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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...]
Nah, don't like it much.
Makes search results look like a female oriented magazine.
I guess they didn't plan for the initial rush of traffic.
test test test
everything until it works.
there won't be a Times article titled 'after two weeks, Cuil got its act together'
...
but... who knows. perhaps there will be.
Not impressed so far.
It is great for anyone to aim high but when a company says that they want to fight with Google, they are just looking for cheap publicity.
I feel sorry for Cuil investors for investing in such a lousy search engine.
Yet another opportunity lost for providing an alternative to Google.
1) Is it scalable?
2) Are users clamoring for alternatives to Google?
Google. Easy to pronounce. Easy to repeat. Easy to get word-of-mouth exposure.
Agreed. I think the name is horrible. You will have to spell it every time your tell someone about it. Bad for branding, IMO.
Don't underestimate the people behind this technology and what they just may do.
But marketing it is going to be tough - Google is a tough act to try and trump.
Overall the results are looking good for the upstart. Of course we can't compare a rookie business with the team currently working at Google.
"Mozilla/5.0 (Twiceler-0.9 [cuill.com...]
Also you would have thought a company with such potential would have IP records in their own name:
64.1.215.ccc is XO Comm.
38.99.44.ccc is PSI
Tried another search. My site came in with different pages at 1,3,4,6,8,9. The top result had an image that is nothing to do with my site.
Well. Not so good.
"4 days in Widgetcity"
Cuil finds lots and lots of eBay listings for tickets. Tickets? No travel guides? No hotel sites?
"Aerial view of Widgetville"
No results. Huh? The biggest index? Er, no. Not yet.
"Superhotelname golf hotel somewhereisland"
OK. Very few results. My site is at #2 (or is that #4?). Even the right picture next to it. Good.
"sleepytown italien"
OK. They show two entries from my sites, fair enough. One would be better, though.
"popularfestival faq"
Okayish. Almost. A lot of identical/similar articles, many of them coming from the official site for the popularfestival. My site nowhere to be found.
"Photos of wondertown italy"
So-so results, with several photos from Arizona? And some hotel sites advertising hotels in wondertown, that show off photos of the hotel rooms. The pages bar announces "10" result pages, yet there are no results beyond page 2. Gasp.
Nah, Cuil is surprisingly Uncuil today and certainly not a Google competitor anytime soon. Reviewers will have a good time dragging the search engine through the dirt, while at the same time pointing out the marvels of Google once more.
Would love to see another player in the mix and I'll be rooting for them.
My pages don't display when searched by content - one of the suposed pluses of this new "innovation".
They have a lot of work to do before they are up to par with Google (like G's comprehensive suite of web aps). I'm curious as to what language/platform Cuil uses.
Google does need some competition, but Cuil isn't that competiton. At least not yet. We'll see what happens.
Images don't match the company in the result and the results are pretty bad.
They have a very long way to go and indexing billions of pages isn't going to make them good unless they can actually present those in some good results when searched upon. Right now, they missed it by a mile.
Results are not any where near good, they can't keep up with demand and as a search engine provider they should be able to do that.
They say they have so many sites indexed yet not one of my sites are indexed.
Granted they are just starting out but still they should be able to provide at least decent results and I just don't see that at all.
Mozilla/5.0 (Twiceler-0.9 [cuill.com...]In July, they crawled less than 1% of my total pages. And they claim to have indexed how many pages? 121,617,892,992? Bull.
Makes me wonder, WHY is it that they failed on so many frontiers?
1) Not scalable (clearly).
2) Wrong images (impossible that they have not noticed during their tests).
3) Bad layout (again, end consumer testing would have quickly revealed that).How can it happen that a startup in 2008 with good funding can't launch a decent service?
The benchmark really seems to be Google, I know that in IR tests that's always a good way to see how your system is doing. The results aren't even really worth comparison right now.
I really like how the results are displayed though, i like the category tab on the right, and think it offeres really relevant options. And it is contextual search. WSD is used in just about every NLP system (just we don't all do it the same way), as is keyword co-occurance, if you want to have a go try Ted Pedersen's tool, in fact all his tools are cool :)
A little bold of me maybe, but I think Cuil should have the word "beta" in their logo.
[edited by: Misscj at 3:09 pm (utc) on July 28, 2008]
[edited by: gibbergibber at 3:12 pm (utc) on July 28, 2008]
I don't like the way it returns multiple pages from the same site. (well I do when its my site, if they could get address right that is). The private site is a photo gallery of music festivals that I visit. Search on a festival and a separate result comes back for each photo.
But i think we should support them .
Absolutely, its very exciting to see someone really take a stab at this.
After all you're asking people to switch from Google to something brand new. Why would they?
Because its different.
Cuil (pronounced COOL)
So why didn’t they just call it cool.com and buy that domain, its just a MFA site, whoever these guys are they could find the money to buy it. These guys definitely need marketing help. A BLACK screen? You gotta be kidding.
They should have been better prepared for the launch, that's for sure...
Big time, people are going to get very turned off by how poorly its performing right now. In fact all I’m getting now is; “We didn’t find any results for”
Despite all the problems, poor performance and incredible marketing mistakes, I’m far more interested in, and optimistic about this than any incremental improvements MSN or Yahoo might make.
Already the sand is slipping through the hour glass for them, but heres to hoping they can right the ship, and fast.
One of the results has a picture of a gas station on it that's found nowhere on that site... it's not even close to the focus of the site. How in the world do they intend to display relevant images?
Here's where I think they miss the boat the most... the name. "google" is fast becoming part of the vernacular. I'm not even sure how to pronounce Cuil. Is it like coo-eel? coo-ill? sue-ill? sue-eel? No idea.
Former Employees of Google
All of these sites listed for me, are much newer to the web than my site, and can not possibly be more relevant for my keyword My Company Name at offering what my site offers. In fact, my site doesn't come up at all, even with the url entered. They will rank new sites that copy my content, but not me?
It wasn't just one of my sites, it was ALL of my sites, checked one by one, each that ranks highly in all other engines for the major nitch keywords the individual site covers.
AND . . . when I searched for one word keywords, those that produce 100+m results in other engines, I get the report "no results". That would be my summary of this engine, "No Results". Don't waste your time.
Not cuil, kewl, nor cool at all. I'll never use it.
