2.0". The interface was black/grey/orange. It made me feel depressed just using it even though it had pretty dropdown shadows. Gah, I threw that thing out within the week. What's so "cool" about black interfaces?
I like the highlighting and compact info displayed in google, this site is lacking this, and hiding data behind fancy 2.0 collapsed menu's. Added to that, on my widescreen laptop I only see 5 results at a time. Thats incredibly insufficient if you want to quickly filter ALOT of data. It wont scratch my searching itch. Nice try, but not really.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Scroll right for search results = FAIL
.....and then shut down -- if the servers overload that quickly, they're going to fade into obscurity pretty damn fast.
But I saw enough in those 5 minutes to realize it has major problems:
-- Returned fewer results than Google on 2/3 of my searches
-- Compound "words" (such as, say, "georgebush" as opposed to "George Bush" as might be found in file names, tags, captions, etc.) produce NO results
-- Eliminates common words, connectors, and even pronouns from exact phrase searches, which defeats the whole point
-- Seems to have no provision for ordering by date or viewing most recent additions
-- Also does not seem to allow more than 10 results per page, which severely slows things down
-- Their "safesearch" (which I wouldn't use, but I wanted to try it for comparison) seems to eliminate even some innocuous terms
-- Some of the images that accompany the entries have nothing to do with the actual webpage listed
-- The layout sucks with their "paragraphs all over the page" format -- Give me a LIST, dammit, that I can quickly scroll through and scan
Overall, just as useless to me as most search engines have been. Google has its own faults, and you may rightly criticize them for their ethics, privacy policies, or business practices, but it is still a far better tool, and no one is seriously challenging their dominance anytime soon.
UPDATE: It just came back up. Why am I seeing many of the SAME results on page 2 and 3 and 4 as I saw on page 1? Is it just repeating entries to inflate the numbers for results? This thing is not just "not ready for prime time" -- it's not even ready for "obscure middle-of-the-night cable slot."
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
No, you've gotten the conditional tense all wrong. The appropriate sentence construction for your intended meaning would be:
"I for one would love to welcome our new Cuil overlords."
I hate printers.
The images put next to descriptions are, let's say, a little odd.
For example, I searched for 'titanite' (a titanium silicate mineral),
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=Titanite&sl=long
Not sure if it'll be fixed by the time you read this, but it had some nice My Little Pony type things next to the link to the Wikipedia article.
And, more seriously, I don't think the quality of search results on a few random tests I tried were anywhere near Google in terms of quality.
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
Tried a search for *Cuil*, which according to the their site: "Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge." Also, tried an iconic ghost towns * Terlingua Texas* site of biggest chile cook off every year. Results of both searches, first five pages or so, were mainly named restaurants and other name branded commercial services. It certainly an't Google.
I did a Google search to find the Cuil URL.
Searched for 3rd international plan 9 workshop. Didnt find anything, searched it on google, first hit was the right one.
Cuil, thats just not cool.
No results for my hometown versus 6.330.000 results on google, of which at least the first page are rather useful.
what about pr0n traffic, soon?
I'll say. Search for "Cuil search engine" in Cuil and you don't get the Cuil search engine in the results, even if you search for Cuil. However simply search for Cuil in Google and it's the second result. Hm.
Something is goin funky.
Search for Porn, results: "1,557,400,000 results for porn"
Number of results per page: 11 (which is an odd default I might add)
Number of maximum pages of results = 23.
11*23 = a lot less than 1.5billion results.
Result for cuil is strange. cuill.com is not the first result!? Cuil looks to put a huge priority for the names of the links.
"Cuil is the biggest search engine on the planet. In our quest to let users search as much of the Internet as possible, Cuil has indexed more than 120 billion pages so far.
If you would like Cuil to crawl your site and have it included in our index, please let us know."
This, with "please let us know" as a hyperlink to crawler@cuil.com.
I feel sorry for poor Jim.
While he's not tending to his horses, he's been parsing 160 Billion emails.
Their privacy policy gets a thumbs up:
...when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on this later). Your search history is your business, not ours.
We do not keep logs of our users' search activity.
We do not record the information in your cookies on our servers; your browser sends your preferences to us with each search request. This way, we do not store any personal information about you on our servers.
Trying to search a couple mathematical terms, returns links to random program instead of wikipedia or mathworld article. :( Nice layout but if it couldn't find what I'm looking for, then I'd say it's useless.
The same way that Cost Per Millions (Page Views) is a concept that was defeated by the market, Pay Per Click is also a concept that is going to reach its limit.
Once more people starts realizing that Pay Per Click is not enough (and several options are already arising), google will suffer a major cut.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Of all the languages to find an alternate word for knowledge, why would they choose Irish? Maybe it's different in the rest of the world but in Australia the Irish are the butt of many jokes, eg if "An Australian, and Englishman, and an Irishman walk into a bar", the Irishman will always be the idiot of the three (unless it's the one where the barman says "What? Is this some kind of joke?").
If I can take The Simpsons as a reliable measure of American culture (and I know I can :) I'd guess it's true in the USA too.
If number of pages indexed is their thing, they missed the point. We are drowning in information, which is why we need search engines. I want the best hits, not 60,000 hits.
No hits for J. S. Bach - I am not impressed!
I noticed while browsing the results that the images it displays next to each result appear to be originating from http://www.cuilimg.com./ If these images are in fact being copied and then hosted on this server, could this not be copyright infringement or something even more severe?
All these silly search engines will be obsolete in a couple of years once search.wikia.com really gets started :p
I'm English and I refuse to use this site because I decline to have to adopt the accent of a dumb American blond in order to articulate which search engine I am using. "..and so, like, she said this is, like, really cuil". In England we say "cool", not "ku-el", although to be honest it looks more like "su-ill" to me. It should go down a treat in Scotland however.
(With no quotes.)
Google has the cat manpage at number three.
I've gone back 10 pages on Cuil and not found a single result that's relevant. On the other hand, every single page has had at least 3 out of the 9 results linking to reviews or shops selling an album called "Dad Man Cat" by Corduroy.
Yeah, thanks for maintaining old biases. I'm sure the Aussies get as much grief, but really let's keep that kind of borderline racist attitude off the table and stick to the intellectual and geeky stuff
Interesting as a fluent Irish speaker I am not familiar with Cuil or CÃil meaning knowledge or wisdom or anything similar. It does however mean curls, a goal (as in sports) or occasionally someone's behind - as it does in many languages. The thing is that leaving an 'i' in it means it would be genitive - not a standalone word but part of a reference or possesive case e.g. cÃl, mo chuid chÃil.
Back to the Irish/Aussie thing, a lot of the words you love and know as Australian are in fact rooted in Irish. Let's not forget that Australia was a prisoner colony and Irish being one of the biggest nuisances to the British Empire at the time, we tended to make up a sizeable portion of the population.
I never get used to these constant resurrections
On cuili we get:
Google gives much more relevant hits
it does not find itself.
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=cuil
Some guy: "how do I mount an ISO in linux?"
Answer with Cuil: "Cool it!"
Answer with Google: "Google it!"
It just makes more sense with google.
...built on a business model that is not sustainable (in Google's case, online ads, which I honestly believe are going to tank hugely when advertisers finally realize the true value of online advertisements such as those sold by Google - and it ain't alot in my opinion)
Regarding the true value of online adversing... In my case, I can say that the advertising I put onto Google is worth it. I've just enabled the online store at http://www.lillifoot.co.uk/ and started advertising on Google. It's very easy to track the metrics of how much I spend versus how much income it brings in. If the advertising wasn't covering costs, I would be looking elsewhere to spend advertising money.
My business: Farstrider Studios.
The problem with new search engines is they need to be great before they launch because they are jumping into a room full of competitors. They don't have name recognition so they need to bring enough to the party to make me switch the first time I search with them or I will forget to ever go back. Slashdot has highlighted several new Google beating search engines a few were pretty good but not a single one preformed well enough at that time to make me switch so I stuck with Google. These companies need to put out a full product before it hits slashdot.
a search on "India" returned "We didn't find any results for "India"". Why why why?
Check out the yacy search engine. It's an interesting approach (based on p2p technology) and - theoretically - can't be censored.
-Dennis
Sigs suck!
Except the Cuil founders used to work at Google, and Google is constrained in what they can do because they have a big user base.
