"Cuil" Search Engine Launches, Kind of Doesn't Work
A new search engine dubbed Cuil (pronounced "cool") launched recently. There've been many pretenders to Google's throne in the past decade, but this one comes with a serious pedigree: it was designed by a husband and wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson, with Russell Power. Patterson and Power are former Google heavyweights, and Costello was the founder of Xift.
Cuil claims to be the world's largest search engine, indexing 121,617,892,992 web pages at the time of this writing. Patterson claims that Cuil's new algorithms can index faster and at a lower cost, with more relevant results than Google's current algorithm.
So far, it's got a lot of catching up to do. Shortly after the site went live on Monday it crashed and stayed down for much of the day due to the demand. (A curse of marketing hype, sure, but a search engine of all things needs to support the server load.) Early reports say that search results are often irrelevant or even downright confusing. I myself am having quite a difficult time getting useful results from Cuil--the "magazine layout" format often returns results with images that are completely unrelated to the searched content--pictures that aren't even hosted by or linked to by sites in the search results, making me wonder how the heck they ended up there.
Are any of you having any luck with Cuil? Or conversely, what's your funniest (and safe for work, now) irrelevant search result?
--Aric A.
Jan on July 31, 2008 at 10:57 AM
A few quick searches provided mixed results.
Most glaring omission seems that standard search query modifiers such as site: don't work, and instead the keyword 'site' is searched.
A search for 'Seattle Restuarants' produced meaningful results.
The results seem to be heavily skewed towards content sites. A search for 'iPod Touch' didn't provide a single retailer in the first 100 results. That makes their claim to 'more relevant results' questionable in my mind.
A search for 'Seattle Photography Locations' provided reasonable results, though it appears that they allow a single site to dominate the results heavily. The results have less diversity than Google shows.
I do like the presentation with more content per entry. The results are richer, but can't be scanned quite as fast.
Overall none of the results was good enough to make me want to switch or even use it frequently as a secondary search engine. Time will tell.
Search engine optimization on January 11, 2009 at 11:56 PM
Cuil must catch up. its high time google get a set back. they have been dominating too much. I dont hate google. But i dont like their monopolistic attitude. Maybe is cuil poses a serious competition then they may better the present scenario