Not So Cuil After All

In 100% agreement. They were getting some free publicity on NPR news this morning, but when I tried a few searches, I quickly came to the conclusion that they’re not really ready to launch. When I click on the “About Cuil” link on their Google-inspired Home page (except with a black background…how Cuil!), I received this error:

“Oops! We couldn’t find that page. Please verify that the URL is correct and try again.”

Hmmm…oops.

DT

I’ll second this. Cuil returned so many junk/spam search results before it actually got to content, where yahoo/google/MSN all returned relevant results.

It looks like Cuil is indexing all the crap Google won’t, just to say “We have more pages than google”

WTF?

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3164/2710730454_f53717279b_o.png

I thought I just had accidentally re-read the last sentence of the second paragraph….

Give it time, Rome wasn’t built overnight.

Agreed; the results stink. I’d think that that’s job one if you’re launching a search engine.

@nate: fixed. thanks. sorry about that. darn ctrl-v.

i took their advise and tried a different word, but ‘toads’ gives the same result…

Comment by Jake

Made Monday, 28 of July , 2008 at 11:15 am

WTF?

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3164/2710730454_f53717279b_o.png

clusty.com is quite cool. (And the suggestions are often useful.)

@jake: maybe you should try something that’s not quite so esoteric…

they very least you can do is stress test your service.

Should be “the very least…”

Anyway, I saw the NYT article and tried Cuil for a few grant writing-relating searches and came up with crap. I tried searching for my name; Google comes up with my book blog, Cuil comes up with a bunch of crap. I tried searching for an RFP and didn’t find it on the first page. If that weren’t enough, I find the two or three column structure busy and distracting.

Margaret Boteler: Give it time, Rome wasn’t built overnight.

From James Wood’s How Fiction Works:

There is a very good example of Green’s doctrine in action in V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas. Mr Biswas has decided to build a house, but he only has a hundred dollars. He visits a black builder, Mr Maclean (one of the few portraits in the novel of a black Trinidadian), and gingerly poses the question. What is beautifully done is that both men are dancing a little pas de deux of pride and shame; each is maintaining a fiction. Mr Biswas wants Maclean to think he has enough money for a grand home; Maclean wants Biswas to think he is very busy, with lots of orders for work. And each sees through the other’s fiction, of course.
Mr Biswas begins by suggesting that they take the thing very slowly (that way, he can pay some money each month rather than place a huge sum down immediately). IDeally, Biswas would have Maclean take about a year to build the place:

‘We not bound and ‘bliged to build the whole thing right away,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know.’
‘So they say. But Rome get build. Anyway, as soon as I get some time I going to come and we could look at the site. You have a site?’
‘Yes, yes, man. Have a site.’
‘Well, in about two-three days then.’
He came early that afternoon, in hat, shoes and an ironed shirt, and they went to look at the site.

At the site, Mr Biswas announces that he wants concrete pillars, plastered and smooth. Maclean wants his cash:

‘You think you could give me about a hundred and fifty dollars to start off with?’
Mr Biswas hesitated.
‘You mustn’t think I want to meddle in your private affairs. I just wanting to know how much you want to spend right away.’
Mr Biswas walked away from Mr Maclean, among the bushes on the damp site, the weeds and the nettles. ‘About a hundred,’ he said. ‘But at the end of the month I could give you a little bit more.’
‘A hundred.’
‘All right?’
‘Yes, is all right. For a start.’
[...]

The dance of pride is so delicately done. Biswas first couches his shame in a classical allusion, hoping to give it a bit of grandeur (’Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know’), to which Maclean replies with a practical grunt: ‘So they say. But Rome get build’, Naipaul subtly using Trinidadian patois—’But Rome get build’—to separate the two men and their social status. [...]
And relentlessly, Naipaul reminds the reader that the site itself is leaf-choked and weed-infested, that the whole thing is doomed from the start.

@Jake,
As they suggest, try to think of different words to describe your search. “jumping amphibians” gets THOUSANDS of results!!

I agree. I tried searching for my software programs; my own software website wasn’t even listed on the first five pages. I tried searching for my software company name; nothing!