Cuil could have innovated greatly and pushed search to the next level. Cuil looks pretty incremental to me, and a bit unpredictable at that.
The fact that some common phrases result in no hits also suggests to me that they optimized at an unacceptable expense in search quality. In the end, users don't care how few machines they are using if they simply don't deliver the results.
I used to work at "AllTheWeb.com" and I tell you, basic good search is fairly pedestrian and "cuil" doesn't even have that. It is an interesting and exiting but utterly useless layout. When it does find "relevant" content, which it does a very poor job at BTW, it is hard to find it on the page.
Someone give me a few $mill in VC, and I'll make a better search engine.
A few observations:
* "Bryan" is a really dumb name. "Brian" is a dumb name too, but at least its pronounciation is obvious to anyone reading the name. Can't say the same for "Bryan".
* Microsoft is really bad for Silicon Valley. So many good software developers on Earth got sucked in by Microsoft. Too much of the top talent in the area is now working for Microsoft, doing almost completely useless stuff, and it's not healthy for the industry. Is there any software company on Earth that hasn't had at least a couple of engineers sucked away by Microsoft? I predict that when Microsoft comes crashing down (and it will - anyone who has seen the ridiculous excess of the Microsoft monopoly cannot help but realize this), the net result will have been to set back innovation in the software industry a great deal, by tying up so many people who would otherwise have done something useful.
Anyway that's how I see it.
these guys fell at the first fence. They have to include an explanation of how to pronounce their product name.
That's such a basic mistake it's laughable. If you want to build a global brand, starting with a name people can't remember or pronounce will not help.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
When I googled my name it took me to a really nasty website that probably wanted to install some spyware on my machine... thank god for NoScript :S Google at least screens webpages for this kind of misuse and keyword spamming.
They have a long way to go I fear.
Also, although eye pleasing, the results are not really presented in a "one glance and you know what to click" kind of way...
http://www.cuil.com/info/
Cuil: "three times as many as Google" = 121,617,892,992
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html
Google: "1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!"
Seems like Cuil has 12% the links of Google, not 300%... seems like more than a small error.
It seems it can't understand characters other than Latin. It gives me no results even for the simplest words written using, in my case, Greek fonts. I remember some years back Google had the same limitation.
"Sum Ergo Cogito"
I entered "clustermonkey", which is a site about HPC Linux Clusters, and it came back with references just fine. However, it had totally out of context graphics like flowers and catalogs or something I cannot really make out. I don't really think this "cute" feature helps at all, as a matter of fact I think it reduces the quality of the search. Clustermonkey.net is a cluster geek site, if you search and scan the thumbnails (which is what attracts your eye) you will be seriously mis-led as to the results. Obviously, it is try to grab "contextual" graphics that does not work quite right.
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
You tolerate getting paid-for ads on every results page. That is payment enough for them - they don't need your money - not directly, anyway.
I did like the paragraph included with the link, it makes it easier to determine the relevance. Maybe they could make each result stand out on its own a bit more, it would be easier to do a quick scan.
"zeta potential analysis of gold colloids" returns no results whereas google returns 44,300.
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=Cuil
They should index few of their own pages, before they index the web.
I just tried one single word and got very odd results: I used "Banane" (the German word for "banana") and got exactly 0 (zero!!!) results. Google yields ~10.500.000 hits.
"Banana" on the other hand gives 15.600.000 results in Cuil (~89.500.000 in Google)... oh, and if you turn "safe search" off (which is by default enabled in Cuil), then you get 1.600.000 hits.
Is there something inherently unsafe about German bananas ("pornography or other objectionable material" - are there really only pages about banana porn online?)? Does Cuil only cover the English-speaking internet by default? If Cuil indexes three times as many pages, why is the number of hits an order of magnitude smaller?
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
I admit it, I tried my name, Hal Brown (not an anonymous coward) both with and without quotation marks. First it came up with the baseball player of the same name as number one, BUT WITH MY PICTURE, and no listing for me. With quotes it came up with yet another website as number one also with my picture.
I couldn't get beyond the first page, but on that I wasn't listed at all.
Google lists me several times on the first page and several times on the second.
"daily show" (no quotes) returns nothing. "the daily show" (no quotes) does.
Ironically, search
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=cuil.com
doesn't return cuil.com
My first thought was, even if this were a viable contender for going up against Google... "Cuil it" doesn't quite roll off the tongue the way "Google it" does. If you want to compete with Google your first mission is to make your name a verb. Sounding equally unsatisfying are "Yahoo It", "MSN It", and "Live It".
Speaking as someone of mainly Irish extraction: I've often fell in a barrel of titties and come up sucking my thumb, you insensitive clod!
I can't believe my eyes, the words aren't enough! http://www.bangbull.com/details/30287-BE4/Cute_babe_arrived.html
172,000,000 results for google
Now, I'm going to fucking google cuil.
621,000 for cuil
Wait. Who just fucking won?
I guess it is targeting teenagers who search for porn. I mean, "we don't store your queries, really, reaaallly" and the whole dark layout designed to make your brain unable to keep 100% of the data but at least teens like black layouts... Exciting.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
When it finds something, it's original gui is really useful, much better than standard (google, yahoo, msn).
Also black is good, google is just too whitish; something like skins would be good however (I would like black background, white just burns my eyes).
Results are however pretty bizarre, 'lisp' - nothing. 'common lisp' - 200k. Their algorithms are a bit weird...
Funny... I saw a pic not related to him as well when I clicked on your search. Unlike my earlier test searches, clicking on the 'next page' link actually worked (somebody already mentioned the problem I was having: no search results found despite several thousand being available according to the first results page)... which led to another pic-problem: the wrong party logo associated with him! LOL
Since I comment a lot on various blogs, I've found it's easy to keep track of what I said and where by just googling the name I use. Google gives me very relevant, easy to understand results with very few false-positives (unknown misses, but it seems good in that respect). Cuil, on the other hand, was a bit off. The results look like they're all me in that the sites are places I've commented at, but the text blurbs for the links are collections of pieces of comments, some mine, others not. There are a lot of repeats. The pictures that come up have nothing to do with me and the ones I've checked has nothing to do with the item linked to.
Speaking of links... I'm sure it's a matter of getting used to how Cuil does things, but the linking is very much NOT obvious. All these links that are supposedly to my individual comments are each for a given story, right? Nope. The links at the top and bottom of each search result are to that website's log of my comments. So I have a bunch of links to my Lifehacker member's comments. Another to Gizmodo's index of my comments. (Yes, they're the same system, so it's the same list with a different background, but that isn't any search engine's fault.) I even get this for sites I've only left one comment at. Yet, each search result claims (via its headline) to be linking the story or comment directly. The only time I've found that to be true is on the websites that don't provide an index of members' comments (like Popular Science).
I want the competition and I hope it improves. The layout is pretty nice (well, would be if the info was accurate). So far, color me unimpressed.
I hope this comment is well received... I could have moderated instead!
Persecutors will be violated!
I go to www.cuil.com and search on the term 'cuil'. It has no idea that the search engine exists (itself).
Sorry, but if a search engine has no idea of its own existence in its own indexes, there's something seriously wrong with their algorithm :-)
Wikigarbagepedia is now king.
cuil isnt cool, its lame. it reeks of marketing with a name like that and an 'impressive' "search 1000 trillion web pages" on the front. furthermore, i had my browser set to text only and couldnt even use the damn thing.
There's already a mechanism in place for this. It's called robots.txt. A simple
User-agent: twiceler
Disallow: /
should be sufficient.
The Cuil search engine did provide some useful results though if you want to go a bit further with their spider:
This Cuil search didn't return any spider traps and I am at a loss as to how the results connect to the search. Just plain weird.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
I tried searching for a first non-trivial thing that came to my mind: how to make a bow (as in a thing to shot arrows with).
The top result for 'making bows' from Google is a page of instructions on how to tie a ribbon bow, but the second result is relevant to my query, as well as several others in the top 10. Google also found a page about making violin bows - I wouldn't have thought about something like that, but it's an interesting topic as well, if irrelevant to my query.
Cuil on the other hand returned a page of results related almost entirely to ribbon bows. Not only that, most of the links are trash: only 4 have any actual content, 1 is an error, 1 is Runescape (MMORPG), the rest are either some kind of search engine, a list of keywords or something that appears completely unrelated to my query.
