good summary. I like their UI as well, except the black front page. too obvious I am doing a search in the office.

“Google returns Wikipedia as the first result, then dog.com. Cuil returns Dog.com, wikipedia isn’t listed on the first page of results”

Good! Google is completely overrun with Wikipedia results. They are an epidemic!

Thanks Cuil, sounds like I wasn’t the only one tired of having to skip over Google’s token Wikimedia results.

What’s the point in having many more search results than Cuil? Are you or anyone going to the 129288382382 page to find the 1232342342343 result? Relevance is more important than pure # of results I believe

And oh BTW try going beyond result (or page) 1000 on the google search results – nope, you cannot do that. Google’s search results wont let you do that.

[...] « Previous post Next post » [...]

This is sad:

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=cuil

We didn’t find any results for “cuil”

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.

About Cuil | Your Privacy | Add Cuil to Firefox

It’s not just that the indexes are old. They’re MONTHS old. I blogged about it this past hour but must return to my code editor.

It’s not twice as fast crawling as advertised.

http://tinyurl.com/CUILNEWSLIVE

btw, they don’t have the results for “press release”

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=press%20release&sl=long

interesting eh

Yes, it’s irrelevant for popular terms, only the first few pages of results matter. But for more obscure terms size of index matters a lot – it means some results might be returned for a query instead of nothing.

to me them having a new search interface is not a plus. A new user wants to find what he wants, he doesn’t want to learn entire new user interface to do something simple.

My prediction, one of the big companies will buy them for 200-300 mil

for “perez” perezhilton.com isnt even on the first page == fail

Hi I have tried searching “wipro techno centre” and no results were found. But google gave me the webpage.
We didn’t find any results for “wipro techno centre singapore”

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.

About Cuil | Your Privacy |

Cuil would just come and go.. Google would be the basic and static one for everyone!

they seem to be reindexing constantly based on queries that are coming in. for example a post above says “press release” returned no results and now it does.

The difference is much more pronounced with niche searches.
I picked a random sentence from a page I got from a previous search on Cuil, and searched for it on Google and Cuil.
The sentence was: “Just ask a group of teen internet entrepreneurs”
Cuil did not find any results, and Google found 283, including off course the page I took it from..

The results I get for inprnt (my site) are a bit odd. It comes up with tons of proxy sites like concealme and antisurfer, then a ton of what seem to be either fake results (spam) or expired domains… Not very useful. While the excerpts clearly reference my site, the content is completely different.

[...] Michael Arrington seems to be finding some of the same problems I have. « This is just a test [...]

I’m impressed for such a young product, particularly with the UI and related categories as you mentioned. Relevancy will improve over time.

Congrats on a great launch! Search is one of the hardest things to launch just based on the diverse set of queries people will “test you out” with.

This is intersting. I have not heard anything about it. Have they detailed the PPC model in any detail? How is the traffic thus far?

How do you know the “results in index” are accurately reported by each search engine and that the numbers are meaningful?

You know, I found 121,578 results for “cuil”. From my (somewhat expert) opinion, it looks like they’ve focused on the search index, but their frontend is not behaving properly.

My experience has been that the results seem to filter out a lot of the crap that I get with google. And I like the results page more.

The actual results are a mixed bag but I will use this site a lot.

?? “27,800,000 results for press release”. Seems to work for me.

I guess if people really start using this engine, they might get better.

http://blabtech.blogspot.com

Google admittedly says the size of the returned results are inflated… it’s more of a guess than an accurate number.

It does show wikipedia results!

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=revision3&sl=long

One of the first results, too.

For my site http://www.cuil.com/search?q=panedia Cuil offers all sorts of links in the first 10 pages including scraped content sites and spam sites, but not my hompage panedia.com I think the algorithm needs a little more work.

google seems to lie

http://www.google.com/search?q=france&num=100&hl=en&safe=off&start=99800&sa=N&filter=0

i cant get even close to the billionth search result. anyone know how?

same with cuild http://www.cuil.com/search?q=france&pi=999&sl=long

I rely daily on Google’s index of tech forums for quick answers to common problems. A search this morning for ["allow anonymous property queries"] gives me page after page of people with the same problem as me, and a very quick fix. Cuil has nothing useful. It even seems that “advanced” search operators (such as quotes around a string) are ignored.

Maybe the tech market aren’t who they’re aiming for here, but I’ll be sticking with Google for a while yet.

@anon,

You don’t know how search engines work. The results are compiled by a unit of the search engine and are cached to mirrors. What I blogged about is that Cuil does not have JIT collating where as Google and even really, really cheap search engines do.

Only the top 10-100 pages will be fed to the caching servers.

A search engine is separated into many, many units. While 100 pages and the count will be fowarded to the front end unit, it doesn’t mean that those results are not there produced from the pagerank sorting.

Read the book, Google Pagerank and beyond for more info on that.

http://tinyurl.com/CUILNEWSLIVE

Maybe people are forgetting that many db engines don’t return accurate results / row count numbers… the “we found x results” is most likely a highly inaccurate count of results returned by the database.

“The pedigree of the founders and execs, which includes three ex senior Googlers, means the service will be compared to Google from day”

This is obviously incorrect Mike. If this was the cause, there would be no senior Googlers.

All that work for nothing. “Google” is permanently stuck in people’s minds.

“CUIL” means nothing and is a perfect example of a horrible web 2.0 name. No one will remember it.

Oh, and the searches I did turned up completely random results and there wasn’t any cache pages, image search, etc.

It’s just search…and the whole column thing seems unfair to people who aren’t on that very tiny first landing page.

Thumbs down. I’ll stick with Google & Live Search.

i dont claim to know how search engines work. im a user that sees 1,570,000,000 results and i wanted to see the last 100 and i couldnt. i think ill email google a bug report.

I just read your earlier article announcing the engine and was excited about it. So, I did some testing of my own and immediately came to some of the same conclusions. Although, I think we can give Cuil a bit of a break seeing that they are only a few hours old. Either way, this seems like a very promising project. Thanks.

it’s terrible for long tail sites… I searched for some terms that gave me like 400 correct site oriented results on google and zero on CUIL. So much for that. I suppose it you want the fat part of the tail, CUIL may sport some advantage…. but past the top 5000 sites or whatever, it may be hurting.

If the index is too large it is bound to include low quality documents which kills relevancy. In fact most of the “tail” queries I attempted on cuil came back with no results or irrelevant results.

still very very early but smells like they released too early and hyped expectations too much…

its working

Based on my testing the relevancy of the top results for cuil is terrible.

The test I use in the SEO classes I teach is “chocolate tasting,” since Google returns my page (http://troubador.org/chocolate/) first and Yahoo returns a completely useless page ( a link to a long-defunct tasting). Now, if someone is searching for that particular term, they probably either want to do a chocolate tasting or want to see what chocolates score well. Google hits it, Cuil gives basically useless results: an odd assortment of chocolate tasting events and commercial sites. Furthermore, similar and same results are repeated as you drill down through the listings.

Also the two-dimensional layout is poor: it is hard to go through in an organized fashion (especially since the last ones in the column hang below the fold) and makes it harder to understand which ones are more relevant: the top of the second column or the bottom of the first?

Of course google is better. It’s the cold start problem — you need to track which links people click in order to boost their results.

cool doesn’t have any of that yet.

Hmm, searching for cuil doesn’t even return cuil.com on the first page. That’s rather odd for a search engine that is meant to be relevant.

So let’s look at it this way. If you search for stuff that google won’t give you, use cuil :)

I still think Live Search has a better UI. Especially when you search for stock symbols, which I tend to do quite often. I like the categories of cuil, but certainly don’t like the UI.

I think cuil still needs to go a long way. Search is not the size of the indexed pages.

