Like many I tried the new mega search engine Cuil when it first came on line. I do what I usually do to check out a search engine. I ran a search on my name and it came up with some rather obscure finds and missed some more common ones, but the thing that puzzled me were the graphics (photos) that went with the finds.
The first hit it came up with was an old column I did about four or five years ago (I’m a journalist) about meeting Louis L’Amour. Next to the column, they had a picture of Bill O’Rilley (He is not mentioned in the column, for that matter at the time of the writing of the column, I had never even heard of Bill O). The next hit was from an ebook I am quoted in about unique American newspaper names. The photo here was of the Sidney Opera House. Now I marginally (but only marginally) can see this one since the author of the ebook is from outside Melbourne, Australia and the Sidney Opera House is in Australia. Then a few hits later where I am mentioned in a young woman’s daily blog dealing with theater, they have the Google logo.
I just did a quick search on my wife’s name and the first result was an abstract to a paper she submitted to a bit national conference. The picture accompanying it was lesbian porn… :eek: WFT??
Huh. It returned almost no relevant search results and was highly resistant to normal search string optimization tricks. I also liked the tiny handful of results per page… I do love half of my screen being whitespace!
Bottom of the page has pages of results and the next page arrow.
For me, the first five pages of results had a ton of duplicate entries, far more than Google, some in the same position on every page. Really pitiful. One or two of the pictures were actually relevant.
The founders of this mess were interviewed on our local TV last night. They worked for Google, the woman in marketing and her husband as some sort of engineer. They’ve got 30 employees.
Their servers crashed from the traffic yesterday - it would be interesting to track the number of hits they get. Declining steeply is my guess. Besides the pictures, which is no advantage, nothing new.
BTW, the anchor last night said that if you misspell the name slightly you wind up someplace interesting and nsfw.