Cuil engineers and executives are probably turning red as we speak. You put in the search term "cuil" and the first page of results includes "Properties for sale in Cuil Mhuine, Ireland - Properazzi", and "Restaurants in Cuil Dabhcha | Restaurants Of The World" but no actual link to cuil.com. You think that would have been one of the most obvious test cases in their test suite ... but I digress, after playing around with the search engine, my guess is that they don't even have a test suite, and the experience of other slashdotters seems to confirm this.
The world always needs another example of how not to develop software.
It seems to default to some sort of exact match. I tried long search that I used last night looking for help with sed. Got no results. Added '+' in between each search term and got over 1,000,000 hits. [Most of which weren't what I was looking for.]
Seems like could be a major problem as I am lazy enough to not want to hit those extra keys.
So, it's pronounced "Cool," as in, CoolWebSearch. Not exactly what I'd want my company to be associated with.
Wow! Just had a go on it! That is one slow search engine. I know it will speed up with less people trying it out, but it cant be getting any where near the traffic of Google, and it is incredibly slow.
Google has achieved that apex of brand power where its name has become synonymous with its function; like Kleenex or Xerox. When I starting hearing the computer challenged using "google" as a verb, I pretty much wrote off any future attempts at developers looking for the next best search engine.
I doubt Google would bother with a buy-out. Best hope is for someone flush with cash and looking for a better way into the on-line ad market (read: Microsoft) to buy them out.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Either they are bunch of self-involved liars with bloated claims, or their search algorithm sucks.
I did a search on Google for "bob and tom": 7.5 million page hits.
I did the same search on Cuil: No results found.
I don't think the "Bob and Tom Show" would be happy to know they don't exist. Cuil needs to stop with the marketing and the lies and deliver some actual results.
Bearded Dragon
Cuil tells me there are not results. A search engine that searches more pages than Google can't find a single page for "Visual studio x64 sp1 redistributable".
Secondly, I wonder how long it is until we see some sweet Cuil hacks? Third, the name is escaping me right now but there were two professors at Rutgers University who were working on a search engine for Ask.com a few years ago. Once that "development" engine was successfully deployed it was quickly integrated into Ask.com. I'm wondering if this might eventually wind up being a similar situation.
Ahh, great...
I just tried it by searching for a bit of programming help. Clicked on a result which appeared relevant but instead took me to a spam page featuring multiple large pornographic banner ads.
As I'm at work - working for a large corporation with strict internet policy - I'm now hit by the paranoia that trying out this search engine may possibly have just got me fired!
Dear Internet, I don't want features. Most features are stupid and annoying. I want things to work well. I want things laid out a simple and visible format. Thanks, Aardvark
search cuil on there, and first page has: Properties for sale in Cuil Mhuine, Ireland - Properazzi Wholinks2me Cuil Aodha Chase Around The Windmill: Toss The Feathers/Ballinasloe ...
Cuil Darach Lounge and Bar restaurant in Clones at ...
but no search engine by that name.
Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do. - Jean-Paul Sartre
Irish slashie here - the only (modern) Irish meaning I know of for 'cuil' is 'fly'. That's the insect, not the ebonic adulation. And it's pronounced like 'quill'.
OK, so the UI's pretty, and I like the summary/pic/columns idea.
But, the page navigation sucks. After having the mouse pointer on the right to scroll, you have to move all the way to the bottom left to get to the next page.
Ben
I was just testing it when it suddenly got even more sluggish and stopped responding... because you just put this on the frontpage and nuked it!
Oh well.. I hated it already, so no big loss i suppose *g*
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Doing a vanity search on this results 0 results while a vanity search on Google results in 56 not including the omitted ones (I have been published in newspapers that are archived online). I am underwhelmed greatly by this. Their claim to have more sites than Google is bit too gutsy and my (admittedly) limited research has revealed that to be false.
Do they really think "Cuil that for me" and "Did you cuil Jon Katz" lately is going to take off? Right off the bat I would have gone with Plex. Hell, "Plex: it's what's next", rolls off the tongue. Same for "After Google there's Plex". Anyway if they really want to take over Google they have to consider how to enter the modern lexicon and Cuil just isn't going to cut it. Today John McCain announced he was learning how to use the Cuil. nope.
Seriously. I looked for a nonprofit organization I work with, EngenderHealth, and Cuil said there were zero results. Google returns something like 74,000+ results. Even Yahoo -- whose search I find remarkably useless -- returns nearly 10,000 results. Ditto for other company names I tried. Either Cuil is experiencing database issues, or their claim of "more pages than Google" is utter bunk.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
When I went to the search website I got the following message. They should have prepared for this before releasing any major press releases. There is no place to sign up for a mailing list so I will eventualy forget all about www.cuil.com to even try it again. We'll be back soon... Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity. Thanks for your patience.
Uncle Mantis
Being generous, it sounds like the California Valley joke "Kewl" to rhyme with "Jewel".
Being mean, it looks like it rhymes with "Kill", and we know how much W. Bush will like that meme.
I run a web server cluster, and a few months ago I noticed that cuil was battering our site with about 50 crawlers at a time - this eventually died down to about 1 hit an hour from them, but for a while it was seriously eating our resources. At least google is vaguely considerate of a server's limits.
It also seemed to disobey some of our robot files.
It's already down. Haha
Them jokes arose from the tensions between the English and the Irish. This is why they are so common in Australia.
can kiss their money goodbye. It's long, long gone.
Of course it is the Google arrogance ("We won't implement folders in gmail because our system is better than what you want"): We will give you a columns and you will like it because we have decided it is better.
Screw them. No it isn't. Sure if you're a kid with perfect vision and 2 point font size perhaps it is, but i need bigger fonts to read the damn thing (AND the idiots abuse stylesheets to use absolute fonts, as opposed to google who at least got the search engine right) - 3 or even 2 columns does not in anyway make it easier for me to read, the other columns are distractions in the view - with their pictures and stuff they feel more like advertising than search results.
And that name is not cool its crap - most wont know how to pronounce it and forget how to spell it - google at least is pronounceable and easy to spell.
I'm annoyed by this. I feel offended by it's presence *g*
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
If you want crummy search results, you should at least support a charity at the same time. Try GoodSearch, which lets you select a charity, then donates a penny to them every time you search. Unfortunately their search database is powered by Yahoo. It's better than Cuil is right now, but surprisingly worse than Google.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
from CNN's article: http://money.cnn.com/2008/07/28/technology/cuil.ap/index.htm?eref=rss_topstories
Probably I'm not "Cuil", because couldn't find any pages when searching my name... Google is much nicer in this respect, it really tries to show me that I "exist" when I'm googling myself....
But until I become "cuil" again, i should just stay AC... it's better for confidence...
GOOGLE - Personalized Results 1 - 10 of about 345,000 for streetwars. (0.18 seconds) CUIL - We didnt find any results for âoestreetwarsâ Useless...
You are so right. That is all :)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Even with "safe" search enabled I get porn links with certain searchs (try "cuil sucks" with safe search on for example).
Does this claim nears the reality at least a little? Many search queries I tried are giving very few results (though most of them give no result at all) while in google there are 1000, - of course, only the first 10 of them are useful, but even if you count only the useful ones google is giving a lot more results.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Unfortunately, GooglePreview is browser specific and not as good as Cuil. Their layout is really VERY attractive and easy to use, and the images are a nice touch. However, I need to wait until their search results are as good as Google's--or better, if they don't sell out and allow advertising to modify ordering--and also for image searching. Finally, they have to fix the weirdness/lossage with needing quotes to find phrases.
cuiling (hey if googling is a word so is that) "tempt" brings up this article on the front page poking at google management. Arrogant googlers
wtf ????
Something like 3% of the Oz poplation have any connection with convicts.
Jesus man, the USA started out as a convict colony to...
hey..where do all the black people come from ?
You're full of shit.
Try "rough rocks" (no quotes). Works OK. Try "smooth rocks" (no quotes). Works OK. Try "rough smooth rocks" (no quotes). Doesn't find anything. Tried various other 3-word phrases. No dice. Nice try, guys.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Unfortunately, due to a lot of servers NOT sending 404 error messages, (eg, ColdFusion servers, which respond w/ 200 for _everything_ (or at least, used to ... haven't had to administer more recent versions)), quite a few serch engines will ask for a few randomly generated pages to attempt to determine what a '404' type page should look like.
