unCuil

There's a new search engine called Cuil. It's getting a lot of press lately. I tried searching on "reprap" and got this:



That's the first hit. The site's right but the associated image looks like a screenshot from a video game. Cuil claims "We pick images to illustrate the idea behind each page to aid you in your choice." I'm thinking not so much.

That's not a bug, that's a feature! We are obviously working on the most awesome open-source project ever... cuil has spoken.

Anna Patterson, who wrote much of the search engine that Google now uses, left Google, got a bunch of venture capital to start another search engine company, and is busily burning through her venture capital. Cuil is the result. I've spent several hours with it and am amazed that they released it at this point in it's development.

On the positive side it apparently doesn't require the huge server farm that Google does. The performance of Cuil as a search engine, however, is disappointing so far.

I like the idea of an image of what they consider subject of the page.
BUT that specific picture is no aid but confusing.
I think I I like the idea of an image OF the actual webpage, or an image that was postet ON the webpage (but that may be confusing either...)

Well, but if Forrest tells me that cuil needs just some more time, then I will wait .
maybe there's another favourite in sight.

btw:
is there any searchengine out there that doesn't list all those keyword spammers?
it's awful to have the real information on page 472 just becaus of all those pseudo search engines.

'sid

Believe it or not, but as of yesterday, a search for the keyword "cuil" on the cuil site didn't turn up _any_ relevant results! I checked for myself.

Today it looks like they finally found themselves, but the vast majority of the first page of results is still completely irrelevant.

Hi Sid,

... here in Germany i use mostly - [www.metager.de] - in it's original configuration or sometimes - [www.alltheweb.com] - because of the better boolean syntax ...

Viktor

The Cuil search engine does not provide a link to my bussiness when I enter it's name; Cuil is bad...very very bad.

And I also found that it provides no results for a great many search requests. Infor pages about the search engine have minimal formatting and look like text information documents from academic sources. Definatley not ready for prime time; I think that the initial anouncement might have been leaked.

sid Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> Well, but if Forrest tells me that cuil needs just
> some more time, then I will wait .
> maybe there's another favourite in sight.
>
I'm not sure I can say that. I'm being pressed by a venture capitalist who is excited about cuil and I'm really at a loss as to what to say about it at this point.

There was an amusing, if very NSFW article on The Register about some of the flaws in cuil. [www.theregister.co.uk]

Really, really NSFW though. Or those of a sensitive disposition.

Its hard to be excited about something that has been released in such a clearly broken and unfinished state. What on earth were the developers thinking?

There certainly seems to be a lot of hype surrounding the site. So far, though, they don't seem to have done much more than chew through a lot of investment capital. Kinda reminds me of Pseudo: [www.boingboing.net]

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