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
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.
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
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.
"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!
Cuil means "back" or "rear" in Gaelic.
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
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?
There are definitely a lot of bugs. For example, the first page of a search for "Cambridge University" fails to link to the University of Cambridge's official site, but "University of Cambridge" has it as the first hit.
I can see why that's happening, but that would catch a lot of people out.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
.....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
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
"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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
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.
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.
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
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"
"zeta potential analysis of gold colloids" returns no results whereas google returns 44,300.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hmmm. I was just showing Cuil to someone and it returned 67,000 results for the "EngenderHealth" search. Maybe it is just database overload.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
"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
I was consistently getting "No results" for common search terms, until I turned off SafeSearch, I then got expected search results.
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.
Except the main feature of Cuil seems to be that they keep no personally identifiable information. Cuil can't be an overlord if they don't know who you are. I kind of like that and I'm going to give it a serious try out.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
That's precisely why they are the ultimate overlord. They don't need to know who you are.
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.
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.
Typed 'Free porn' and the first result was "National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum". Thanks. I prefer Google.
-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