The first time I noticed it, it was Yahoo -- I think they appeared in bunches of 20 or so, every few weeks. It's also a good idea to set the cache control down on your robots.txt, as many search engines will assume that the time since last modification is an indication of how long something can be cached if there's no cache control headers ... so that robots.txt that was last modified 2+ years ago isn't going to be checked every 5 min or even 5 hrs if it's been changed.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
If Taco didn't hate me *g*
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
"Yeah, thanks for maintaining old biases. I'm sure the Aussies get as much grief, but really let's keep that kind of borderline racist attitude off the table and stick to the intellectual and geeky stuff"
Even if we overlook that "race" is a cultural concept not a scientific one, Australians are hardly a race, but even if - grow the hell up. It's a harmless joke (or rather, attempt at one) - there is enough tightassednes in the world, that's part of the problem more than bad jokes.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
(proportionally) - epic fail
The layout of the search results is an interesting concept. It seems to work well in that respect.
However, it's not going to keep me away from Google. The content just isn't good enough. I did a few searches, and many of the results were uninteresting or irrelevant. And one search said it had many many results, but once I clicked on the second page it couldn't find anything at all.
But then, I'm a Google fangirl so take anything I say about this with a pinch or seven of salt.
I'm a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar...
-Lucy-
Pathetic. I could think of ten other search engines that I don't use that are better than this one. Typical of the crap that comes out of Stanford.
Eviscerate the Proletariat!
Visually, Cuil beats Google. In every other aspect, it loses. I did a search for both Barack Obama and John McCain to see what popped up. I intentionally spelled their names wrong to see if Cuil would catch it. And, drum roll please, it didn't. Cuil gave me useless top results and when traveling to the second page, well, that didn't happen. The second page of results never loaded.
And they say they're gonna top google. They need more quality before boasting such claims
Why or why is it 2008 and major search engines STILL don't support AND, OR, NOT, XOR and parens in search queries?
Yea, I know about + and - in google - it isn't the same thing.
"Cuil analyzes the content of Web pages to divine their relevance to a search query."
should be (I think):
"Cuil analyzes the content of Web pages to determine the Divine relevance of a search query".
A search for "slashdot" returns "Jesus loves atheists too".
A search for "FSM", returns "God's gifts of grace come in many forms."
First I searched for my name. The first two links were from Linked-In, perhaps the least important web presence I have. The rest were from old articles from my site - no new ones. Two featured pictures I've never seen before. Perhaps they're crawling in reverse order, or using The Wayback Machine.
Then I searched on "second hand smoke." Google shows three million matches, and my SHS page is usually on their first page. (Currently it's number six.) Cuel says, "We didn't find any results for "second hand smoke"" Somehow they missed all three million pages that mention it.
Gawsh, I'm awfully impressed.
Pretty Vacant. It looks really nice. I like the layout and the addition of images, etc. Very Pretty. I did the classic search on my name (which is none-of-your-beeswax). In Google: top of the list, #1 with a bullet: My Website, as expected. I did it with cuil and the result? Tertiary links REGARDING my work. I had to go 7 pages in to find the link that was top of the list in Google. So, in terms of searching the obvious, Cuil sucks, verily. I then searched on the name (in "quotes") of my friend's rather obscure antique furniture biz. It says I got 3,420 hits, but only supplied me with 6 pages of hits, for a total of 72. Stupid Stupid Stupid. What if I really needed the link on #73? Too Bad! cuil needs a LOT of work before it even comes close to Google.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
from CNN's article: http://money.cnn.com/2008/07/28/technology/cuil.ap/index.htm?eref=rss_topstories
That has to be absolute nonsense. Because it's Fionn Mac Cumhail or at worst in English it's Finn McCool. Even in medieval Irish it'd just have a few extra gh's or dh's...
In all the times I've heard and read the tales I've never seen it spelled like that
I never get used to these constant resurrections
I have to agree that Cuil is a pretty lame name. However, I think Google is already so well known that, even if another search engine grabs a significant chunk of the market, people will still refer to any web search as "Googling". Just as vacuum cleaners from Electrolux, Panasonic or Dyson get called Hoovers and public address systems get called Tannoys even though Tannoy haven't built PA systems for years.
it's = it is
its = belonging to it
Too bad Google's facility is named the Googleplex.
So you like the layout, if there is one there is bound to be more.
I detest it looks bad (perhaps because i need bigger font that the 2 point ones they want you to use), and i don't think its easy to read that in the least, i want one column, not more - the more are just visual noise to me - might as well be advertising.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Even if we overlook that "race" is a cultural concept not a scientific one[...]
That makes no excuse for bigotry, nor does it allow for discrimination.
I never get used to these constant resurrections
People like you give me hope for the human race..
Politicians and Pedophiles: Two groups of exploitive bastards who are most dangerous when they're thinking of children.
As some have said, they must have log many redundant websites to get their 12 billion pages as I have searched for some simple things, only to get a negative result. Playstation 3, or just Playstation, nets NO RETURNS. However, a search for Nintendo, Wii, Xbox 360 or just Xbox will bring in a TON of results. Funny though that Playstation 3 brings in 0 results for me but when I look at the categories for the Xbox 360 search (suggested cats in the right) "Playstation 3 games" is one of them. Afterward I thought about searching for Playstation 3 games, thinking there's no way it would bring me many results as Playstation 3 should have caught everything the in games too... 87,000 results. I don't think they'll have to worry about their very non-robust engine being bought out. To me, partial word recognition is a must for a search engine as sometimes I can't think of a PRECISE way to word something in a search.
Is the job of a search engine to: 1) Get you to the site, and figure you will find your way around? 2) Give you many entry points to the same site, clouding out the number of unique sites on the first page? Google has pretty much always aimed at #1, with rare occasions where it puts the same site on the same page. Yahoo has been notorious about showing the same site on the same page 3-4 times, sometimes with and without the www, pointing to the identical site. 'Cuil' takes #2 way beyond showing the same two sites 8+ times on page one, eg: http://www.cuil.com/search?q=snowboard+helmets Search engines that don't focus on just getting you to the site... well they suck!
Nothing is foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
Another search engine where # of results rules all and the ability to do refined searches is even less capable. Seems you can't even group results with "" wrapped around words that need to be next to each other. Really? I really give a crap that there are millions of results for tooth paste when there would only be a million for "tooth paste" (its an example, no those weren't the searches I tested with).
I'm sure I missed some tricks but still ... a search engine shouldn't require tricks to refine a search. Google's problem is NOT a lack of content. Google's problem is a lack of refining searches. But they do a better job than Cuil so far. Simple +, - and "" grouping are useful ... url: prefacing is helpful ... but none of that truly lets you get a good search.
Give me Cuil's OR Google's content but with the old Altavista interface (remember when Altavista had the most content AND you could do regex searches?). That would be cool. I've heard replies from Google that regex searches take too many resources. You're GOOGLE ... go figure out better ways to do them. NEARing, ANDing and ORing help but being able to break a search word -inside- the word (or expand the search word -inside- the word) is where its at. And no ... your internal assumptions about plurals and singulars when grabbing like words isn't enough.
In other words don't make me shoot fish in a barrel with a shotgun.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
cause it's pretty obvious they haven't done it themselves.
I was consistently getting "No results" for common search terms, until I turned off SafeSearch, I then got expected search results.
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=APPLE
With google all the results are ranked. With Cuil you mind is not quite sure if things in the same row are the same rank or what. As a result you may be inclined to scan down further till you see the picture you think is right.
in the end however you read just as many entries, but somehow the perception is that the right one was "closer to the top". But that's perceptual not actual.
Howver perception counts: if you can more quickly absorb 2-d layouts than 1-d then it's better. But of course google to do this to.
the quality of the search seems lower.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
They could have avoided the scalability issues if they'd just built it on Google App Engine.
...will fail based on stupid name. Seen it a million times before. Pardon me if this is redundant..no time...
I find it interested that a couple hours ago Cuil.com could not return itself as a result when I searched for both 'cuil' and 'cuil.com.'
Plus it's a tad inconsistent in it's results. Click search fast enough and it will report no results.
Good start though. I will use it once it gains stability.
I'm not quite sure I understand the Google hate. They return consistently relevant results, and a lot of them - I've never been truly disappointed with a Google search - their ads are tasteful and (with the exception of Gmail ads) also relevant.
