Yep, I did the same thing with the same results. When I google my name, the first hit is my web site. I got nothing relevant with cuil. When I looked up another page of mine, it had an accompanying thumbnail photo of some strange woman who I had never seen in my life. WTF?
I don’t understand the images they display with the search results. Sometimes they’re relevant, sometimes they’re not. Sometimes they’re banner ads from the site, not very useful. On our site, somehow they extracted the text from the top of our home page and made an image out of it. I don’t get how or why they did that…
I searched for “cuil” on Cuil – and got something about Cuil Mhuine, Ireland. When you search for “google” on Google, the first hit you get is what you expect. Oh dear – when a search engine can’t even find its own home page, you have to wonder 
Even better, type “cuil” into Google and click “I feel lucky”.
As I said in another thread, Cuil has about 12 more hours to get this fixed, or forevermore “Cuil” will be shorthand for “epic failure”
Epic fail. Type in “bezoar” and you get a weird mishmash of websites selling “bezoaar” talismans, and offhand mentions of the word “bezoar” in other documents. Put “bezoar” into Google, and up comes Wiki, Medline, and a host of other–informative–hits.
Part of me wants to give them a bit of a break as a startup is bound to have some issues but this thing is so screwy one has to wonder how they ever missed it and thought opening for business at this point was a good idea.
Cuil is a crappy search engine because it’s 2008 and we know how search engines are supposed to work. The world has been using search engines for over a decade now (yes, the Internet has been mainstream for roughly a decade) and the interface portion of a search engine is a solved problem: Alta Vista, Yahoo!, and Google all did and do the same thing, to varying degrees of usefulness. Cuil is simply a really crappy version of the technology going head-to-head against an entrenched version that’s a whole lot better. There really is no competition and six months from now Cuil will have been forgotten.
I entered “tits” and only got a few results. Very few were what I would prefer.
Total failure.
My first search yesterday was “free porn.” The results were highly unsatisfactory but I actually got more hits with safe search on than off.
The search for my website’s keywords returned the homepage - and apparently every single other page on the site- of which there are hundreds, as it is a genealogy site for which I used a program to generate a separate page for every individual in my database. And of course completely random images, including one the looks like the work of Ralph Steadman, for the page about my great-great grandmother.
That seems to be a common thread in many complaints, including mine. Cuil’s attempt to match images with text just doesn’t work much of the time, producing bizarre results. They seem to ignore the obvious associations – a pic on the same web page as text probably has some connection, but they don’t use that piece of information.
I guess in fairness, Google News has the same sort of problem. At least Google doesn’t try to associate images with the search engine results though.
Weird. I searched for my company, and most of the results on the first page were not from my company’s website, but product pages from the site of one of our distributors. The images are of our products, but they’re all mixed up, and don’t match the product in the link.
Then, when I clicked on the link for the second page of results, I got a page saying there were no results matching my search term.
To me, that’s by far Cuil’s biggest detriment. I don’f feel I get an added benefit from seeing images, nor from previewing random content from random pages.
The pics next to some links sometimes have nothing to do with the link. I am sure they are connected in some roundabout way, but I can’t figure it out. I CUILed my company name and the pic was of an EA Sports game…and we are in the credit business!
fauil (pronounced “fail”)
I’m gonna give it a few weeks and try it again… I know nothing of how search engines work, and maybe it needs a breaking-in period or something?
But, yeah, so far FAIL.
Google is so good that I doubt I’ll try Cuelle again unless I start hearing that it’s absolutely great.
You mistake me: it’s the organisation of the text that I like. It’s very much like red-top computer news sites like The Inquirer and The Register.
Back in 1993 or so I was at a small party on X-mas Eve with some friends. We had all kinds of gourmet food that we were making. One of the guests decided to try to make Oysters Rockefeller. We were ready to go when we realized that none of us knew how to open an oyster. It was X-mas Eve and there was no one to call because everywhere was closed. Luckily my hosts were on-line and I got my first taste of the power of the Internet. We searched for “how to open an oyster” on Alta Vista or something and instantly had instructions. It was an epiphany for me as I realized the way of the future.
Yesterday I put “how to open an oyster” into Google and got millions of hits. Right on the first page were a couple of YouTube vidoes as well as sites with pictures and great instructions. I put the same thing into Cuil and it didn’t return a single hit. It was worse than the first search engine that I ever used nearly fifteen years ago.
Cuil=Fail