Mike,

It doesn’t matter whether Cuil is 1 hour old or not. The fact of the matter is that people arent going to use the service if its not turning up relevant results. Of course its going to be compared to Google because Google is by far the best.

Cuil should not have gone so public until they did more testing. The results aren’t relevant – and really in terms of competitive edge – Google could just implement the “categories” selector (which is useful) at any time – so its hardly awesome at this point.

I searched for a whole bunch of stuff and Cuil just didnt return what I was looking for.

complete and utter failure.. it doesn’t find shit! who cares if they’ve got a trillion pages when they bring up completely irrelevant search results for even pretty common terms.

Not well though…

I tried “bulgaria” and it returned no results. Then I tried “Bulgaria” and it returned a bit, but pages 2+ didn’t work.

I think Cuil is just buggy at the moment. They rushed to launch it and either the spike in traffic is breaking their engines or it’s something else, but it’s not usable at this point.

Your last point is very important. Give them some time, and appreciate they were willing to take on Google, and hope like hell they don’t sell out to them. We need Google to have some competition, and Google needs some competition as well.

Site is very buggy.
Search results from homepage search textbox return results for “ZA”. Search results from second search page for “ZA” return nothing.

Auto-linking web search text from the “Explore” bar works terribly and often returns zero results.

Click the 4,5,6 etc links on the bottom of the page and get a “no results” error.

No results are not location friendly, not even Country-friendly? I can’t read French…doesn’t my IP tell you I’m in the US?

This search site sux and is a total failure.

Google lists your personal page http://troubador.org/chocolate/ on the first result? man, you must do a lot of SEO to boost it, your site is rather useless to me, another reason I am using Google less and less. They just have too much spamers like you.

I have been testing cuil myself for the last hour or so, and the results are fairly relevant. I do not care about either google/cuil returning millions of results, I only care about the first 15 pages.

I tried the search term “cuil” and a couple of time, it showed an error and when it did eventually returned results, none of them show what “cuil” itself is.

I am sure they are working on their algorithms every day the results will get better. It is too early to pass judgment on something of this big size and importance and I wish Cuil good luck.

Ever tried building even a 1 page bug free website on your own, huh?

I wonder if Google would actively seek to buy Cuil out just to overcome competition… ? http://blabtech.blogspot.com

Noone was expecting a flawless bug-free launch. But the failures are too many to have any amount of confidence in this site. If 80% of these “glitches” are not fixed in the next 7 days, good riddance.

Stupid greed and arrogance of ex-Google employees. Bad Luck.

Bizarre results.

7,707,000 results for john mccain jokes

We didn’t find any results for “barack obama jokes”

yes i have actually, and it has nothing to do with my comment. bugs aside, their search engine just doesn’t bring up relevant results, full stop. unless you want to call their whole site one giant bug in that case it’s a pretty big/expensive one. :P

FYI, the founder of the site is wrote this article years back:
http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=143

i recap one of the paragraph:

“Don’t do page rank initially. Actually don’t do it at all. For this observation I risk being inundated with hate mail, but nonetheless don’t do page rank. If you four guys in your garage can’t get something decent-looking up without page rank, you’re not going to get anything decent up with page rank”

………………..
that tell us why the result are so crap

and one more paragraph:

“NO ROOM FOR ERROR – When you look at all these steps and all the complications, this process is rife with things that go can wrong. The hardest part about writing a search engine is that you’re going to process billions of URLS and serve millions, if not billions, of queries. This does not leave a lot of room for error. One super-linear algorithm applied over the wrong-sized list of items and you are sunk. One lock inside another lock and you are sunk. There will be no code paths not explored. All of those comments in your code, which print out errors like “This will never happen,” will happen”

…………….
and they just doin it

My brain can’t handle scanning the results both vertically and horizontally. I definitely prefer the presentation of Google/Yahoo/MSN/Ask results… hopefully Cuil can follow suit, or provide a setting for it.

Cuil needs a lot of work before it can be considered mature. I dont see them having any feature that will upset Google.
- Cache? No.
- True Relevancy? No.
- Related Widget? Yes, but Google could implement that tomorrow and leave it in beta for another 2 years or more.
- News Search? No
- Image Search? No
- Video Search? No
- Search History? I think Google has this.
- Customer Loyalty? Definitely not leaving Google, at least not yet.

Even a direct search for my domain (including the .com) name does not return a link to my site. BS

Even the snippets of results Google provides is more useful:
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=chinese%20whisper&sl=long
first result is spam, the rest – although vaguely useful-looking – are not the best results possible as shown by:
http://www.google.com/search?q=chinese+whisper&num=100&hl=en&safe=off

I live in Sweden, so naturally I searched Cuil for HV71, the Swedish ice hockey champions 2008. Cuil did not find a single page. Google? 1 800 000 hits. (Starting with the official web site.) Clearly Cuil has some indexing to do. The UI is pretty nice, though, so let’s not leave them for dead just yet.

[...] We strongly disagree with those who feel that way. Michael Arrington from Tech Crunch echoes our feelings with the blog post talking about how Google Beats Cuil hands down in size and relevance. [...]

>But for more obscure terms size of index matters a lot

OK, but then you should have tested those search terms. A comparison of the billions from self-reported result numbers doesn’t show which search helps me to find what I am looking for.

searching my name on google gives my personal website…while cuil ( not cool exactly ) gives links to inappropriate(porn) , broken links…

these all (immature) search engines from MSN,YAHOO to cuil,powerset adds real value to Google’s search technology and index size…

but i appreciate all second hand search engine companies as they at least tried….. making monopolized market to discrete

There goes 38 million down the drain. what a waste of capital.

this search engine sucks. keeps on giving me spam results.

it’s even worse with live.com

go back to kindergarten boys.

Yep, was doing my own tests, found there’s not Google killer here so far:
http://searchengineland.com/080728-024035.php

On the counts, Mike, these illustrate how meaningless the size claims can be. I’ve had some queries were Cuil must have more than it’s showing. I’ve also got some queries where I wonder if there’s a phrase search being conducted (which would show a lower count that Google). And what will happen is more and more people will try to measure size based on counts. Then they’ll find those aren’t reliable so they’ll try do do unique queries where each result can be verified. Then arguments over duplicate content will erupts. None of which tells you if the results are relevant or verifies the size of the index (which is why I said in comments on Friday the entire 40 billion estimate that Cuil gives of Google isn’t, we’ll verified).

Trying type
groovy
as search term, and you will get a nasty surpise. Now, at least I know cuil is developed in python.

Look like Cuil hate groovy somehow

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/data/0/wqslave/tasks/bx-web-server-run395-440-30013.5.20080727.203028/deploy/lib/web/wsgiserver/__init__.py”, line 625, in communicate
req.respond()
File “/data/0/wqslave/tasks/bx-web-server-run395-440-30013.5.20080727.203028/deploy/lib/web/wsgiserver/__init__.py”, line 358, in respond
response = self.wsgi_app(self.environ, self.start_response)
File “/home/autobuilder/launch1/web/lib/web/httpserver.py”, line 200, in __call__
File “/home/autobuilder/launch1/web/lib/web/webapi.py”, line 316, in wsgifunc
AttributeError: ‘function’ object has no attribute ‘write’

All that matters in search results is first page. I liked the page, unlike ugly texty texty google. Google’s monopoly in search is hurting users, competitors simply cant experiment with interface where majority of users are novice.

“cuil” means testicles in french (“couille” is prunounced the same way). what a stupid name!

[...] what’s great about the blogosphere is that everyone gets to participate. Look at TechCrunch’s early searches and the comments that are coming in. I, too, think that Cuil is going to face an uphill battle [...]

Sadly Cuil doesn’t seem to handle international (non-english) relevance logics very well. I just tried to find a trustworthy renovator for flats in Finland and Cuil gave me a bunch of gibberish. And even when I tried several search phrases and words (in Finnish of course) Cuil seemed to note only those companies that have information in english. Why should english info be a relevance when I’m located in Finland and searching Finnish keywords and phrases?

