TechCrunch and others are waxing almost poetically about the new Cuil search engines, designed by ex Googlers to compete with the mother ship. But after a few scattershot queries I’m just not feeling the power of Cuil. It still is failing to find itself for what seems like an obvious query of “Cuil Search Engine”, and for the query “computers” I’d expect a bit more than this among Cuil’s claimed inventory of 121 billion web pages:
We didn’t find any results for “computers”
Some reasons might be…
- a typo. Please check your spelling.
- your search includes a term that is very rare. Try to find a more common substitute.
- too many search terms. Please try fewer terms.
Finally, try to think of different words to describe your search.
Obviously Cuil is missing a LOT of stuff, so what am I missing here?
Update: I’m still waiting to be impressed, but have learned that Cuil’s architecture is such that if some of the servers go down you can get empty results as I did last night. Now, ‘Computers’ does turn up relevant results.
Joe Duck 
Ha – I just did a search for “Health and fitness blog” (no quotes) which is my niche – and got no results.
Um…Guys?
Metroknow I’m getting a lot of empty searches and wondering what’s up with this. Clearly queries like that should list a lot of things (like your blog!), and queries like “computers” should have millions of good results.
You may very well be getting no results as a result of the client web interface being overwhelmed. Give the product a couple of weeks to settle out their usability issues.
Remember a search engine is never really seen by the end-users and their client based results may not accurately represent what they really can do. (you know the old – pay no attention to the man behind the curtain – good dog toto, good dog!)
I am sure they are getting completely swamped today with activity. I am not here trying to promote what they are doing either I just know how large scale software works.
It is going to be an interesting 2nd half of the year though.
I wonder if they will announce a Cuil phone as well…lol
Glenn you were exactly right – Cuil was swamped, taking some of their servers offline. Their architecture is not parallel so if the servers that are “expert” in “computers” go down you get no results.