Cuil having trouble keeping index up to date?

[gibbergibber]

(I wanted to put this in the main Cuil thread but it's been locked. Presumably it's okay to still talk about Cuil on this forum though as it is an alternative search engine?)

There was a big event I was waiting for, and the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Live) managed to provide links to reviews of this event within 24 hours, some of them indexed within an hour of publication.

It's now been many days since the event and Cuil provides no links at all to any post-event reports, just articles that previewed it months ago.

Is it possible that Cuil does indeed have a bigger index than others, but doesn't have the ability to update it easily?

[Lord Majestic]

It is a very difficult problem to keep web scale search engine up to date - the bigger it is the harder it is. In case of Cuil I think they launched it earlier than they planned.

[zett]

I read a story that Cuil stopped indexing sites around May/June 2007. The author claimed that sites created later were not in their index. I did not check upon that (did now, and found at least one site that was fresh). Maybe it was one of the many problems during their launch hickup?

[edited by: engine at 9:01 am (utc) on Aug. 12, 2008]

[Staffa]

stopped indexing sites around May/June 2007

I have seen them drop by till before the launch but, unless I missed a visit, nothing since then.

[Funtick]

Try to compare search results for "www.amazon.com"... they clam that their index is 3 times bigger - such a funny achievement!

I also noticed they show in search results pieces of AdSense generated text taken from crawled pages.

[inbound]

Keeping the index up to date seems to be a moot point given the spectacular failure that they had in converting interest into loyal searchers!

In the locked thread I posted early stats for a busy site (percentage of visitors delivered):

28th July: 0.145%
29th July: 0.244%
30th July: 0.122%
31st July: 0.075%
1st August:0.063%

Looking at the last 7 days, the average is now down to 0.019% - that's just one visitor from Cuil for every 5262 visitors from other search engines!

[Lord Majestic]

So 0.244 at peak to 0.019 now - a drop of 12 times - not Cuil :(

[StoutFiles]

Cuil...failing at something? This is unheard of!

[zett]

Cuil *is* cuil, that much is clear. Being made by Ex-Googlers, Cuil can not fail. With these impressive CVs, how could they?

I just love the layout, and the way they *cough* creatively use pictures they *cough* find on the web to illustrate the search results. Thank God, they did not change their product to comply with those few critics who claimed that this use of images was violating copyrights!

P.S.: The drop in usage is probably due to an inaccuracy from your log file analyzer. And those web-based stats, well, we all know that Alexa never gets anything right. Probably they have bypassed Yahoo! and Microsoft in traffic by now.

[/irony]

[zett]

Just out of curiosity, I checked the stats for Cuil referers. In August, Cuil sent about 0.05% of the search engine traffic. It's a joke.

[incrediBILL]

Being made by Ex-Googlers

I misread, I thought it was made OUT of Ex-Googlers, sort of a Soylent Google.

Their indexing is definitely slowing down as I haven't seen them back in a few days.