When I search, the first thing i do is Ctrl+f and enter wiki, so that I go right away to wikipedia results if any. (I dont enter wiki in the keyword or do a wikipedia site search because I dont want to go to them unless they are in the most relevant 50 results)

very good indeed….one hour this search engine generated so much buzz….in one year i can see cuil and google competing for search market

results page is very nice, usually i laugh at ppl if they say they are working on search engine, finally cuil brought something i can start using!!

[...] Cuil’s claim of having the Web’s largest index. Over at TechCrunch, Michael Arrington did some searches for which Google returned more results than Cuil did. But judging a search engine by the size of its index is a basically iffy proposition. The search [...]

their search engine is incapable of matching phrases to domains. for instance “car offer” won’t return CarOffer.com etc…

Searching on my name “Larry Weisenthal” gives results in three areas: medical (my occupation), political (avocation), and swimming (sports/recreation). With Google, the most important medical/occupational retrievals dominate the first few pages. With Cuil, it’s the political and swimming stuff. Very hard to find the medical stuff. Interesting difference.

Yes, why they used blank page. I think just to differentiate it with Google

[...] Cuil de beloftes echter waarmaken om Google te verslaan? Een klein onderzoekje van TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington bewees het tegendeel. Maar de site is dan ook pas net een [...]

Cuil seems to be putting the wrong pictures with some of the search results as well. I did a simple search, got a profile of a guy, but then compared his pic with one from his linked blog and they’re different.

I took a snapshot: http://billkatz-test.appspot.com/static/images/cuil.png

So maybe I’m too sweet, but I say the Cuil interface is nice, different, and potentially very useful. It’s only been up for a few hours, let the hiccups come and go. It will eventually grow into a useful search engine.

What it seems to do is *very quickly* adapt its crawl and index based on queries that dont turn up any results. Our own site didnt show up at first, I sent a mail to the crawler, and 5 minutes later its in there, in full. Same for all the examples of no results above – now they do have results (HV71 etc).
Weird thing is – it seems to add random pictures to the results – most of the pics used for results relating to our blog are not actually from our blog…

ANyway, as pointed out before, google has had 10 years to perfect things, this one has come out hours ago. Cut them some slack :)
First indications are promising.

go ahead and test them, Ken.

amusingly, if you search for “tree frogs” on Cuil, the first result includes a photo of President Bush :)

Actually, I have done basically no SEO until three months ago when I improved the internal links as part of a graphical face lift. It was #1 before then anyway.

If you bothered to look at it, you would see that the site is basically a posting of ten years’ worth of data chocolate plus a description of how to do a chocolate tasting. As I mentioned above, I can see how that would be useful to someone searching for that particular keyword, and might even be the most useful out of the other top-ranked results.

This is, of course, the real test of a search engine: its ability to give the result people are looking for. And, if I were to try to game the system, I would do so by improving the content of my page to better serve the desires of people searching for that particular keyword (actually, I’m planning on rewriting the page to give better instructions and be more interesting.)

Seeing as how I explained this briefly in my original post, I find your reply, replete with grammatical mistakes, rather inane.

i dnt think they crawl news sources yet ??? has anyone else noticed that ??

any search i do for international news events that happened in the last 48 hours does not give me relevant results. but its their 1st day so lets go easy on them and not curse them … i think its a nice effort with the amount of money they raised…

kudos to the team !!!

a good try how to change something in the world of search engines.I like thier front page a lot as it makes things to look so much different – it is not like the Google front page or Yahoo’s – all white..it makes things look different and that’s a good approach…and what about the search results and thier relevance?? yes, they do not get so many results as the google but they are onnly a few hours old and this will change over the months I am sure ;-)

well and a really good feauture (at least according to me) is that when you search for the term i.e. “times” in the top menu you get results “new york time, la times etc.” and so you do not ned to scroll down thepage to find what you are looking if it is a web site of a paper or magazine so it is good and it adds something new to the search world :-)

[...] the way Mike Arrington carries on about it (oh and a bit more here too), you’d think so.  My initial impressions are quite different [...]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kinergy/2709079463/

Site down right now….

is it just me who gets this when accessing the homepage:

Forbidden

You don’t have permission to access / on this server.
Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.3 with Suhosin-Patch Server at http://www.cuil.com Port 80

Few thoughts:

a) count size is irrelevant and not a useful measure of index size — it’s publicly established to be an estimate. That estimate is highly inaccurate when dealing with large numbers results…this is a well documented phenomenon in the SEO world.

b) the UI is horrible — it violates the fundamental user model that Google, Yahoo, and most websites have trained users to observe: important content is in the upper left hand part of the page, the next most important content is below that, and the next most important content below that. Occasionally there is some content in the far right or far left (a menu system or text ad) that is relevant, so users look there after they don’t find what they’re looking for in the upper left. Search engines that don’t follow this model are going to break the user experience as most users know it today. It’s like trying to teach someone how to use a word processing suite that doesn’t have the toolbar layout and menu names of Word…it’s a pain in the ass for most people.

c) Relevancy is largely a spam game – in the world of 10 years ago, people hadn’t optimized websites, links were pure, and user behavior was simple. Today spam sites rule and links aren’t just links. Figuring out what is spam is at least as important as a/several good core ranking algorithm(s)…there’s a lot of good, valuable content out there for most queries but there’s a lot of spam trying to outrank it. Do some searches of things like Viagra or Cialis and you’ll understand why most of the results on common queries blow. They haven’t focused on figuring out what is bad, only on what might be good. Until they have that other half, their relevance will be far below the major search engines.

Who cares what it means in French…

Google did it again! MSN announced 5 billion claiming the biggest index. Google quietly stole their thunder by upping the size to 8 billion. Yahoo announced 20 billion and Google quietly upped the size to about 40 billion. Now cuil announced 120 billion, and Google index is now effectively (using a random rare/mispelled words sampling method) 200 billion. These evil bastards :)

It also appears that cuil uses a distributed term index, a la gigablast and the relevance is terrible for many multi-word queries that’s not a typical phrase. Relevance is bad for international queries (especially CJK) as well. Index is also quite stale (months old for some popular sites). No spellchecking is also inexcusable as it’s pretty easy to do a half-decent job for anyone who know how to write a search engine. So many million dollars later, they built a bigger Gigablast, with less feature.

It’s a great engineering feat to scale to 120 billion index. But that’s not how you compete with the big G. Cuil’s defeat is actually written in everybody’s web access logs long time ago, even when they were at their crazy (and broken) crawling peak, where they’re still a distant second in the access logs (across hundreds of domains)

it’s down
http://www.cuil.com/info/unavailable.html

Down boy! Down! :D

—————————————————————-

We’ll be back soon…

Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity.

Thanks for your patience.

—————————————————————-

Sigh! So much for the Google Killer!

[...] “know about a trillion unique web pages”.  Techcrunch has put Cuil through its paces (Google Beats Cuil Hands Down In Size And Relevance, But That Isn’t The Whole Story and [...]

[...] to TechCrunch, their index is ten times smaller than Google, despite them claiming otherwise. And their site is [...]

Cuil’s down …

[...] hat Cuil auch getestet, weitere Infos dazu dort. Kategorie: InternetTags: Cui, feuerwehr, Google, Suchmaschine, [...]

Index size and relevance are 2 entirely different issues. Besides index size is not the only measure of the quality of the index – you can read more on my blog post: http://clickr.typepad.com/vijays_blog/2008/07/cuil-launch—h.html

120 billion web pages?? Uh, haven’t you guys heard Google has now indexed over 1 TRILLION pages? Come on…

Google’s web map/graph contains more than a trillion urls. Not all of them are indexed. The index size appears to be around 200 billion pages now.