Why is everyone apparently desperate for an alternative? Google isn't Windows, it's a low-clutter, streamlined, and effective search engine. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
A few quick searches (net-stalking myself, apparently Cuil doesn't think I'm cool) revealed a link to a 404'd page (given that they just started turning on the PR machine, that's surprising in and of itself).
I never realized how much I used the "see the cached version of this page" feature of Google until that moment.
-Ed Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.
I was comparing various search terms/expressions, and figured "gay" would provide quite a few hits. From there, I tried some other similar terms. The results are pretty funny (unintentional I'm sure). :)
# hits for gay:
cuil - 1,032 million
google - 409 million
# hits for straight:
cuil - 0 (ok, all kidding aside, wtf?)
google - 369 million
# hits for homosexual:
cuil - 25 million
google - 22.1 million
# hits for heterosexual:
cuil - 4.2 million
google - 11.6 million
"I drank what?" -Socrates
We didn't find any results for "boston public library"
Some reasons might be...
* a typo. Please check your spelling.
* your search includes a term that is very rare. Try to find a more common substitute.
* too many search terms. Please try fewer terms.
* Finally, try to think of different words to describe your search.
We didn't find any results for "episcopalian church in cleveland"
Some reasons might be... (etc).
"lithia motors"
returns eleven hits that are displayed and summarized on the first page, not one of which is http://www.lithia.com, the website for Lithia Motors (huge dealership in Oregon).
Google, of course, returns www.lithia.com as its first hit.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
EGAD, man, that's brilliant! Someone with points, please mod the parent up!
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Well, its early days. Google wasn't built in a day. Yes i tried a few queries and the returned results were 'naff'. However give it time, and it'll learn and refine itself. Google wasn't good in the beginning but it got better over time.
Just like the MS effect, i think we've all got very used to the 'google' interface/layout, and it will take time to move from it.
However competition is good, and even if it doesn't work out Medium/long term, hopefully it will up the game of other players in the market.
David J (IT Manager)
www.joots.co.uk (great place for jewellery online)
The first thing I order in a new restaurant is the calamari. Because I happen to like good calamari and it gives me a baseline for comparison, albeit an admittedly arbitrary one.
The first word I look for in a new search engine is "Perl"; same reasons. This is, sadly, not on the menu at Bistro Cuil. They are serving "PERL", but that's kind of like having "Diced octopus" as my appetizer. That would be gross.
I think I'll let the Chef work on this for a bit more before I become a regular.
... Not a good thing!
For example, when a page title has standard HTML character entities (like ">" [>]) Culi returns the search item with just a "&" instead)
So the logic expression
(a & b) > (b & a)
becomes
(a & b) & (b & a)
Makes the search engine pretty much useless for
large areas of science and mathematics.
You know, ego surfing isn't anywhere near as fun when you can't even find your own website. Until their indexing database is more developed, it's kinda the equivalent of waiting for waves in a public pool. I wonder if instead of webmasters throwing out meaningless pride behind their Google pagerank we might soon see bragging rights to "Well, Cuil found my site on such & such date"
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
It seems like the "Explore by Category" section needs some work too. Search for "Barack Obama" and the top two categories are "Iowa State Senators" and "Polish-American Politicians".
I, for one, welcome our new Polish-American Overlord from Iowa...
http://www.google.com/search?q=cuil+pronunciation
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
If you aren't blessed with particularly tender sensibilities, I'd suggest you turn off the "Safe Search" option. I entered "rhinoceros" in the search box and came back with virtually nothing. After turning off "Safe Search" and "Typing Suggestions" in Preferences, I got back about what you'd expect from a decent search engine.
There's obviously some bugs to work out, but Cuil looks like it could be a winner. I especially like the fact that they emphatically DON'T keep track of searches and personal information. That aspect of Google has always made me a bit uneasy. True story: about six years ago, my sister was having trouble with her new dog. I thought I'd find some information to help her train the beast, and typed "Dog Instruction" into Google's search box. What came back was, um, not exactly what I expected.
I can imagine Google linking that search up with my computer in some way, and stuffing it away in its little electronic filing cabinet. For that matter, I'm not pleased with ANY of my searches being tracked, and not because I spend my life searching for pornography or anything else shameful. It just isn't anybody's business.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Can we mod this website as a troll?
Something's not right there. Cuil is missing obvious search hits. Searching on phrases and for multiple words comes up empty for many phrases that generate hits on Google. It even misses phrases on sites that it has definitely indexed.
Either there's an out and out bug, or there's a level of effort limit on difficult joins. Can't tell which as yet.
Didn't MS have a technology call kool? And that it became .NET?
Smells of conspiracy are in the air.
Unlike the famous companies in the .com bubble, Google is actually making money. And lots of it. More than a billion dollars a quarter, to go along with their $12 billion in cash and zero debt.
Anyone have some insight as to what is the source of this income? I would expect it's not just from advertising alone. I know Google has other business interests. How do they stack up?
The specific example I have in mind is the Google search appliance. I've seen these things dropped in to a couple environments with great success. In fact, one employer had spent several years and no small amount of budget on an internally developed search system that had severe performance issues. Replacing it with a Google box greatly improved performance (although no silver bullet). Are more enterprises quietly purchasing Google tech for internal use?
I always wonder if Google's public projects, all those beta apps that people like to scoff at, aren't simply test beds for Enterprise products. What better way to test and develop than to invite the Internet to provide test data.
My first vanity search (searching for my name) returned interesting results. The graphic for my personal homepage was a graphic with text professing my devotion to scientology. (I am not a Scientologist and this graphic appears nowhere on my site.) To make matters worse, a photo of me from my website was being displayed next to numerous other results that have nothing to do with me, but other people with my same name. This looks like prime grounds for a libel suit when someone's picture ends up next to a result about criminal/socially unacceptable activity of someone with the same name.
Useless!
Wow, I put in "renegade", after attempting to search for the Renegade Miata Club (those three terms were producing 0 hits), and it still reported 0 results!
0 results for Renegade! I mean, come on!
So then I turn off safesearch and I got some results. Oh wow, no thank you!
Do a search for Cuil and it doesn't even mention the service. http://www.cuil.com/search?q=cuil
Well, its early days. Google wasn't built in a day. Yes i tried a few queries and the returned results were 'naff'. However give it time, and it'll learn and refine itself. Google wasn't good in the beginning but it got better over time.
Just like the MS effect, i think we've all got very used to the 'google' interface/layout, and it will take time to move from it.
However competition is good, and even if it doesn't work out Medium/long term, hopefully it will up the game of other players in the market.
David J (IT Manager)
http://www.joots.co.uk (great place for jewellery online)
I'll stick with Altavista, thank you very much. I moved from Web Crawler to Lycos to Altavista because each offered a huge improvement over the previous. Never found a reason/need to move to Google and check one against the other on a semi regular basis. Altavista is still on top as far as I'm concerned.
"Cool (Cuil) it" does not sound all that catchy or positive to me. Kind of like "can you A9 that?" - What!? I couldn't even imagine how "CUIL" is supposed to be pronounced when I first saw it. In today's WWW if the name is not catchy like Java, Slashdot, or Twitteritosis, it will not work no matter how good the technology is. Case closed. It's over before it even began. Too bad.
I refuse to use any search engine which returns 0 hits for bacon cob,
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=bacon%20cob&sl=long
Guess they didn't learn from Apple's MobileMe mess. By tomorrow afternoon Google should have pulled together a new project team bigger than the entire Cuil staff dedicated to first copy and then surpass what they have done. Good luck to them.
Because we all know what a flop that was for Nintendo, right? http://nexgenwars.com/
Last night I played a blank tape at full volume. The mime next door went nuts.
How useless is it if it can't find any hits for "Tiger" forget something more complicated!
First of all, from CNN's article, Patterson enjoyed her time at Google, but became disenchanted with the company's approach to search. "Google has looked pretty much the same for 10 years now," she said, "and I can guarantee it will look the same a year from now."
This is part of what works for Google. It's reliable, consistent and simple, from a user's point of view. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
My "reference search" was for "CREB", a protein. As with google, the first result was the Wikipedia article on CREB. After that, Cuil went to hell. The second result is "Uberpedia", which cloned the wikipedia article. The third result was for the same article (no longer existing) on a polish server. The 4th result was useful. The 5th result was some sort of wikipedia related server called adorons.com, but it returns an error referring you back to wikipedia. The 6th result, somewhat useful. The 7th result, another non-existent wikipedia copy on a polish server.