Not so hot IMO, unless they’re trying to do something else…

I couldn’t agree more. I get so used to Google being able to at least weed the spam out of the first page of results for what I consider common search terms that it’s a bit surprising when something being hyped as much as Cuil fails at that task. A simple search for a popular sports team gave me one good result in the top left position, and the rest were all spam results — most were for ticket sales. From what I saw, it looks like massive keyword stuffing will work well with Cuil — something Google fixed several years ago. Were these Cuil guys high up in Google when they left, or were they the guys who made the coffee in the morning and then got fired when they were found wasted and passed out in the parking lot?

I searched for the big Internet meme of 2007, “2 girls 1 cup”. It returned absolutely no results. Pathetic. Next!

I agree; irrelevant results abound!

Also, the adjacent photographs apparently are not necessarily associated with the content; some are simply ads, based on the blip displayed under the URL.

Many of the links I clicked did not properly resolve.

And, finally, the primary, expected URL for some common search item was buried on a subsequent page. Example: Search: cuil. Their own home page does not even come up first.

What would really be useful is a search engine that permitted exclusion in the query.

not to mention that some very simple searches return no results, even if cuil has made a suggestion. or, at least, that’s what happened this morning, before cuil became overwhelmed by all of the attention and needed to take a “time out.”

Really stinks! Not only will Cuil not give Google a run for it’s money, Cuil is not even a decent search engine. Don’t waste your time.

I plugged in the name of my new online publication Sustainable Farmer - zip. They suggested I might be misspelling the keywords.

I launched the publication three weeks ago and used PR Web to promote it. Google already had a ton of links for it.

Definitely not ready for prime time. Now or ever, I suspect.

The difference I’ve found with Cuil and Google is that when searching for very specific things in Google I tend to skip the first 10 or so pages of results because mostly it’s people trying to sell said specific item and not actually inform. With Cuil at least I ahve found a few things quickly (in teh first 10 pages) that Google pointed out about 30 pages in.

Yeah, its not so great at this point in time…

I searched for Los Angeles, no results. I searched for San Diego, no results. I searched for Las Vegas, got results and got confused by the layout. Then the site went down for me without even an error message. No more results.

cuil is garbage. sure it might get better in time. but the point of me checking it out today was because of all the hype they’re generating saying that they’re a google killer, when they’re not even a msn live search killer. have fun competiting with webcrawler and altavista cuil. maybe i’ll check you out in six months, but after this very bad first impression, i doubt it.

Search for:

Letty’s Restaurant Tornado (a restaurant that was destroyed in AR by tornado this year)

Google: 7,700 results, with mostly relevant hits on the first page.

Cuil: ZERO results

Rex Ipso Loquitor “The Thing Speaks for Itself”

They should have done a lot more work before blowing their big prime-time media chance. If this was really all it was hyped to be today, Google could have lost a fair amount of market share overnight.

[...] http://www.hostscope.com/templature/not-so-cuil-after-all/ [...]

When I searched for my name, the cuil claims to have found 60 results. The first page list 12 of them and the second page lists 3 more. What happened to the remaining 45 ?

@Annie Mouse

Hmmmm…you seem to be the one and only person that has “anything” positive to say about Cuil. As a matter of fact, 100% of the opinions voiced in here so far, are exactly the opposite of yours. What are you doing differently (from the rest of us) to get better results from this search engine?

Just curious…

If you get “no results” for a search on cuil, disable “safe search”.

Seriously. It appears cuil considers most of the internet is not safe for anyone.

In this way, it is truly before its time.

Notice how it uses the same graphics over and over on the site links and the graphics have nothing to do with the sites.
Do a search then go through the pages…the same graphics pop up in random sites that do not have the graphics on the website.

Glad I’m not the only one who was disappointed. A search for a keyword, has what I’m looking for on the first page of every major search engine out there. With cuil, it’s not even listed. Very lame.

Ah please, Google is going to rule the world one day you just wait and see.

JT
http://www.Ultimate-Anonymity.com

I welcome the approach of categorizing data. Google so often just presents noise, unless the result is really obvious. It quickly degrades for rare searches in which case I often resort to Clusty. Now I’m gonna use Cuil.

Cut ‘em some slack, they’be been hit hard by the unexpected level of demand.

This is here to stay. This is not some major epic fail like Microsoft’s search.

Probably the worst attempt at a search engine I’ve ever experienced. It’s absolutely DOA, I’d be surprised if it’s still around in six months.

They are trying to hype it to find a buyer so they can bail out.