This seems pretty buggy to me.

For the same query, I’ll get no results and then in the next search, pages of results. Then I’ll click on page 3 or 4 and it will say it has no results. Until I reload. And when I do finally make it to the next page, they’ll have a few duplicate results from the page before.

That I could put down to load. But much worse to me is that they aren’t properly encoding and decoding URLs, so that some of their search results click through to pages that never existed.

Also, the icons next to many of my more obscure search results border on the bizarre.

To me, this is two black eyes. The buggy behavior makes me not trust Cuil, and for me a search engine is all about trust. And if there are bugs on the surface like this, I fear there are deep bugs too, ones that will slow their progress enough that they’ll never catch Google.

I’m not sure why it was considered relevant to test search engines with search terms like “dog” or “france”. You say judging the relevance of the results is subjective, I’d say it’s plain impossible. I suppose these terms came from Cuil’s own examples?

If Cuil claims they handle associations between categories, these two terms are easy ways to illustrate what that means, but being such generic words would return an impossibly huge number of results even with the poorest search engine. While we can easily grasp that it would b a good thing if a search engine would return pages/categories with “cocker spaniel” on them rather than just the word dog, I don’t think anyone would search the web for “dog”. Or would they? What would they be looking for? And that was the problem of this “test”, it was done just to see what comes up, rather than trying to find something, which is why people use these things. And in these situations, the time it takes to find what you’re looking for is the most important factor. This can be measured objectively.

For me, the UI is very important, and especially the advanced features of search. As I spend a significant amount of time searching various databases, I’m perhaps more familiar with things like Boolean operators, keyword hierarchies and such. This is perhaps why Cuil looks interesting to me, and why the options that ask.com gives in terms of being able to widen or narrow down the search by moving to more general or specific categories are important.

With google you of course use the widest net for fishing, but it’s often a rather blunt instrument. You can only add search terms or exclusions, which works for questions like “what the heck was the capital of New York State again”, but less well on stuff like “who wrote that book on the history of local government in America back in the 19th century”.

Semantic web is going to change everything, meanwhile I’m interested to see where each step towards more cognitive approach to searching leads to. Unfortunately, Cuil seems to be down due to too much traffic…

Have used it, and think, while I am sure there is some good engineering, it is not even close to motivating either the advanced user or the average consumer to change their search behaviors. Relevancy is materially weaker, the page controls on the bottom are a huge UI mistake as implemented, and the lack of video, blog, and image search is a non-starter.

vicaya, interesting comment. Are you associated with the Vicaya project or Alex Genaud?

Searching for “Chimp” returns a photo of Dubya on the first page of results.

I’d say the relevancy was bang on!

I liked their presentation layer. And if they achieved the kind of indexing capability, the relevancy and quality of results will follow over time.

1. Yes, for more obscure terms I did get better results.

–> “prashant2228″ returns 119 in Google and 318 in Cuil.

2. Cuil seems to undermine the matching *term* in url.
–> prashant2228.com was first result in Google for the above search, whilst it appeared nowhere in Cuil.

3. Cuil is a lie.
–> It boasts of 318 results on the top-right but allows browsing only 3 pages with meagre 18 results.
–> Well, unless you are willing to manually type pi=7 or pi=8 in the url-string.

Yes – i have it forbidden.
Try it tomorrow

Hi Guys and Michael,

I am not sure if you have picked up the right factors to determine which of these search engines is better when it comes to relevancy.

In my opinion, the best way to test a search engine is to pick up and 3 words term with specific query in order to check the relevancy of answers that a search engine can or should deliver.

By counting simply the index of pages or numbers that you see, you might be far away from comparing a search engine to another.

Yet, we should agree that Google is more than a search engine, I will say it became a Global filtering system of quality pages except their entire groups.google.com that is full of por n and drugs related spammy pages.

Google will come with a 77% fullfilled users satisfaction in the coming years for local, and geo LBS services adding to it the voice search.

Remember that people are lazy and Google is here to answer their needs for local needs.

really disappointing results in my opinion. Seems like their “unique” approach of ranking based on content is not working out that well. For more specific searches they rank Google adwords landing pages full with keyword spam rank in the top results..

that is what I am searching.

Interesting but still in very early stage.
I searched for “Ελλαδα” which means “Greece” in Greek.
For this Google gives you a map, an article in Wikipedia, a tourist guide, and a very popular Greek portal.

Cuil tells you about Sun’s division in Greece and other rubbish. It stills does not understand basic concepts.

It works well for (some) obvious queries such as brand names, but not so well for anything else. Although it’s not a bad start, they have a lot of catching up to do. Comparing it to Google gets the eyeballs, but truth it it is far from either of the top 3 engines.

Yeap, that was the first thing I tested. Guess what – a search for ‘cuil’ in Google returns cuil search engine whereas the same in cuil does not return it in the first page

You know, Google doesn’t always focus on the company when you search for Apple.

When my mother searches with the query “apple” results are returned about the fruit, especially since she often researches plants online.

I’m guessing years of tech searching has taught Google to give you nothing but that… :)

[...] Some sites have managed to do a quick comparison though, and the results don’t look so great. Google is out performing Cuil on average 10x on pages returned and 4 out of 5 random queries seem to be more relevant from google. To be fair though, google has had 10 years to perfect it’s search and Cuil not so long. [...]

Cuil: Thrive or Fail? [VOTE] http://snurl.com/36fll [www_thriveorfail_com]

[...] mi pare però che i risultati non siano neppure paragonabili a quelli di Google, e anche questo test di Techcrunch lo conferma. Per essere appena nato, comunque, promette [...]

It’s kind of funny and somewhat silly that people hear the words “Google” and “New search engine” in the same paragraph or sentence, and then immediately start flaming the new search engine.

Some of you people don’t understand that this is like a day old search engine. I would really love to see one of you develop a search engine that returns better results with 38 million. In fact, I would love to see one of you create a search engine full stop.

From what I see, it’s got huge potential. Sure it’s got a lot of irrelevant stuff. but do you really think Google was any better when it had only been around for 1 day?

Google have been around for a decade. Cuil have been around for 1 day. I think they can kill Google. So I applaud them on their efforts, and hope they eventually catch up to Google’s stature. It’s about time Google had some competition.

- Dwayne Charrington.

What is the point of returning 20+ pages of search results when users only look at the first 2?

All this talk of numbers of results is just pointless – a bit like being on page 3 or more.

[...] some issues with multi-word queries, but I’m sure those bugs will work themselves out.  As TechCrunch said, “Cuil is only an hour old at this point, Google has had a decade to perfect their search [...]

Very disappointed with ah-so-cool. forget the broad queries like france, apple etc. search with some specifics and cuil is utterly lost. e.g. search for “around the world in 8 dollars” — a hindi song. Google gives me what I want and cuil is nowhere…

I’m still getting better results (by a long way) with google. So far cuil look like fail to me.

If they gave me “categories” what the hell do I do with categories when their results actually SUCK? and I don’t care if it’s not the whole story. I am ready to give it chance, but will not check it back until after 6 months, if it still exists that is…

[...] el nuevo buscador que, en teoría, viene a poner las cosas claras a Google. En TechCrunch hacen un microanálisis del cacharro (lectura recomendada, pero no imprescindible), y vienen a decirnos que, aunque Google se mea a Cuil [...]

Interesting prediction but we rarely find any search engines competing with Google acquired (by Google or anyone else). The last example was Microsoft – Powerset but in that case it was obvious that Microsoft wanted to use the technology they already have in place after years of research and development. Do you really think anyone will need Cuil’s technology? I strongly doubt that – the keyword-rich approach does not prove to work all that good. Only if they manage to prove that Google needs their scalability algorithm for itself – but the company was definitely launched to compete with Google and probably they will continue that way for some time, at least until they run out of money.