In addition, wikipedia offered 600K results vs. Cuil's 100K results. If they're indexing more, why are they returning fewer results?
I don't see myself using this anytime soon.
Be careful about the preferences. About my name (Quisquater): - Putting safe search ON gives 0 result ...
- Putting safe search OFF gives 36394 results.
CUIL is not ready to be subtle.
For Google:
63100 results .. for the 3 levels of safe search.
Hum!
Louis Monier (do you have his current email?) don't like my results because I'm working about attacks?
I write grant applications for my fire department.
First search I tried was the name of a Federal grant program I just finished an application for.
In Google, name of the program returns as the #1 link. In Cuil (I hate the name btw), I get no results found.
Sorry, if they couldn't index the US Government websites properly, it makes me wonder how many other holes are in their search.
Does anyone else find it odd that clicking on the About Cuil link yields the following message:
"Oops! We couldnâ(TM)t find that page. Please verify that the URL is correct and try again."
It seems that a number of the company information links result in the same custom 404 error page, including the Contact Us link. I'm not sure that this builds my confidence in the search engine...
Is cainteor lÃofa mé fresin. (That means I'm fluent too yanks). Cuil ( or more of cuileog the diminutive) is a fly or an insect/bug.
(My god slashdot can't do accents)
Typed 'Free porn' and the first result was "National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum". Thanks. I prefer Google.
Aside from it being a pretty bad name in and of itself, if you make a fairly obvious typo when trying to get to "Cuil" - typing culi * instead of cuil - it will take you to some sort of porn site. Methinks they should have spent a little more time on their branding.
* Site NSFW.
Hmm, Arthur gives results but 'arthur' gives none. Do they expect everyone to capatilize proper nouns when they search?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Tom was an RA, and PhD alum, but not a professor at Stanford. I'm always amazed by how anybody who worked at Stanford suddenly becomes "professor" when a story enters the media.
"moo" returned 0 results. ... maybe next month.
Keep getting the "can't find error" on almost every search attempt and it is giving me forum posts discussing the items I am looking for many pages before actually listing the sites one would expect to see show up. Tried this on multiple searches, very useless as it is now.
I tried a search for a unique item. Search terms: "Geforce 6150 nforce 430 socket 939 review". There are only a few motherboards with this configuration.
Results:
Yahoo: 10+ pages returned
Google: 10+ pages returned
Cuil: 0 pages returned
The first 20 links returned by both Yahoo and Google were all relevent to the search. About 30% of the first 20 links were returned by both search engines. The results from Yahoo had a few more from "expert" sites, eg: motherboards.org. The results from Google had a few more from "commercial" sites, eg. Amazon or NewEgg.
Based on this particular search, I would prefer Yahoo. In practice, when I am searching for in-depth information, I'll use both Yahoo and Google, but skip Cuil.
I tried searching for an item I'm not having much luck finding on Google (but generating TONS of hits) : "send to mail recipient" (without the quotes) yeilds NO results on Cuil. WTF? I can imagine not as many as Google, but none?? They've indexed NO pages with those search terms?
In a short and highly unscientific test I searched for 4 sites I am involved which, all of which rank quite well on all the other search engines, especially when you use certain terms (like business names)
Of the 4 sites... 3 appear to not be indexed at all and the 4th came up with the wrong image beside it on page 6.
Methinks it was a little too early to launch and get this much press.
Play me online? Well you know that I'll beat you. If I ever meet you I'll "/sbin/shutdown -h now" you. -Weird Al, kinda.
I have my own business and my own website. I'm the first link on Google. On Cuil, there are a bunch of random index sites that show up on the first page. I tried myself several ways including adding my town and still didn't show up. I don't care how many pages they index, that's odd that I don't show up.
Make love, not reality television.
Dependency on one search engine is not a good thing. Variety is essential.
I do a lot of searching for scholarly material and my best finds come only by putting together the results from several different engines. Google misses a lot of what some others will locate.
Any new player in the search game is always welcome, and after doing some searches with Cuil I have already discovered some pages that were
not found by the other engines (or at least that may have been buried so far in the back pages that they were inaccessible).
The more competition the better it will be.
don't turn safe search off, or it will zero your results for everything.
safe search off:
We didnâ(TM)t find any results for âoebill clintonâ
safe search on:
2,800,000 results for bill clinton
Cuil does not know why cuil is bad but Google does. Two times out of three Cuil does not return any results for this query, and when it does all results are irrelevant.
Showing my age, but anyone else remember the movie short SNL did in the early eighties with Eddie Murphy and the prisoner poet guy? Basically it was just a prisoner Tyrome Green who wrote poetry about his crimes and he REALLY hated his landlord.
One of the poems was about going in a trashing his landlord's place and the phrases
Kill My Landlord, Kill My Landlord
C...I....L....L...... MY LANDLORD
Needless to say, kill my search engine, kill my search engine
C....U....I....L...... MY SEARCH ENGINE
Ah, not the same.
Here is the full text of the poem. Wonder if it is somewhere on YouTube or something.
"Images by Tyrone Greene"
Dark and lonely on a summer's night.
Kill my landlord. Kill my landlord.
Watchdog barking. Do he bite?
Kill my landlord. Kill my landlord.
Slip in his window. Break his neck.
Then his house I start to wreck.
Got no reason. What the heck?
Kill my landlord. Kill my landlord.
C-I-L-L my land lord!
I tried a few searches, and judging by the results returned, they should rename it 'Shet'.
We didn't find any results for "solaris"
Whenever someone trots out a new search engine, my usefulness test search is "java keyword default". If the first page does not include a language spec for java indicating that 'default' is a keyword that appears in switch, then the engine is marked 'fail'. Only google did it right and even now, they have slipped. The one right page is forum at sun where someone is getting schooled on what the keyword 'default' is about, but not sun's own language documentation. That used to be the number one position. However, the link spam is significantly less. Currently on google you have to mentally edit the garbage out as you read if your search refers to anything that might be bought or sold.
Try something popular, UFC 87 - fails!
searching for "Miserable Failure" - gives correct results - a direct link to George Bush's biography.
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=miserable%20failure&sl=long/
I'll see your hokum and raise you a boondoggle.
While most searches came up with null results, the few that returned results appeared either off topic or otherwise useless.
I think Cuil has a very long way to go before Google even bats and eye at them.
BrickerEnterprises.Com - Innovation at work
it is good for a starter. I personally will dump google when I have a chance. Google`s privacy policy sucks big monkey balls.
I am cuiling at the moment.
Call me a bigot, but I am only really interested in open source search engines these days. Google pretty much has the proprietary search engine market covered, as far as I'm concerned. It's fast, has the results I want on the first page almost always, and it doesn't cost me anything to use it.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Some strangely hilarious results as it matches images between sites. I find my website next to a drystone wall because i share a name (but nothing else) with a dry stone walling specialist. Other people who share the same name have their faces interchanged.
10 years ago if you had said "I'll just Google it" to anyone they would have looked at you like a cuckoo just popped out of your forehead.
If the internet had shown us anything besides porn, it's that any word can be verbed.
The first two times I searched 'clapton woman tone' (my standard search tester) I came up with 0 results. On the third try, I finally got 328,839,126 results. There may be some bugs to work out still.
God, I can't stand you corporate assholes.
The name, the business plan, everything screams, "Marketing Think Tank".
The difference between you manipulative scum and something which isn't you, is that you don't know what Passion and Honesty are. They don't come in a bottle, and they cannot be engineered in a board room. You crocodiles are the kinds of people who think, "Ah, I understand that if you turn the corners of your mouth up, then people are more likely to let you exploit them."
The sad, sick, depressing and altogether pathetic part is that often you vile pieces of worm dung are successful. Luckily, in this case, my spider sense is telling me that you are about to amount to a big fat nothing. You're probably just in this to scam investors and you have no real interest in actually even making a successful search engine; that's just part of the horse & pony show. All you have to do is demonstrate due diligence, and pocket the check. At least the public isn't the piece of cake which happens to be in your sights this time around. Fuck you and enjoy your worm dung lives. --But you'd better be quick; your brethren in banking and industry have seen to it that all your money will be worth less than toilet paper by the middle of next year. (Because you see, toilet paper is more comfortable and absorbent to wipe with.)