If their honest about their privacy policy I’ll use Cuil over Google or any other searcher any day.

I’ve done some searching and found it to be fine…of course it’s not perfect…..but then none are.

To be so ridiculously negative when comparing a brand new searcher to the worlds most popular searcher that has been around for a while now is….well…..ridiculous.

All the ‘hype’ was generated by attention seekers (oh please please click on my blog/story about this new “Google killer” blah blah blah) that as usual take something someone said and blows it so far out of proportion so that it couldn’t possibly attain it’s projected value. And then all you guys do is just fumble all over yourselves to put it down when it ‘fails’!!!!! Talk about hype!!! Give me a break!!!

It could be a disinformation-based marketing ploy by Google itself…

[...] best results - so that's what we expect and when they are not what we expect - they suck. Like this clever play on words, cuil is crap right out of the gate, or maybe even the worst tech launch of the year. When was the [...]

Has anyone tried changing the font size on a page of search results? Maybe it’s different on another browser, but on Firefox resizing the text completely screws with the layout of pretty much everything. The search text moves out of the search box, all of the buttons on the bottom start to move off the screen, the results columns get wider and go out of the visible area (and of course you can’t scroll horizontally). Pathetic accessibility design.

[...] Kinda no results for yeroc.org. Weird. Even results for culi are.. mixed at best. Reaction here, here, and of course [...]

I searched today for ‘wall sconces’ on Cuil and got zero hits. I pared it down to ’sconces’, also zero hits. I searched on lighting and got Something but the result were too blocky and wordy and there weren’t as many hits per page as on Google. There was no indication of which compaines payed for clicks. I was Not impressed at all.

On the other hand. I recall vividly the first time I used Google sometime back in 98. The front page wasn’t drowing in crud like Yahoo and the results returned were fantastically better than anything out there.

Cuil does not Ruil.

PattyMc

Google today is useless. Google has the same problem that the old search engines had… that is they are targeted by marketers to achieve top results.

The fact is we need more search engines with entirely unique algorithms that make it difficult and very expensive for a marketer to target top positioning across all engines.

We also need people to start using more than just one search engine as their reference.

Google holding such a large audience is not a good thing!

Also.. if you all remember the reason google got popular in my mind is because of the nerds. We went around to our parents computers and set google as the homepage. Told our friends to use google etc etc. I say give the new guys a chance!

Tried searching for “cuil”..oops nothing about the website itself . Meaning their own homepage is not indexed ! Many things to like about the site though! Unfortunately , search not one of them right now .

well as everyone said it is definitely not ready at all. i actually felt bad for them when i did some searching and realized how fubar the whole thing is.

however, i would definitely wait and give them some time. perhaps they jumped the gun or they did not intend to go officially “live” at this time.

wait 3 months then see. they definitely need to ditch the black background, too morbid/satanic =)
they also need to redesign/rethink the whole results layout; good idea but not realistic.

Doing a common search and coming up with zero results is a result of the server overload, not a result of their index.

@Rasputin - I think people would be happy to use more than one search engine (google) if more than one search engine had 1.) solid results and 2.) displayed the results correctly.

@Rasputin, agreed that engines need to come up with algorithms that make it impossible for marketers to “backlink” their way to top positions - at least deliberately.

Oh P.S. - Cuil results are absolutely atrocious. Sorry Cuil, your PR campaign jumped the gun WAY too early. How did you not see this coming? Did you actually “use” your own search engine on a day to day basis? Could you actually accomplish your day’s tasks with the results?

Sorry, you have to get it right when you launch because people won’t really come back and give you a second chance.

But thank you for playing.

“Come on, even Yahoo finds the home page for the plugin as the first result. ”

ugh……………. yahoo uses google’s search engine, just fyi

“yahoo uses google’s search engine, just fyi”

No it doesn’t.

Just as a note: neither google nor yahoo actually returned any useful results for “TTFTtitles”. It certainly didn’t return the page you listed as its homepage.

“Come on, even Yahoo finds the home page for the plugin as the first result”

Whaddaya mean? Yahoo’s search results are almost as good as those of Google. Any day.

@Chris: Just checked both from here and both give the plugin’s home page as result #1. Odd.

@Yug: Matter of opinion, I suppose.

What’s with the irrelevant pictures that accompany Cuils random results? Ugggh. Not cuil.