Scobleizer - Latest Comments in A new search engine appears: will you use it?

Re: A new search engine appears: will you use it?

Peter Murray — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 16:20:53 -0000

I searched for my wife (who has an uncommon name) with Cuil.

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.

Re: A new search engine appears: will you use it?

Josh Mcdonald — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 16:24:33 -0000

this is definitely some lovely talk

Re: A new search engine appears: will you use it?

Curtis — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 14:11:27 -0000

Id probably end up forgetting all about this search engine. There were sites on there I know haven't even existed for years. Why do we need another under powered search engine.

Re: A new search engine appears: will you use it?

Nick Ward on Cuil — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 15:38:56 -0000

Several people have mentioned how Google came from behind, via word-of-mouth to win the search game and suggest that Cuil could do the same. I disagree; I am a pretty heavy user of search and have been for a while and the day that I heard of a new search engine called Google (what was that name about?) I tried it and immediately saw that it cut through the porn and other garbage to deliver EXACTLY what I was looking for. I was hooked from the first moment and never used Excite again (along with just about everyone else it seemed) and told everyone interested about this great search engine with the wacky name

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

Re: A new search engine appears: will you use it?

Nick Ward on Cuil — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 15:38:30 -0000

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

Re: A new search engine appears: will you use it?

AlexSchleber — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:48:46 -0000

Robert, very perceptive about the possible MSFT angle.

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

Re: A new search engine appears: will you use it?

mihir — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:00:40 -0000

Try searching for "Facebook f8" (without quotes). What result would you expect at the top? Google shows developers.facebook.com, while live shows the webpage for the F8 event.

Re: A new search engine appears: will you use it?

Andrew Kun — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:55:37 -0000

I compared Cuil, Google and Live Search on 3 terms that are important to me: eceblogger (the blog I run), Project54 (the project I work on at UNH) and "Andrew Kun" (my name). Results:

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.

Re: A new search engine appears: will you use it?

Robert Scoble — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 14:04:49 -0000

Charles: I just did the search again on live.com and Barack's energy policy comes up #1 for me. Sorry, Google wins.

Re: A new search engine appears: will you use it?

Cody — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:40:15 -0000

As a fine art landscape photographer, I was surprised to "cuil" my name and see a suggestive image of a woman next to website results...I don't photograph people. I did similar searches for other photographers in my circle and discovered the same thing - sexually suggestive images of women next to the results. I wrote cuil an e-mail straight away because to me it's not appropriate that they make such an association and could potentially trash my name to their users. So much for relevant content...

Re: A new search engine appears: will you use it?

Josh — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:17:03 -0000

I just Cuil'd myself, and the first result was me. What's more, I discovered that I'm also a racing driver.

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.

Re: A new search engine appears: will you use it?

Natali — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:04:47 -0000

The new visual search engine already exists, it is only for kids))
http://www.aga-kids.com/

Re: A new search engine appears: will you use it?

dmg — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:01:49 -0000

Google managed to overtake established search engines based almost solely on word of mouth... Cuil could to the same thing.

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.

Re: A new search engine appears: will you use it?

Nick Light — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 08:36:49 -0000

Have searched for "Cuil" and "Cuil.com" on www.cuil.com - and their own site is nowhere to be seen :).

Very smooth.

"Cuil.com - works 60% of the time -- everytime"

Re: A new search engine appears: will you use it?

Markus — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 08:36:39 -0000

the relevance of the cuil results were way off in my tests

Re: A new search engine appears: will you use it?

John Agno — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 08:11:23 -0000

Since there is no eraser on the Internet, I just "Googled" myself on www.Cuil.com ....and...was pleasantly surprised liking the display of results and what I read. Guess I'll be using Cuil again and again and even advertising there when offered.

Re: A new search engine appears: will you use it?

Ganesh Kulkarni — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 07:10:16 -0000

There is a 'bounded rationality' meaning people generally settle on 'good enough' and don't need 'the best'. Google is THE 'good enough' of today's search-sphere. We do not need any other search engine.

Re: A new search engine appears: will you use it?

Lloyd — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:35:50 -0000

This site sucks in my opinion. Although the pics beside the results are pretty cool, that doesn't account for the irrevelant results. Next!

Re: A new search engine appears: will you use it?

Fritz — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:12:13 -0000

Cuil=Junk

Re: A new search engine appears: will you use it?

Connor F. Feldman — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:09:54 -0000

I excited about the possibilities.

Re: A new search engine appears: will you use it?

tchalla Jones — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:41:59 -0000

They seem slower. Have improved relevancy of results but lack some of the bells and whistles that Google has built up overtime E.g "Did you mean" Would use as an addition to google not a replacement at this point

Re: A new search engine appears: will you use it?

Victor — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:24:32 -0000

They seem to better. Now when I do your Obama search I get a different result every time. Which is consistent with Obama's message.

Re: A new search engine appears: will you use it?

emcye — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 18:19:55 -0000

33MM! - a really bad name and we have to scroll DOWN to access a search? Sideways?

Doesn't pick up Mac-based urls...interface unpretty...not ready, overly bumptious....sure smells like a Microsoft branding project.

They're Kidding, right?

Re: A new search engine appears: will you use it?

jere — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 17:50:51 -0000

FWIW: I just did a search on both Cuil and Google for "brrreeeport". Google now reports 9,590 web pages (down from their two year high of 200,000? Did 190,000 servers suddenly go offline?) with the word, and Cuil reports 9,641 web pages.

Seems like Cuil is quite competitive with Google's size.

Re: A new search engine appears: will you use it?

jere — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 17:47:43 -0000

Maybe someone can look up those original series of blogposts again, so that we all can see the exact experiment and numbers. (Scoble?) But at the risk of being corrected, what I remember is that at the same time that Google Blog Search was reporting 500 or 600 different pages with the word "brrreeeport" on it, Google Web Search was showing something like 200,000 web pages with that word on it. And this was like two days after Scoble originally invented the word -- meaning that it didn't exist on any web page, anywhere, two days prior.

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.