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SAN FRANCISCO — In her two years at Google, Anna Patterson helped design and build some of the pillars of the company’s search engine, including its large index of Web pages and some of the formulas it uses for ranking search results.
Skip to next paragraphThe makers of the Cuil search engine say it should provide better results and show them in a more attractive manner.
Now, along with her husband, Tom Costello, and a few other Google alumni, she is trying to upstage her former employer.
On Monday, their company, Cuil, is unveiling a search engine that they promise will be more comprehensive than Google’s and that they hope will give its users more relevant results.
[nytimes.com...]
DITTO
"We didn’t find any results for “example”
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...
[edited by: crobb305 at 12:57 pm (utc) on July 28, 2008]
There are definately bugs this morning. For a major keyword ... no results.
For one of my sites, and unknown graphic beside the result.
I would think they are rather busy today with the avalanche of traffic and numerous bugs.
Hope they get it all worked out, we need another major search engine.
It's like eBay's Kijiji. All this effort into launching new enterprises and yet people choose domains that are so easily misspelled or mispronounced.
Give's us with good search / find domains a chance to sell to them ;)
Good luck i say... results were pretty accurate for a few UK searches (although those were only broad health / finance / seo type searches....) until I got kicked off as their servers melted!
That will be resolved soon enough though.
still, early days, good luck cuil
I wish them luck however. The world needs more search competition for sure. Google is a superb search engine but they have the power to break people, even if they don't mean to.
Not to mention Google can offer multiple applications off their homepage, including the fancy iGoogle. Cuil can only offer an average search that won't even load for me right now.
Good luck cuil...I...I don't even know how to pronounce your name. :(
Case 1: some years ago i would search using Altavista, one day I stumbled upon a new search engine called Google. The results were imediate, they were better, therefore i started using Google.
Case 2: today I use Google, then I stumbled upon a new search engine called Cuil. The results were imediate, they were worse, therefore i will never use Cuil again.
How sad. They got the promotion. They got the traffic. They failed.
On a more specific search, my site came up at #1 but the photo that came up with the result was from some other source, yet it linked to my site.
Are these images results some kind of image search result that is somehow independent of the text search result?
In spite of the big hullabaloo, I think maybe we need to look at this as not even the "beta" version, but as the yet untested "alpha" version, and maybe - just possibly - give productive input on assessment and improvement of relevancy factors.
The IR foundation is sound, it's probably the practical implementation that needs empirical statistical input to maximize the potential of their technology.
Cuil (pronounced COOL)
The makers of the Cuil search engine say it should provide better results and show them in a more attractive manner.
The results display really needs to be rethough. Going from the more than a decade long standard 1 column to 3 columns with no numbers indicating relevance ranking is putting too much processing on the user. If you are going to go against the conventions that people are used to, you'd better be doing a better job, and I don't think they are. It seems like change just to be different rather than to convey information in a more efficient and effective manner.
[edited by: crobb305 at 1:55 pm (utc) on July 28, 2008]
Other results are directory entries or scraper sites.
And the pictures are all wrong. How are they collecting them?!
'Google it'
'Cool it'
... it might just work.
'Google it'
'Cool it'... it might just work.
Except when I try to cool it, I go to cool.com, which sadly is not a search engine. Frustrated, I go to google.com and never consider to 'cool it' again.
Having a domain that's spelled differently is ok if what you offer is so amazing that people stop for a minute to study your name and make sure they can type it into a browser. Cuil fails in that depatment.
My typical test of US locations (City, State & City, state postal code) came up with unimpressive results. Lots of spam on middle market cities, where most of the population lives. They launched too early in my opinion.
Everyone thought Google was a pretty stupid name too, once.
Nice start - let's see what happens.
It is possible to detect duplicate content and then apply this pattern to yet uncrawled urls , this way you can "search" those duplicate "pages" without even crawling them.
But more competition is always good - so long as claims (like 120 bln pages) are backed by reality as otherwise it may have the opposite effect - negatively affect startups who won't be able to raise money since Cuil is so damn good.
give them a chance
Definitely, The feedback they'll be getting over the next few weeks will be invaluable to them in improving what's there already.
Old Irish word for knowledge, eh? (says about us page, which first gave me error [had I typed in link correctly?])
Yes, dodgy results, not inspiring return visits.
Layout makes it look tough to get load of results (100 on page - not an option in preferences) and scan down thro them.
Tried one place I've done site on, and didn't find my site, but various photos of mine scattered around other sites (one used as logo on a site; others just on homepages)
For a bigger place, the list of "cities in ..." was woeful; hard to know how it was arrived at.
Will a Kuleguy appear here, seek ideas, n lead to rapid changes? Doubt it; the bluster suggests the ancient Irish knowledge folks were happy with Cuil thus far.