[...] Michael Arrington dari Tech Crunch mengungkapkan dalam tulisannya tentang bagaimana Google mengalahkan Cuil dalam ukuran dan relevansinya. [...]

[...] Crunch also have a good early review of the new search engine here. They also make the point that Cuil is a new search engine and Google is a decade old. So it [...]

As long as it cant find itself, it sucks. Searching for ”cuil” on cuil.com doesnt display any result for their own website

Pity that Cuil couldn’t even list it own site when I searched cuil or cuil search, but Google does!!!

They already have a plugin for Firefox search bar. No need to go to the black search page.

[...] TechCrunch compared some search results for G and C and posted results here [...]

3 suggestions:

1. It is obvious that either your architecture doesn’t work or you need more servers. It is slow….. ;-)

2. “Black+Blue” is too dark, and some people (including myself) won’t like it.

3. I searched for my company name (bizroof), cuil shows 286 results while google has 13,400. So, “Indexing more pages than google” is NOT your selling point. :)

@Raj

Agree :)

[...] de seguro tener un sitio en un idioma que no sera ingl�s no te har� la vida m�s f�cil. Fuentes: TechCrunch, SearchEngineLand, GigaOM addthis_pub = [...]

[...] at være tre gange så mange sider som Google, men det holder vist ikke helt vand, bl.a. ifølge TechCrunch. Cuil forsøger i øvrigt at adskille sig ved at kunne lave en slags semantisk indexering. Skal dog [...]

Actually the black front page may do well for them if they take off. Good contrast to the whiteness of Google.

Cuil is ok. Not as amazing as hyped up. I did a bit more research and wrote about it today on the blog, shortly after discovering it. They seem to over index and under deliver. I’m sure it’ll improve in time. $33 million in funding, with ex Google employees and a great concept.

But will it kill Google? lol… i v much doubt it!!

Vince (HongKongWong.Com)

Read my full post on Cuil here:
http://hongkongwong.com/2008/07/the-cuil-google-killer-cuilcom/

I liked that search it’s better than Google

I would argue that if there is a page in Wikipedia for the query term, that it most likely should be listed somewhere on the first page. What better way to learn more information about a search term than to view an encyclopedia entry?

[...] buscando formas de encontrar terrenos. Hoy he estado probando Cuil, un nuevo buscador que ví en Techcrunch hace unos días, formado por personas que anteriormente trabajaron en [...]

And if you mistype cuil and go to culi.com you’re on a porno site. I think google is safe.

Hmm.. I think TechCrunch give them hard work… I try searching and they only display..

We’ll be back soon…
Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now…

btw: the number of results on google suddenly increases once you hit result page 60 or so, e.g. for ‘techcrunch’ from 6.5m to 11.8m
so the initial number of results offering might not mean much after all. it might be the same with cuil.
and who cares for the 1000th search result?

yea, cause wikipedia is a trusted source for information…

“iphone” would not return apple official iphone website

[...] Google Beats Cuil Hands Down In Size And Relevance, But That Isn’t The Whole Story [...]

Another aspect not mentioned so far — with Quill I’m regularly getting pages that aren’t there anymore or that — GASP — cause my antivirus to choke. No such pages for the same query with Yahoo or Google.

For obvious reasons I’m not going to say what query caused this, but it wasn’t spam, only slightly risque.

[...] Arrington, TechCrunch here, says, “Cuil does a good job of guessing what we’ll want next and presents that in the top [...]

funny, the haven´t indexed yet their new name. Culli (double “l”) however does work.

Pretty dramatic that with 120 billion indexed site, not a single page for any querry in russian??

Cuil only lets you view the first 23 pages anyway.

This has a long way to go… many of you are being overly nice by searching against one word queries. Try ‘travel around the world’ or ‘around the world travel blog’ — both return nothing. You’ve got a long way to go, folks…

I just searched for “network programming with awk”. The result was astonishing:

————
We didn’t find any results for “network programming with awk”

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.
- To many search terms. Please try fewer terms.

Finnally, try to think of different words to describe your search.
——————————————–

I see….

V.I

[...] launched last night to tremendous fanfare. Most people are focused on the relevancy of search results, but to me the big story here is the cost [...]

Ubuntu linux:
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=ubuntu+linux
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=ubuntu+linux&btnG=Google+zoeken&meta=

Cuil = 0
Google = about 7,260,000

Five minutes later –> Cuil: 400000

Very strange

It seems to give priority to blogs and other sites for some reason. I searched for my site and it didn’t show up but it did show my blog. Weird. Anyone else getting a results page where they say 6,000+ results but they only show 1 page and not 2, 3, 4, 5 etc? Sure Google may have had a decade to perfect their engine but people loved it from the start. Unless Cuil gets their act together, they won’t last half as long.

[...] Here’s some more fan fare on TechCrunch. [...]

They built it just today? Wow. I thought they were at this for a while now. Shows what I know.

[...] There are, of course, some early blog reactions.  For example, Slashdot, Quick Online Tips, and TechCrunch. [...]

surely you jest? can’t announce a release w/all that hype, the come so short of even the meekest expectations and suggest that that they did a great job. as for relevance over time, they claimed this as their initial expertise and the background of their team also claims an understanding of spam issues, yet my most basic queries have yielded spam pages. sorry, but this assessment can only come fm a friend of the company’s ;)

these are not a group of rookies making a go of it. monier alone should know more about this and certainly claims to understand relevance. don’t know the rest, but reading their bios suggests that they should be much further along for this release.

My testing showed a lot of duplicates with CUIL and a lot of URLs which were no longer valid – comments left on forums or news sites that had since been deleted. There are also bad URLs in Google’s results but not so many and that would take a lot of bandwidth/overhead to cure (by re-checking links before presenting the results).

I am more disenchanted with the duplicates. Returning 5 links to the same item is just clutter and means if I’m seriously looking, I have to drill that much deeper.

[...] their index, although they claim to know about a trillion unique web pages) (Update: see our very early testing here). They’ve also dropped one of the “l’s” from their name – previously the company was [...]

CUIL was not so COOL for me. It missed major celebrity websites, and much of the data was quite old with some broken links. It got completely hung up on one search I did, ironically, my own website. Google hasn’t a care in the world in comparison to CUIL.

[...] What about when Cuil is up — does it do a better job at search than Google? Not based on our quick survey: Type in “Batman movie” and Google gives you news about the “Dark Knight”, followed by the official movie site, then two IMDB listing about the movie, then a YouTube clip, etc. Cuil’s first page of results doesn’t link directly to anything involving the Christian Bale/Heath Ledger flick. Our peers have given the site a spin and find similarily disappointing results. [...]

Is # is search results really the right way to measure quality of search results?

At best, very very crudely.

I’ve found Cuil to be pretty much useless for what I’m searching for. It only seems to recognize English words.

For instance the search for Turneja returns no results from Cuil – none at all. In contrast Google tells me that it has returned 1,260,000 results. Google’s first reference is to the IMDb page for the movie. While I have to refine the search to get more meaningful results from Google, as turneja is a fairly common word in Serbian and Croatian, Cuil is useless out of the box.

If Cuil is still around in the fall of 2009, I might bother looking at it again.

seems like the “About Cuil” link on the home page isn’t working… guess you’ll need to search for it in those 121,617,892,992 web pages

[...] wins, but Cuil is just a few hours old [...]

Cuil don’t recognize caps and small letters? Strange….

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=usa&sl=long

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=USA&sl=long

For everyone saying that “it’s a day old search engine” and “give it time,” you are at odds with the company’s statements. Cuil, in their press release, made every indication that their search engine is ready to be better than Google RIGHT NOW, and it’s not. No, I will not give it time. I expect promises to be delivered on. If they wanted us to participate in making their searches more relevant and helping it become what they want it to be, why don’t they tell us that?

