Comments on: Cuil search engine fails to find itself

By: Another Reason to Prefer Google… | Jeff's Idiosyncratic Musings

Another Reason to Prefer Google… | Jeff's Idiosyncratic Musings — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 21:59:04 +0000

[...] Within a week, Cuil had completely tanked. In a moment of both hilarity and irony, Cuil was even unable to find itself. The entire story was chronicled in an article from [...]

By: JoeDuck

JoeDuck — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 17:15:55 +0000

Linda – I meant that Cuil does not find itself at Cuil.com. I’m picking on some obviously bad results, but I am not impressed so far.

By: JoeDuck

JoeDuck — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 17:08:04 +0000

Glenn a very good point that a game changer may wind up being a search that is about as good as Google but uses hardware/power/resources more effectively. But I’m not betting on Cuil to deliver on that promise. In fact I’m growing increasingly suspicious that the game in search engines is not so much to create good ones, rather it is to hype yourself and then scare or entice the big players into buying you out. Powerset appeared to do that with the aquistion by Microsoft despite a very lackluster search routine that never even made it to prime time.

Based on my first look Cuil does not show much promise as a search engine, but I think their goal is to get bought out quickly at a huge premium – probably by Microsoft as a legal way for MS to get at some Googley search algorithmics.

By: glenn

glenn — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 16:40:44 +0000

Cuil is a very good example of why Google should feel threatened. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. One huge advantage for Cuil is the hardware required to accomplish their indexing is much less than Google.

At some point your hardware requirements make change very difficult – there is a very real like wall that you hit when you need to make changes.

I wonder what would happen is Yahoo! or Microsoft were able to successfully cut a deal with Cuil.

By: Tommo

Tommo — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 16:37:03 +0000

I am also among the unimpressed. I maintain and monitor an open-source project called JBurg; Google’s results have become slowly less relevant over the years. Cuil results looked like they might have had fairly good relevance… except that 9 of 10 results are useless to me b/c JBurg is in dmoz.org and in a Wikipedia article, and those entries get replicated all over the Intarweb as SEO spider bait. Nothing like Google’s -foo boolean filters, even. Meh.

And I did just look at a Google “related pages” link for the first time in a while and got impressive results.

By: Kathy

Kathy — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 15:46:10 +0000

I did several searches using three words that returned zero results even though there are webpages where all three words are present. In one case, all the words were in the headline of the page. Not so good, I think.

By: Linda

Linda — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 15:13:21 +0000

That’s funny. When I entered cuil search engine, it was the first one to come up on the google list. And I loved the layout when I entered a search that I tried to do yesterday with google. I wouldn’t count them out yet.

But I’m only a non techie!