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http://scobleizer.com/2008/07/27/a-new-search-engine-appears-will-you-use-it/ -
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Its giving 102,986 results for scobleizer.
as against 1,070,000 in Google.
Your popularity will be down by 1/10 if people use Cuil.
Some of "great" blogger are not even featuring.
So I guess you are lucky.
As it is who is going to use Cuil ? I guess nobody.
But that was the case with Google earlier too.. I maybe wrong ...
Live Search, Yahoo, Alta Vista, Ask, Wikia Search ( am I missing any? ) and now Cuil.. how many more would it take to give a stiff competition to Google?!
That makes it difficult to actually compare the quality of the results, because they could likely change that with a huge amount of funding (or an acquisition).
Me, I agree with your point that they are there for Microsoft's money. Microsoft would be intelligent to buy the promising search start-ups and give them all the resources they need. (Personnel, computing power)
Cuil could give them a cheaper crawling technology, which all other search properties (Live Search, Powerset) would profit from, Powerset could take this index and process it with their technology, Live Search and Cuil could do their thing with it.
Live Search is a dead brand, they should simply try several approaches and hope that one of them works. Cuil, like Powerset, wouldn't be very expensive. They could get it for 100 to 200 million dollars.
http://broadstuff.com/archives/1100-An-initial-...
Net net - nice, but what's the unique differentiator, as Robert notes.
"The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity."
Now it is up and I can make a few test searches. I actually like the clean 3-column layout. The long texts in the results seem to be of rather good quality. I'm definetely going to use it now and then. At least, it gives an additional viewpoint to the web.
BTW: For those looking for more visual search, do check searchme.com which is in beta stage at the moment.
Moreover, tried cuil [word] on google [search] and google [word] on cuil [search] .. cuil gave me link to google.co.uk ! and a tabbed browsing for its specific sites. which was nice.
Though, google has benchmarks which are difficult to beat the very first day.
It needs to evolve. Cuil's Evolution would tell..
Can't see it doing much - any website that needs to be spelt and is unclear how to pronounce is never going to get past a niche audience that likes to blog about sites that are silly to spell and need explainations on how to say it.
Mum and Dad aren't going to be using cool.com, i mean cuill.com, cull.com.... oh whatever. Just Google it.
But as cuil.com fails, let look at some of the nice ideas it came up with.
On thing I noticed with Cuil is it's lack of monetization or advertising. Granted they are new the layout doesn't seen to really lend itself to ads. In the end maybe they will invent some small piece of technology that one of the big 3 deem useful enough to buy them.
Sorry, at the moment Cuil seems disappointing to me.
"Explore by Category" is a nice addition, more engines should implement it.
-Results will be in an ordered list: are Cuil's left-to-right, then top-to-bottom? If so, the fifth highest item gets visibility at the top of the page?)
-Results are easily "scannable" by the eyes: Cuil's can't be scanned because they're broken into three columns (or even two, as they offer this option)...this irritates me, and apparently doesn't work well, see Nielsen's study http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html
-The toolbar: As you have mentioned, I already see people type in that, and they simply expect to see Google results (or as you said, they type in their Url there...oops). Even if Cuil got a toolbar in peoples' browsers, if a three column list popped up, they'll think they've done something wrong, and they'll probably not even realize they're looking at search results
-Google is a verb and a noun...I would surmise that even if people used a different browser, they would probably still say, "Did you google it?" Much like "Xerox it" still gets thrown around even if you're using a Ricoh. Will anyone ever "cuil it?"
1. just keep hearing people RaVE re Cuil that it's SO much better
2 google starts being unreliable
I am probably not moving
Like the play for MS $ angle, that's a good bet.
Robert, you're absolutely right. This is a play for Microsoft $$$. We have a window of a few months where we're probably going to see tons of search companies start up with the sole purpose of being bought by Microsoft.
Come to think of it... it's so much like iPhone I could easily be led to believe it's an Apple product. Nice on the outside but essentially crap.
The new search is social media. I use blogs or twitter to find the content that people are discussing, which is a really good filter. And the system feeds on itself too. If the people/blogs talking about what I am interested in are not in my list, I will include in my ecosystem so that I can get their input next time as well.
2 examples of this:
- search.twitter.com: type a keyword, see who discuss the subject and what their general tweets are about. If they are talking about what you are interested in, follow them and you will get the input as it comes.
- eCairn: build a list of blogs, start listening, and keep feeding the system. The more you read, the more your ecosystem will be, and the better access to information you will have.
Now for Google all this is not a huge deal (at least Cuil is not) because Google is about infrastructure these days, rather than search. The real killer Google App is Google Apps, as a way to help companies transition into the new world of online collaboration and online participation. Watch them on this, I see a big wave coming...
http://research.microsoft.com/~ryenw/papers/Whi...
I think it answers your questions about what.. and even whether.. there is "a" search engine that you should be using.
A smart searcher, just like a smart woodworker (for example), understands that there is more than a single tool to get the job done. If you are using only a single engine, you are severely robbing yourself of the best results. No matter what one single engine that is.
"Its giving 102,986 results for scobleizer. as against 1,070,000 in Google."