Google won search by paying attention to it in a major way when no one else was taking it seriously. PageRank was nice and all, but Larry and Sergei’s biggest coup was recognizing search as the essential and mighty tool that it has become.

Three former Google employees cannot beat Google at its own game. Google is paying attention to search. Google has all the resources and all the *dedication* it needs to maintain its number one position in the game.

Look at Baidu for one example of how to beat Google: they launched in a foreign turf with home-grown customization. It’s worked for them so far. If Baidu has been a US-focused site, it would be dead by now.

Leave alone the search results…Cant they even recognize i’m searching with CAPS letters? It will take a min to fix that but it leaves a bad taste…Have they tested it before releasing it?

What’s not amusing is that I did a search for “memphis maddogs” (a defunct Canadian Football League team) and the accompanying images appeared to be child porn.

Search is a “winner takes all” market.

Why would anyone use Cuil if they get better results every time from Google?

The only way to launch a search engine and survive is to be better from the get go.

Cuil will not survive unless they get massive additional funding to keep going.

Also, the name ‘cuil’ does not catch on. I cuiled…googled…the winner is google.

In addition, the are so many filthy words associated with the word cuil and its close relatives culi, culo, in other languages that one has to wonder if they chose the word because of those associations.

Google wins hands down in speed. This thing is too slow. Google spends millions of dollars a year just to improve performance by fractions of a second. These guys will clearly need to spend money in this area day 1 if they are to be competitive

It’s too early yet!! Cuil needs the write speling phirst.
Get a good Website or searchengine!!

It’s that people know about it thats important!!!

Surprising results here, I won’t spoil it for you.

Search for “cuil search” http://www.cuil.com/search?q=cuil+search

20+million results and NONE point to cuil.com! Having such a large doc index it is easy to identify “matches” but GOOGLE KILLS IN RELEVENCY

[...] by some former Google employees, I wonder just how far this search engine will go?TechCrunch says that, “Cuil also claims to have better search results than Google and others based on [...]

[...] accurate, and error free. I can’t take this seriously if they can’t even handle first day traffic. Techcrunch has a different take on breadth. And all black vs all white background. Really? posted by Ynoxas [...]

[...] Google Beats Cuil Hands Down In Size And Relevance, But That Isn’t … [...]

[...] TechCrunch points out, “Cuil does a good job of guessing what we’ll want next and presents that in the [...]

Cuil has 55,495 results for “pocosin” that covers 23 pages of “pics.” I don’t see a way to get more than 23 pages of results (about 250 or so results)–where are the 55,245 other hits?

Either way, my blog isn’t on the results. Needless to say, I don’t like Cuil :)

The article says “A search for Dog returns 280 million results on Cuil and 498 million on Google.”

Google doesn’t _return_ 498 million results, it reports that it found that many, and such deep result counts are always always estimates. Google has a history of, um, estimating to the high side. The estimates are unverifiable, as you can only page through to the first 1000 results or so.

cuil can’t even find digital funtown, awesome looking page though.

http://www.digitalfuntown.com

[...] Google Beats Cuil Hands Down In Size And Relevance, But That Isn’t The Whole Story [...]

But how did they associate the photos? I noticed that photos associated with a story are not necessarily from the site referenced, in fact they are sometimes from something completely unrelated.

And how’s this? A search by subject for an article yielded more results than a google search but then attempting to locate additional stories using the author’s name in the search field yielded 0 results, not even the story it found using the subject.

Here’s an amusing visual take on this particular showdown:

http://onlinebrandexperts.blogspot.com/2008/07/cuil-vs-google.html

Looking at the estimated raw results for queries doesn’t tell you anything useful about a search engine’s index size as in many queries you can reduce “millions” of raw hits down to only a few hundred actual hits. Search engineers like Matt Cutts have pointed out many times through the years that such estimates are radically out of line with reality.

Cuil’s inability to return relevant results for names like “George Washington” and “Thomas Jefferson” is a much better indicator of search index size and depth. They obviously have their work cut out for them.

In the mean time, it would be nice if you started measuring search market share by something more relevant than number of queries performed. When you look at estimated unique visits per month, Google still has less than a 40% market share.

That is where Cuil has a chance to strike at Google. And so it is with other new search engines. Microsoft is currently the second most active search service after Google. They got there through traffic, and because search engine optimizers send almost all their automated queries at Google and Yahoo!.

searched for ABDOMINOPLASTY – and got “no results found” – searched ‘tummy tuck’ and got something. And in the tummy tuck results – was the word Abdominoplasty!! Go figure – I’ll stick with google for now until they work out the kinks

[...] Google Beats Cuil Hands Down In Size And Relevance, But That Isn’t The Whole Story A new search engine — Cuil — launched last night. Its founders are ex Googlers. Michael Arrington has been running a bake off this morning and he says Google wins hands down. But he’s impressed with the performance of this “baby” search engine. (tags: search google cuil) [...]

[...] TechCrunch Tags: search startup This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 3:26 pm and is [...]

[...] initial reviews from critics seem less optimistic. TC’s Michael Arrington noted : “Based on our test queries Cuil is an excellent search [...]

Problogger is not top resource for Blogging for Money – Cuil…

Problogger is not top resource for Blogging for Money – Cuil…

Google does that, too, so nothing unusual there.

Dwayne, could not agree more. Calm down, Google minions.

I had the same problem! Cuil is filled with porn on tons of searches. I tried “fireplace dvd” and got porn. Out of curiosity, I then tried “cartoon dvd” and got more porn. The images they’re displaying aren’t affiliated with the sites they’re returning as results (not always, anyway), so why all the porn? I definitely won’t be recommending Cuil to anyone with kids.

searched for Clinton and the second result is about George bush, LOL!!

You base your analysis of how big cuil’s index is compared to google by the number of results it shows for “dog”.

Are you f***ing serious?

I can tell you this, I searched in google using a wide variety of search phrases for vanilla ice cream bars coated in white chocolate, wondering if any stores have them in the U.S.

Google gave me nothing. Not even stores in other countries, nothing on the subject whatsoever.

If there aren’t many links pointing to the page Google is useless, no matter how relevant the content is. It is a fundamental flaw in their search technology.

Cuil returned a post on a forum talking about a vanilla ice cream bar coated in white chocolate called Magnum White. I was then able to do searches on Magnum White and find out its made in the UK by Unilever.

Seems more relevant to me. At least on harder to find material that doesn’t have much in the way of links.

They attack the problem from different angles and each have their strengths and weaknesses. Popular content Google. Obscure content Cuil.

Cuil certainly generated a lot of press today, I just tried a search and got this messge:
“No results because of high load…Due to excessive load, our servers didn’t return results. Please try your search again.”

I’ve never had Google say that to me.

Cuil has peaked my interest, but I’m not crazy about the 2 and 3 column UI – it’s not easy to scan, requires too much reading. Relatable navigation is interesting, not crazy about the pagination option.

sorry if this is redundant, but it seems their safe search mode may be a bit agressive…

[...] their index, although they claim to know about a trillion unique web pages) ( Update: see our very early testing here). They’ve also dropped one of the “l’s” from their name – previously the [...]

The relevance [Google] still important and of course the meaning [Hakia]. The organization, as Cuil proclaim is useful, but for a rapid assertive search Google is still the leader. Cuil have a a lot of pages but not relevant at all sometimes.

There are a few misrepresentations of numbers here.
1. Google might say it has found “approximately XXXX” pages, but as we all know, after you page through a few, you might find half or a tenth that many.

2. Google does NOT claim to _index_ a trillion pages (as some sites has suggested). Google searches through this many, but does not index all of them for a variety of reasons.

Confirmed. It sucks.

