OK, so I went and tried the hyped cuil search engine at http://cuil.com (pronounced “cool”) and typed in “Straight dope message board” and it got me nothing olike this place. But it did say there were 1,060 matches, but only showed me two and I had no way to see the others.
This is supposed to challenge Google?
I agree. Either I’m not doing it right or it completely sucks ass.
I played with cuil this morning. It was disappointing. Maybe with time it will improve. I liked the way it displayed search results though.
I have a hard time imagining any search engine that can really rival Google.
Odd. It’s got the pictures of two of the Straight Dope books, but the text is random spam text in one entry and something unrelated in the other.
Well, it does show that this site may be ripping off the SDMB.
I like the way results are shown better than Google.
But it’s slow, which is a death-knell for a search engine.
I’m wondering if they’re simply hoping to be bought out by someone like Microsoft or Yahoo.
How are you supposed to access the hits other than what’s displayed?
The info link gets an error message. What kind of an amateurish operation is this? This is supposed to be their big launch day? This thing is ASS.
A search for “Straight Dope” gets zero results. I’m going to assume that they’re still working out some bugs, but as of now, I think Google is laughing its ass off.
I entered “Straight dope message board” (with the quotes) and received 4,610 results. Using the two-column format, the real SDMB shows on page two, column one, second link. The Perfect Master would not be amused.
Cuil was exceedingly slow, and highly inaccurate. I tried several other search phrases and found web content attributed to everyone but the actual owner. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt their search engine needs tweaking, and the end of the week. If they haven’t got it working by then, their investors can kiss their $33 million goodbye, not to mention their customers.
Could be it’s heuristic, and needs time to get refined.
My first search for “ACLU” got zero results. The second time I tried it, it actually showed some reasonable hits - the ACLU national page, the texas page, and so on. But honestly, now - how many people are going to try their search twice? Most would probably just assume the page stinks.
Not yet, anyway. A random check of some of my web sites shows that it compiles a search results page by combining pix from different sites than the text next to it, and in most of the cases I saw, the pix have absolutely nothing to do with the text except if you think like a stoopid computer.
Example: one site (link below) is named doorbell.net. The name comes from the County (Door), and has absolutely nothing to do with wooden doors or door chimes. But Cuil thinks that it does because of the similarity of words.
And some of the links tied to pix have no relation at all, that is, the pic doesn’t even come from the page it’s linked to, but some unknown site.
Wow, epic FAIL.
I google’d myself. The first page contained link to different professional organizations I belong to, some online interviews I’ve done, my blog from a couple of years ago, and my NY Times wedding announcement from 1996. All in all a pretty good snapshot of my online existence.
I cuil’d myself. The only thing that turned up was my name in the guest list of a random science fiction con from ten years ago. Utterly worthless.
Slow and inaccurate. Just what I want in a search engine!
I took a quick peek at Cuil and was not overly impressed.
Some of it may have to do with simply being used to Google. While Googles layout is uninteresting it is functional. Cuil’s results layout I find harder to navigate as simply.
Additionally Cuil does not hand you news results as part of your search as Google does. I find this feature of Google of great use as often I am looking for a media report on a subject and not the webpage of the subject itself.
Finally, Cuil’s results seem off a bit. I Googled a website I am involved with and while Cuil returned links it did not return the basic homepage link at all on the first page (returned articles more deeply embedded in the site). I used the name of the website as the search so this was odd. Additionally, I searched on the term “cuil” on Cuil’s site and it returned nothing about them at all opting to show me links to Ireland and windmills and restaurants.
I really, really like that Cuil will not track users searches as Google does. Just on principle I very much dislike Google for doing this but so far I am not seeing Cuil as a Google killer.
Here’s hoping though that Google finally gets some decent competition!
ETA: Tried doing a search (several times) 30 seconds ago on Cuil and this is the response I got (that is something Google never does and does not engender faith in Cuil):
“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.”
It’s DOA now:
I tried a vanity search and it was dreadful.
My dad likes it…it won’t make it past next Tuesday.
I did a vanity search and once I used the ""s it was sorta useful, otherwise scheisse.
I tried searching for the company I work for… Google gets it as the “I’m feeling lucky” link. Cuil gets it on the third page with a useless summary, and I had to check the web address to see if it was actually correct.
Also, I keep reading it as Cul… ass, in French. Sounds about right.
And, according to The Register www. culi. com is an Italian porn site. Worse, according to this - http: //www. theregister. co. uk /2008/07/29/ cuil_launch/ - NSFW article, they paired up an academic first with a soldier and secondly with gay porn.