"Cuil."
-FL
I typed in some searches I regularly get good hits from on Google and Cuil delivered zero hits each time. If they indexed three times as many pages as Google, what pages were they? Porn I hope.
-A INPUT -s 64.1.215.160/255.255.255.224 -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-port-unreachable
whois returns:
network:Organization;I:CUILL, INC. (259492-1)
network:IP-Network:64.1.215.160/27
Why? because despite multiple attempts to prevent the aggressive spidering of my sites by this abuser they did not stop.
Buh-bye, losers.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I searched for my own surname: nothing
I searched for my company's name: nothing
I search for my country's name: nothing
Well, I could understand surname and company (although they have many entries in google), but country?
I live in Spain: 0 results vs 491,000,000 in google.
We didnt find any results for Cute Asses ... What?!
Some reasons might be...
* a typo. Please check your spelling. Come on! Playing grammar nazi when your unable to deliver? And it's not a typo, damn it! Anyway, Google delivers tons of content even on severe misspellings!
* your search includes a term that is very rare. Try to find a more common substitute.There are 6 bn asses on Earth. Is it very rare by your standards? Well...
* too many search terms. Please try fewer terms.OK, I got it, 2 is too many. But if I have only 1, how can you separate cute asses from ugly ones?
Finally, try to think of different words to describe your search.Exactly! Google!
This search engine is worthless so far.
My second search, with safety on, returned a porn site as its first result. My search was "afterschool.com". Go figure.
Hey, the dot-bomb called and said they wanted their business plan back.
Sorry dudes, you already failed when you picked a stupid name. Your entire future is simply waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Don't kill the messenger.
Pretty pathetic that a search engine is slashdotted and unusable.. "Sorry, an error occurred. Please try your search again. If the problem persists, please be assured that our team is working quickly to resolve the issue."
at least make sure all the links on YOUR SITE work. I tried clicking at the links on the top of their page and some of them were broken. On the FAQ page it had a link to their crawler for websiters, but that link is broken as well. Just bugs me.
Ya, the search results have a lot to be desired, but I'm sure as the site continues to crawl the web and they start taking submissions or whatever they will end up with better results, as the site looks nice and displays info well, it just doesn't have a lot of info...yet.
Ave Molech Setting
Sorry, an error occurred.
Please try your search again. If the problem persists, please be assured that our team is working quickly to resolve the issue.
so much for it being touted as the competitor to google...
-- Fuck Beta
Send your feedback to: feedback@cuil.com. I just did. It wasnâ(TM)t pretty
"Cuil" is a really dumb name.
I have to agree mainly because viewed at a distance in my default Firefox font the 'i' looks like an 'l' so I was left trying to figure out why a search engine cull was bad for Google!
The article states " Costello also claims that Cuil's Web crawler is three times faster than Google's" and not "three times as many". Google may be crawling as many as 1 trillion pages http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html while the cuil front page says something more like 121 billion.
The speed claim may or may not be true but crawling a trillion times three isn't as plausible unless you get a crawler that likes to crawl a lot of junk. :)
so usually its a good idea to wait until your technology works before you market it, but they must have just skipped that phase. typical searches yield about half the results of google. im sure all of the extra pages in their index are spam/phish/malware related.
"i stand on the edge of destruction" -shai hulud
I looked at a couple of results and 'recency' does not seem to be part of the algo. This seems to be a continuance of the PageRank paradigm which is inherently flawed: one algo for 1.3 Mio users?!
It still has a long way to go, but it has the potential to be great. The thing that impressed me was their privacy policy:
Cuil analyzes the Web, not its users
Privacy is a hot topic these days, and we want you to feel totally comfortable using our service. .. So our privacy policy is very simple: when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookie. Your search history is your business, not ours.
Huh. I can't seem to find the search engine itself searching for 'cuil.' You'd think they would spider their own website first.
1,789,736,391 results for intelligence at microsoft
We all know the answer is 0.
if I were able to see further, it was because I stood on the shoulders of Giants -Newton
Here's my quick review:
1) I really like the privacy policy. Google
worries me. Especially when I can fill my screen
with detailed images of my home - not to mention the
amount of information they have stored on me and my search history.
2) I don't like the columnar results. You can reduce it down to 2 columns - but why not 1 - maybe google has me trained but scanning results left-right, top-bottom seems like more work.
3) searches like "target san francisco, ca" bring up the store with phone number + map google. cuil's results are nothing special. I tend to use google quite frequently for these types of "yellow pages" type queries.
4) I think cuil needs to present one thing they do better than Google that would justify switching. The privacy angle is HUGE but I think they need at least one(or a few) in your face, obvious features that in some way, for some target audience, blows google away feature wise.
5) I am sure this will draw laughter - but honestly, I sort of miss ads - advertising does have value, and when you search for something sometimes you appreciate seeing links that people are willing to pay money to show you.
did a search in Arabic for the word Arabic and got 3/11 results on the page in English. Talk about off target.
Neither are good at finding specific personal pages if they are similar to something that is a roughly normal term. No big surprise here, though.
1:Type in say, anything in Google with "review" in it. Typically you want information on the newest processor or car or something, right? You get 20,000+ links to blog and responses and such on retailer sites instead of actual reviews from mainstream sites. Google is hideous here. Cuil filters out the blog blather. In fact, it seems to ignore blogs entirely, which is a godsend, really. I don't care what some idiot in the middle of nowhere thinks about a product. I want real magazine articles and analysis.
2:Cuil is worthless for any search that includes a location, though. Say, I want to run the same search but for Los Angeles(where I live) Ramen reviews. There's really only ONE major site that reviews this and is only about local places to eat.(ramaniac) Google pulls it up as #1. Cuil thinks I want names and addresses of every darn shop in the area and goes brain-dead on the "review" part. Ramaniac isn't in the first half dozen pages.
I used the word "review" as it is a good way to tell how the engines are filtering results as it covers a lot of potential meanings, yet has specific results depending upon the usage that almost always mean you don't want any of the other interpretations.
Google seems to focus on the verb or adjective for results and Cuil seems to look at the subject/noun. It's worth keeping in mind.(though for some searches, like the example I used, I'll be using Cuil instead) Cuil also does seem to do better with seeing excluded words more as topics than actual terms, so for instance, I can search for "Los Angeles Ramen Reviews -address" and get what I wanted originally. Google doesn't change at all that I can tell with that modifier.
P.S. I also tried a couple of specific names. Google is horribly bad at this. Cuil seems to understand that you are looking for sites with personal information and so on/trying to locate someone, especially if the name is similar to another more common name. I'll be using Cuil for personal and web page searches from now on as well.
Ie - I searched for "Handl". This is a specific Italian composer from almost 100 years before Handel. It pulled up only results for people with that name and of course, the composer and rejected "Handel". Google gave me the result I wanted but only 2-3 results, then spammed "Handel" responses. If I was looking for a friend with that last name, I'd be out of luck with Google. Google's "you're an idiot - you spelled that wrong and want THIS spelling instead" behavior bothers me a lot. I constantly find myself having to do "-(name) -(name) -(name)" to keep it focused.
Google's biggest problem is that it's founder's/owner's politics show up in so many of their search results as well as their other products. Now I don't mind if they're going to erase blogs that are anti-obama, or refuse ads from conservatives. Those are products they're selling and they can choose who they want. But when I do a non-political search and ten percent of the returns are left wing political commentaries?
Please, enough all ready. We know you're leftists, but quit trying to color everything else in the world with your beliefs, I just want a result to my search!
...I wonder where that cookie will be used for...
This search found my username inside a jpeg and in the binary contents of a pdf.
Need some algorithm refining. Would save a lot of processing - and probably lower the announced number of indexed pages!
If you search for something too specific, Google will just return noise. Also, if you're searching for a page very little people have linked to, Google is not your friend. Google is very good for searching the "obvious" result.
For these reasons, I occasionally resort to Clusty. It atempts to categorize (semantic web?) the results and sometimes it helped me search for that page that was buried under Google's statistical heap of nothingness.
Cuil seems to operate with categories too. I welcome competition.
Besides, let's be honest. It's nothing like the major epic fucking fail that Microsoft search engine was.
I bet Cuil is here to stay.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Darn, and when I searched for "weapons of mass destruction in Iraq" I thought the truth was finally out there when no results were found.