We didn’t find any results for “”

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.

I just want to search, dont ask me to think.

Opening day and the instant pundits sound off. Here;s another and consider this: Privacy is good. Google forgot that. I do business overseas with people in “interesting countries” and my phones have been routinely tapped by multiple agencies. I’m sure I’m on a list that Google responds to as well. If you believe in the Bill of Rights you should like Cuil.

As for the criticisms of the Google people and their minions in the technology “press” bashing Cuil, I say stuff it… I search information on the web for a living, spending 6 or more hours a day in search activities and engines. There is plenty of room for Cuil. Okay so it’s overwhelmed on Day 1- guess that means a lot of people are looking for alts to Google. Do any of the ADHD users out here remember what Google’s opening day was like? They were overwhelmed, just like Cuil and did not spring forth as a little homunculus of applications.

Search is my bread and butter and Cuil, Alta Vista, Zaba, Ask, Vivisimo (Clusty), Google and others all have a place in the information stew. So I say Cuil it and allow them to roll out and grow. Remember Windows 3.1? It got better. They are gonna get better, have a great brain trust and a point of view other than posting popularity for ad revenue. Cuil is kewul.

[...] Cuil (pronounced “cool”).  It claims to be the most comprehensive searcher on the net (though some would disagree).  It has an inovative results page that shows pics, blurbs and categories.  It may not be my [...]

Not only is the service beta-grade, which is somewhat forgivable, the results are HIGHLY irrelevant for many kinds of keywords. Sorry, this is no Google killer.

[...] חיפוש בגוגל מפיקה מספר תוצאות רב יותר מאשר ב Cuil, טקראנץ הריצו את מילת החיפוש dog והתאכזבו לגלות שלמרות ההצהרות, Cuil מוצאים רק פחות מ60% [...]

Searxher,
Please shut the pretentious unadulteratedly assuming cavarnous hole in your face. You couldn’t be more wrong.

Wow, you search six hours a day? An apt description of the activities of someone who rarely finds what they seek. No wonder you’re a CUIL fanatic.

[...] Devono aver detto questo quelli di Google quando hanno visto Cuil, un nuovo motore di ricerca creato da un ex dipendente di BIG G. Cuil si pronuncia “cool”, un nome presuntuoso non c’è che dire. Nonostante sia stato lanciato la scorsa notte secondo alcuni Cuil farà concorrenza a Google per diverse ragioni tanto che iniziano già i primi confronti. [...]

[...] 今天看到Techcrunch上面的文章，提到一个新的搜索引擎 Cuil 刚刚发布。于是顺手测试了一下，发现Cuil的索引量确实还比较少。譬如，我输入关键词“ubuntu mac4lin traffic light”，在Google中有138条结果，而Cuil中则是0条。 [...]

[...] servizi collaterali. Ma non bisogna sottovalutare il nuovo nato di Menlo Park perch�, come afferma Michael Arrington, di TechCrunch, "Cuil � nato da poche ore, Google ha avuto dieci anni per affinare il suo sistema". [...]

[...] seguito è arrivato Techcrunch a confermare che in effetti da prove empiriche sembrerebbe proprio che il famigerato [...]

[...] kept issuing the caveat that “they’re only an hour old” when he published his initial piece on Cuil. I’m not sure that’s an excuse. If their index is “larger than [...]

[...] their index, although they claim to know about a trillion unique web pages) (Update: see our very early testing here). They’ve also dropped one of the “l’s” from their name – previously the company was [...]

Yeah, I think we’re overlooking the bigger issue: launching like this without relevant results and no real impetus to move users off their Google Habit is a HUGE problem:

http://www.htmlist.com/rants/cuil-search-that-sucks-or-index-size-isnt-everything/

you serious?

[...] in reading anymore comparisons between Cuil and Google in terms of index size and search results; TechCrunch has a great post if you want to catch up on those findings. I’m here to offer a comparison in [...]

Google gives me different results for the same query on different days.
If I search for a blog post using the exact title, instead of serving up the original bog post, it serves up a list of sites that have re-posted the article. Very frustrating indeed!

GOT MONEY? http://www.cheapogroovo.com

[...] A searche engine called CUIL (pronounced “cool) says they’ve got what it takes to compete against Google. Cuil claims to do a number of things that make its results more relevant than the lists you get over at Google. But relevance is in the eye of the beholder. TechCrunch, for one, thinks that Google still serves up better search results… [...]

Is Searx(ch)er for Hire a Cuil employee? The username is a bit suspicious, but the repeat appearances of his comments on other sites is perhaps more so.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/cuil_good_but_not_good_enough.php

http://techie-buzz.com/comparisions/cuil-the-next-google-search-killer-techie-buzz-verdict-no-way.html

http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/search/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=209602251

[...] to much fanfare, $30 million dollars in venture capital funds, multiple TechCrunch stalkerage, and even CNN frontpage coverage, a former Google exec’s secret product was [...]

[...] that the end of Google is imminent. – Cuil Exits Stealth Mode With A Massive Search Engine – Google Beats Cuil Hands Down In Size And Relevance, But That Isn’t The Whole Story – And….Cuil Goes Offline – Do Not Mistype [...]

838,871,250 results for dog in Cuil
and
Results 1 – 10 of about 479,000,000 for dog in Google.

[...] find what you are looking for, far fewer results are returned compared to google as demonstrated by TechCrunch.  This is expected to be a Google killer?!  Give me a break!  Cuil claims it crawls 120 Billion [...]

[...] noticia se ha confirmado… Varios ex ingenieros de Google lanzaron su propio motor de búsqueda, que [...]

I agree…Many months old. We changed our website layout back at the beginning of the year…cuil is indexing the old layout pages! I’m also not happy with the images show next to search results. In searching our company, the results have images that don’t have anything to do with our site. For example, we are a web optimization company, but the image that appeared with our listing was that of a nearby college logo. Another search provided an image of a tree. WHAT??

[...] engine has to bring back the best results from that haystack as well. Here Cuil falls short, as we pointed out an hour after the site launched and we could actually check it [...]

A few thoughts:

- On the launch: Cuil should have gone with a quite alpha and test queries from a few hundred users instead of setting hyped expectations and putting themselves directly opposite to Google with ,000s watching live. At least this is what Google did when they first launched. They went live and let their results kick Altavista out of the market. Now, Cuiles are possibly sitting there getting hammered by all our queries and comments on poor quality results and trying to fill gaps as soon as they can – but how can 30ish team meet ,000 of users requirements at this point, before negative word-of-mouth kicks in and finishes them once and for all?

- On the indexing: Again, throwing the index size did nothing much but setting unrealistic expectations with users. G. will come back with a much bigger number or, even better to them, completely ignore the figure, implying that it is insignificant. 0 + 0 = 0

- On the relevancy issue: Cuil could be appealing to users looking for useful content from providers that do not have the ability to launch their site on the first 2-3 pages of Google’s pagerank. This is the only good case i can think of where Google’s popularity-based ranking methodology could have a limitation. And even in that case, it makes you wonder why a relevant site with useful content is not popular. Anyways, even in that case, popularity plays a role. All in all, i am not sure how ranking based on content exclusively could improve the search quality at the end of the day, in a world where popularity determines pretty much everything from our country’s leader to the next american idol.

- On the UI: Glad to see some deviation from the default setting but users will have to be re-trained on usability, which would take more time and effort than just re-train them on a new way of thinking search results ranking and quality (which is a must, given the new philosophy behind Cuil)

- Overall: Once all of us are given the impression that, by using Cuil, we are missing important info/sites/pages/etc., we stay with established players, Google leading the way. Unfortunately, lack of trustworthiness can kill Cuil’s methodology and business model really fast and even $33m can vanish in no-time nowadays. BTW, business model? Where is the revenue stream if bahavioral history is not stored or utilized for targeted marketing???

thanks!