It never ceases to amaze me how many people quote these types of numbers, then conclude that the engine with the bigger number is the better one. First of all, you should look at the experiment that Scoble did a few years ago, with the word "brrreeeport". One can conclude that Google vastly (and incorrectly) overinflates its numbers. It lies, in other words.
And even if it didn't lie, one has to realize that Google will not show you more than the top 1000 results, anyway. What does it matter if there are 100,000 or 100,000,000? If the search engine won't show you more than 1,000, the two numbers might as well be the same.
If anyone proved that a simple and better technology could eventually win out, it's GOOG.
Not saying Cuil has all that, just the logic behind many of these posts seems ironic given Google's history.
cuill, TC
You launch a search engine to compete against Google, spout off that you have more indexed pages, more relevant results, a better design, and better algorithm, and you name yourself Cuil (pronounced cool). You do a search using the Cuil search engine for the word Cuil, and they don't even show up in their own search results.
The size of their index is part of their pitch to users. They said to the press that they have the biggest index size.
Sure it doesn't matter - relevancy is the most important thing. I wouldn't care if search engines had only 20 results for each query - as long as these were the relevant results! But Cuil advertises their index size - which doesn't seem that big after all.
And since Scoble has already shown that Google lies about these sorts of things, by overinflating the reported numbers ("brrreeeport"), I don't really see how you can conclude that Cuil's index doesn't seem that big, after all.
And since Scoble had asked bloggers to put the word on their blogs, I tend to think that it is more true that 600 blogs suddenly started using the word, rather than 200,000 web pages.
So let's generously assume that the real number of pages that contained brrreeeport, two days after Scoble invented the word, was somewhere around 2000. That means that Google was overreporting the size of their index by a factor of about 100. So if this is really the case, and Cuil isn't lying about their numbers while Google is, then Cuil's index does appear to be larger.
Seems like Cuil is quite competitive with Google's size.
Doesn't pick up Mac-based urls...interface unpretty...not ready, overly bumptious....sure smells like a Microsoft branding project.
They're Kidding, right?
Very smooth.
"Cuil.com - works 60% of the time -- everytime"
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=Barack+Ob...
BTW it's incredibly easy to make Cuil your default search in Firefox... firefox asks you to add it while you're on the Cuil web site, if you expand the search option box top right.
Cuil should quickly add news - their layout would be great to add google news-like search results for certain queries - in a tabbed option layout. So far I think this is pretty good. It's not like Google search is so amazing that it's untouchable.
Like most things, there is tons of room for improvement.
http://www.aga-kids.com/
They may claim to have more pages indexed than Google, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. It depends on how you count, such is the nature of the web.
@Andrew: Well, is anyone actually going to want to find Cuil using Cuil. They are obviously aware of the search engine's location if they are using it.
Cuil:
eceblogger: Only finds references on other pages, search should produce www.eceblogger.com as the top result.
Project54: Search produces no results. It should find www.project54.com.
Andrew Kun: Worst of all, it can't find me very well! Shocking. When I search for Andrew Kun, I find a golf player in Canada and some old pages I set up, but not my current page in my department, or my www.andrewkun.com.
Google:
eceblogger: top result www.eceblogger.com
Project54: top result www.project54.unh.edu
Andrew Kun: top result my current UNH page, www.andrewkun.com is 3rd
Live Search:
eceblogger: top result www.eceblogger.com
Project54: top result www.project54.unh.edu
Andrew Kun: top result www.andrewkun.com
So forget Cuil! ;) Google and Live Search are tied with a slight edge to Live Search for placing www.andrewkun.com on top.
Love how someone further up said they "cuiled" themselves... and the image mix-up thing is downright comical (you'd think they would have checked at least that bit, apparently they served up even quite a few X-rated images next to unsuspecting poeple's bios, etc. ).
Just finished an in depth look at the Cuil branding disaster (with Knol hot on its heels):
http://businessmindhacks.com/post/cuil-knol-and-other-crimes-against-branding
I tried Cuil in the same way and sadly it lost me straight away - first by being down (I don't recall ever seeing that happen with Google - how are Cuil going to compete with that scale?) but I can forgive that...just. But by failing to return any answers to some queries that Google just nailed - I'm not talking about stuff that requires up-to-the-minute indexes, just regular searches that cuil thought were so specialized that nothing could be found whilst Google took me straight to the answer. Sorry guys but I'm too busy to help you debug your stuff when I have a perfectly adequate solution today.
I do appreciate the play on privacy - that alone got me interested enough to try it even after the initial service crashes. But you have to deliver and right now it doesn't
I tried Cuil in the same way and sadly it lost me straight away - first by being down (I don't recall ever seeing that happen with Google - how are Cuil going to compete with that scale?) but I can forgive that...just. But by failing to return any answers to some queries that Google just nailed - I'm not talking about stuff that requires up-to-the-minute indexes, just regular searches that cuil thought were so specialized that nothing could be found whilst Google took me straight to the answer. Sorry guys but I'm too busy to help you debug your stuff when I have a perfectly adequate solution today.
I do appreciate the play on privacy - that alone got me interested enough to try it even after the initial service crashes. But you have to deliver and right now it doesn't
The 1st result was our ancient family website (last updated in January 2004)! The picture attached to the search result has nothing to do with that website.
The top of Google's search results are my wife's Facebook public profile and her Amazon wishlist.
Google wins.