Not So Cuil After All
Cuil was finally ready for its big debut. The Press had picked up the story. Digg was awash with stories of how it would kill Google.
So, I decided to check it out and I have to say I am disappointed. I’m cool with their Gaelic spelling of “cool,” but there are two significant problems with their service as currently released.
First, their results are not very good. I decided to look up a WordPress plugin I wrote with the reasonably unique name TTFTitles. In general, if a page mentions “ttftitles” it is talking about this plugin. So, what results did I get? A bunch of blogs mentioning that they are using it. Come on, even Yahoo finds the home page for the plugin as the first result.
Results for other searches were equally unimpressive for anything other than very general queries. It seems that relevancy drops as query detail increases. A search for “seo” returns some relevant results, but if I try to find out about the new ride at Kennywood this year gives me links to a grade school in West Virginia, some newspaper articles, a couple of blog posts, and a couple of forum threads. These are all related to what I was looking for, but completely miss the page I was looking for. In an era when the average search query has finally reached three words (can’t find the reference right now), they seem to have optimized for the wrong queries.
A second problem with Cuil is this:
I haven’t seen a search engine do this in almost a decade. If you are going to go after Google, the very least you can do is stress test your service. Under stress, they could dial down their “relevancy” (I doubt we’d notice any difference). They could use some caching for the top million queries. There are a lot of things they could do, and I’m sure they did a number of them, but they result is that this debutante has come to her coming out party with toilet paper stuck to her shoe.
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.