Only to discover the "no results" searches appear to be some side effect of being overly busy :(
Did anyone notice this: www.cuil.com/search?q=
[sarcastic]
It reminds me of one address that I'm used to see elsewhere.. I can't remember where
[/sarcastic]
Yeah, I know, yahoo uses a scheme like that, but at least they change the GET variable to p
>Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity.
This message seems to be the catch all message when the search isn't cached on their end--or they don't have results to show? A search for "adam eve cain able" always comes back with their servers busy. But search just on "adam" and they display results.
I think it's a fundamental mistake to judge the health or future prospects of a company by its stock price. Google is a company with a positive cash flow, little debt, and sizable cash reserves. If they were a private company it would be howlingly funny to speculate that they are going to crash anytime soon.
Stock prices fluctuate all over the place, having as much to do with the relative bets of institutional investors as with the business fundamentals of the company itself. If you want to predict the future of a tech company have a look at its balance sheet and R&D resources. By both measures Google seems to have a long and healthy future in front of it.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Hi! This is the internet; you can curse here.
Permissible, but not beneficial.
The Internet is a social place. We can associate more respectably and communicate more effectively by using decent rhetoric. Cursing distracts, and detracts, from your message... even if the words are obfuscated (- note to the GP).
CUIL is an acronym at NASA that means: Common Usage Item List.
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
compare:
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=nemati%20comet&sl=long#
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=nemati+comet&btnG=Google+Search
Funny, the so called better search engine doesn't even show up results for itself, google show is as its first result when you search for "cuil"... this is beaten to death right aways....
I did a spot check of a few search terms, and I found that 1) I didn't like the relevance of the selection as much as I like it at Google. 2) The images don't match the domains they are alleged to be with. I saw some of my images (including logo) associated with other sites, and when I clicked through to the site my image was no where there to be found. It's almost as if they just grab images and text related to the search term and match them up whether or not they belong to each other. 3) "too many connections" error encountered three times. I've never encountered that with Google. I like the idea of having images to go with the search results. However, if they are not accurate matches, then that is going to be a distraction, not a help. More is not better if it is not accurate. Thumbs down. I wont be using their service.
Tomorrow's news yesterday -- the bleeding, visionary edge.
Cuil looks me an old school master, this kind of search engine should be in existence I think so. It`s cool, how often i will listen about this master I will consult.
"We didn't find any results for 'seattle.'"
Well, of course.
I have to agree, except from an end user standpoint. Frankly, the UI sucks. Sure, it may superficially look nice and shiny (because it's new and different--and most commercial sites just don't use black backgrounds) but there are already some major irritations.
First, the entry field on the first page. It's awful. The text is fairly small and it doesn't seem to stand out particularly well from the background. At least with most other sensible search engines, it's trivial to see what you've typed in, even if you're using a ridiculously high resolution. If I have to ctrl+wheel to increase the size of a font, there's already something wrong.
Secondly, and this is where I stopped because of the results (beaten to death already by most posters). How the heck are two columns of text--or the default of three--supposed to be easy enough for someone to quickly scan. When I search, I'm not going to have my eyes bouncing across my browser window just to look for a result. I'd rather scan DOWN the page with minimal effort. Less eye movement == easier, friendly interface. I can't seem to find the article now, but Jakob Nielsen had one written on how users scan pages (something to the effect of scanning a page in the shape of an F). I'm sure he'll have something to say about the design of Cuil if prodded enough.
That's my rant about the UI. I'm certainly no UI expert, so I'd advise that my comments should be taken with a grain of salt. However, I do know what works easiest for me, and having search results returned in a single column is easiest. If I have to read a more detailed site overview simply because a search engine doesn't return concise results, I'm going to go somewhere else. Obviously, I'm using the search engine to find something fast. If the search engine impedes my ability to find results quickly and with minimal effort on my behalf, they're not bound to get visited by me again!
He who has no
http://digg.com/tech_news/Cuil_Doesent_show_its_own_name_when_searched
Cuil doesent show its own name when searched Talk about indexing!
The mean jew?
The stupid nigger?
The cowardly bosnian?
The lazy romanian?
The ugly Tutsi?
The dead homosexual?
The guy in the wheelchair?
The drunken Irishman?
Sure they're only harmless jokes.
(Blanket apologies to anyone I've offended).
If there were a book entitled 'How to commit genocide', chapter 1 would be 'The Harmless Joke'.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
"Just because it's commonplace does not make it acceptable. "
Just because you are intolerant doesn't make it not acceptable.
"That makes no excuse for bigotry, nor does it allow for discrimination."
It's neither, and close minded people who say its are part of the problem.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I saw this, and laughed. They don't know who sends queries? cURL tells me their webserver is CherryPy - I don't know it, but I have a strong feeling that CherryPy knows exactly who (what IP address) sent a query. I'd imagine unless they're running on a single server (and they did say they were running out to buy some more, see some other post.. somewhere on this page), there'll be a raft of load balancing / proxy software on their servers that all know the IP addresses queries are coming from. Do they seriously expect us to believe none of those systems are making logs?
Some people think "Irishness" is cool. I'm sure we're only a few domain registrations away from the search engines "Dark-e" and "Slowp". It must be hard coming up with a marketable excuse for the only 4-letter domain name you could find available. I'm not convinced hoisting the colours of one nation or community is such a great idea for an Internet venture, I'm sure it must alienate as many as it wins over. Would it have been better if they'd said "Like 'cool', only spelt funny"?
while i totally agree with what's been said previously about branding, and the need for a memorable name, let's not forget the stupid name for nintendo's revolution when it was renamed the wii - pretty much a household name now I would say?
Well I think everybody who is able to refine his search can do withouth Cuil! I don't like the column layout. And I don't like the fact, that space is vasted by the whole layout, this catalogue view ...
Do you think Google could sue them? They have had clear insights into Google Technology...
just replaced my g00g bookmarks toolbar link with a cuil link.
Lol, I cuiled the word Cuil....and voila...none of the results match! I also tried cuiling about the recent bomb blasts in India......got links to the 1992-93 blasts!
"Do not confuse the unusual with the impossible" - Psmith
I'm always feeling lucky with Google-
When a search is done using the keyword "aqk", my website is ALWAYS shown at the top.
And Yahoo as well.
But CUIL? Harrumph!
All they could find was a nasty ol' computer virus and some silly Pakistani Nuclear physicist who apparently sells blueprints for atomic weapons to Iran and Al-Queerduh or whatever!
Well! Borrrring...!
I might start using cuil.com once they recognize my importance!
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- aqk
F U
When will a web search engine open that help you LIMIT your search? I mean, normally you can't use broad enough search terms to find the pages you want, because if you do, you get too many hits. I have yet to find a single search engine with any sort of page count and such that can do a simple thing like exact string match. Maybe I need to look for a product called "sEx"... or find the documention for a "setPoint()" method. enter either of those in google and it will look up "sex" and "setpoint", no matter if you enter "sEx" and ".setPoint(", and regardless if you quote it, etc. So you get too man hits, and have to start guessing additional words until you get down to a reasonable level of hits, and then you probably don't find anything anyway, since you guessed the wrong words.
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=bipin%20upadhyay I was sentenced to five years Rigorous Imprisonment :(( :)
What the hell! I prefer Yahoo! search anyways.
Blog
after taking a look at Cuil i dismissed them as no threat to my own companies effort at Search. Not only can't they return anywhere close to our results (but then even google has trouble there)but like almost all search engines (except ours) they do not keep visitors on site for any length of time. We discovered long ago that the real trick in running a search engine is the ability to retain your users on the results pages while still allowing them easy access to the information/sites they are seeking. This is one reason why our New engine which is only 4 months old has climbed to PR 5 on the main index and PR 4 on the TLD search index, obtained without any trickery or fancy SEO Footwork.
Try Easy Search Live - Next Generation Search Guaranteed more results better search experience
Not one link mentioned their site, not even news stories, etc...
that's pretty funny
I believe that people that tried Cuil early on will be much happier with the site now that it has had a few days to digest user query styles. I have noted a significant improvement in just two days. The number of hits have improved as has accuracy. Give them a chance to tweak things around a bit before laying the heavy criticism on them. Imagine if you were judged similarly on your first day at a new job. I'm usually lucky to find the coffee machines, break room, my boss's location, where I sit, the restrooms and the routes that connect them all. ;-)
Be as you would have the world become.