Agreed that slowly google search result and relavency of the queries are deteriorating but the seo professional are twikling the site in a such a way that it beats it algorithem, the google cralwers has to more smarter and improve its quality

[...] 2008, Frederic Lardinois, “Cuil: Good, But Not Great”, Read Write Web, July 28, 2008, Michael Arrington, “Google Beats Cuil Hands Down In Size And Relevance, But That Isn’t The W… Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and [...]

Cuil is so cool, that I am going to nickname it culo.

[...] in magazine-style fashion. What does this mean for users? In short, better search results, though TechCrunch and several others who have tested Cuil said the superior search result claims are [...]

[...] there are only 121,578 results!) are saying about Cuil: Danny Sullivan, Rafe Needleman at CNET, TechCrunch, Masterworld, you name it, they are saying [...]

Let’s try something easy.

Query was ‘how to restart my computer’

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=how%20to%20restart%20my%20computer&sl=long
9 results

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS280&q=how+to+restart+my+computer&btnG=Search
3,550,000 results

um…

The Cuil Debacle: not so cuil….

Take an unknown japanese company and suppose it comes on the market with a product that is supposed to kill the ipod. The press is all over it, Digg’s homepage screams “the Ipod killer is here” and your fingers become numb.
They…

[...] Cuil, [...]

[...] nahezu drei mal so viele Seiten zu indizieren wie Google es tut. Doch verfolgt man die cuil-Tests diverser Blogger, so scheinen die Suchergebnisse nicht wirklich befriedigend zu sein. Allerdings sticht die [...]

[Search engine Cuil launched earlier this evening, claiming a bigger index size (120 billion web pages) than Google or any other search engine. Read rest of the story here]]

[...] rest of the story here – Techcrunch If you liked this post, please share it with others: These icons link to social bookmarking sites [...]

Remember when Google was an hour old? I do. They were better than Cuil back then too. I remember those times. As soon as anybody typed in their first Google search, it was “Wow!” “Whoa!” “Cool!” “Amazing!” and you’d just sit there mesmerized trying all these different searches. Then you’d run out and tell all your friends, “Oh my gosh, you have to try Google!” Over the next decade most of the time when Google rolled out something new such as searching PDFs and other files, spell check, translate, and Maps and GMail, it was another wave of “Whoa!” “Awesome!”

One thing I have learned from Cuil so far is how many spam link pages Google has filtered out that I didn’t know existed before.

[...] a closed-source, read-only, hardly-transparent search engine.   And also like Google, Cuil claims to have the most comprehensive index out there, with over 120 billion URLs ready for the picking.   Naturally, we expect a bit of a PR grudge [...]

[...] Google Beats Cuil Hands Down In Size And Relevance, But That Isn’t The Whole Story Komentar mencemooh Cuil (tags: cuil mesin-pencari google) [...]

Cuil is definitely going for it, but it’s hard to imagine them doing anything but incremental changes to what Google’s done. And even that would take years of effort.

Me.dium.com has taken a different tack. We have a full web index, but we change the results based on the surfing activity of our user base (now over 2,000,000). It’s in alpha, but I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. http://me.dium.com/search

[...] fly as such (unless you know what you are searching). For example, techCrunch’s analysis of Cuil vs Google mentioned searching “apple” and neither returned the fruit but if you try it on [...]

[...] Devono aver detto questo quelli di Google quando hanno visto Cuil, un nuovo motore di ricerca creato da un ex dipendente di BIG G. Cuil si pronuncia “cool”, un nome presuntuoso non c’è che dire. Nonostante sia stato lanciato la scorsa notte secondo alcuni Cuil farà concorrenza a Google per diverse ragioni tanto che iniziano già i primi confronti. [...]

Maybe because you were already on cuil.com, you muppet, why would you need to find a page you are already on???

Bah. In their blurb they *say* their site hits and pix match. But check out the results. There are pix, sure, for most hits.

Trouble is, not from the same site! The pix could be from anywhere – even when they match the search result. How does that help?

What a crock.

[...] di servizi. Ma non bisogna sottovalutare il nuovo nato di Menlo Park perché, come afferma Michael Arrington, di TechCrunch, “Cuil è nato da poche ore, Google ha avuto dieci anni per affinare il suo [...]

[...] has already been a lot of talks of cuil’s claims and then it’s performance from Day 1 of their launch but one thing is [...]

[...] Some sites have managed to do a quick comparison though, and the results don’t look so great. Google is out performing Cuil on average 10x on pages returned and 4 out of 5 random queries seem to be more relevant from google. To be fair though, google has had 10 years to perfect it’s search and Cuil not so long. [...]

[...] whats great about the blogosphere is that everyone gets to participate. Look at TechCrunchs early searches and the comments that are coming in. I, too, think that Cuil is going to face an uphill battle [...]

[...] has already been a lot of talks of cuil’s claims and then it’s performance from Day 1 of their launch but one thing is crystal [...]

[...] que me han hecho dudar de esta contribución. Si en Julio se armó un gran revuelo con las comparaciones entre el número de páginas que indexaban Google y Cuil (y, por tanto, que era capaz de devolver para una misma búsqueda), ayer leía en ReadWriteWeb una [...]

[...] חיפוש בגוגל מפיקה מספר תוצאות רב יותר מאשר ב Cuil, טקראנץ הריצו את מילת החיפוש dog והתאכזבו לגלות שלמרות ההצהרות, Cuil מוצאים רק פחות מ60% [...]

[...] were similarly underwhelmed by the quality of Cuil at launch: Hallam, Huffington Post, PC Mag, TechCrunch, Techie Buzz, Industry Standard, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, [...]

[...] חיפוש בגוגל מפיקה מספר תוצאות רב יותר מאשר ב Cuil, טקראנץ הריצו את מילת החיפוש dog והתאכזבו לגלות שלמרות ההצהרות, Cuil מוצאים רק פחות מ60% [...]

[...] חיפוש בגוגל מפיקה מספר תוצאות רב יותר מאשר ב Cuil, טקראנץ הריצו את מילת החיפוש dog והתאכזבו לגלות שלמרות ההצהרות, Cuil מוצאים רק פחות מ60% [...]

[...] More importantly though, Cuil didn’t live up to its over-hyped billing. The search results weren’t even close to Google’s relevancy, and their indexing bot was crashing [...]

[...] What happens when you get three ex senior Googlers? Cuil. According to its website, their search engine boasts 3x the amount of content than Google and 10x the amount on Yahoo. While checking it out, I was a little enticed. The “darker” theme for searching was neat and the way results are shown are something worth checking out. – Source [...]

good works

nice

goood

[...] positive attention), and they say that Cuil has a larger search index than Google (which doesn’t appear to be true). They miss Cuil’s big possible tech advantage, which is IP on how they handle [...]

[...] Cuil, [...]

[...] positive attention), and they say that Cuil has a larger search index than Google (which doesn’t appear to be true). They miss Cuil’s big possible tech advantage, which is IP on how they handle [...]

[...] positive attention), and they say that Cuil has a larger search index than Google (which doesn’t appear to be true). They miss Cuil’s big possible tech advantage, which is IP on how they handle [...]

I have got lot of Stuff from Cuil search Engine, when I was Searching for Social Media sites and Social Book Marking sites In search engines Most of the New sites which I’ve collected are from Cuil Search engine.

[...] und da macht cuil.com zum Start einen sehr ordentlichen Eindruck. Techcrunch’s Versuch der Ergebnis-Analyse und Vergleich mit Google hinkt etwas. Niemand wird für “dog” eine Suchmaschine nutzen. [...]

[...] engine is called Cuil. Cuil claims to have a larger index than Google, although this has been questioned by TechCrunch. Personally I really don’t like Cuil, but because we know how many pages it claims to have [...]