Tuesday, 29 July 2008

Cuil the New Useless Search Engine

Cuil Homepage Whenever something claimed to be the “Google-killer” coming out from the closet, everyone went Wow! So here we have it, Cuil, from the old Irish word for knowledge, claimed to have indexed 121 billion pages.

Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else.three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page.s coherency.

Hey that is cool! The interface looks very Web 2.0′ish (gradient, rounded corners, big constrast. etc). Let’s check how good it is on search. So I searched my name, Scott Yang on Cuil:

Search for Scott Yang on Cuil

Nice. This blog is the very last item on the SERP with a totally irrelavent image next to it. Someone’s LinkedIn profile is the first result — but not mine. And the rest of SERP? There are full of those “Scott Yang School of Obesity” links. WTF?! School of Obesity? Is it trying to tell me something?!

I’ve tried to search with many specific terms and none gave me satisfactory search result. Yes — none. At the end of the day, it does not matter whether you have indexed 120 billion pages or 120 trillion googol pages. If your SERP does not yield useful result, then you too are irrelevent. Next!

Comments

1.
Avatar for Simon
Posted by Simon on Tue, 29 July 2008 4:32 pm

I don’t get three columns, and it’s not even a grid – incredibly hard to scan.

The images appearing next to search results half the time are not from the site being listed – very strange.

But, how did they get so much PR? They’re in newspapers and all over blogs. Although if like me, you get wacky results, you’ll head straight back to Google.


2.
Avatar for Felix
Posted by Felix on Wed, 30 July 2008 4:24 pm

I agree. A search for my name comes up with nothing useful. I thought the algorithm and index might not be tuned towards people so I tried searching for “Saxophone wx50″ (which is a wind midi instrument for those of you not familiar with it !) it can up with…… NOTHING !!! Google found 54 entries with a supposedly smaller index. Big index means nothing.


3.
Avatar for Felix
Posted by Felix on Wed, 30 July 2008 4:28 pm

Actually, my bad. it should be “saxophone WX-5″ and it did come up with some results, not great though.


4.
Avatar for yy
Posted by yy on Fri, 1 August 2008 2:08 am

cuil=pretty sucky. searched our business and my partner’s name–which comes up smack top three on google. nada. none showed up on the first FOUR pages! i say google killed them before they got out of the water.


5.
Avatar for Mean Dean
Posted by Mean Dean on Fri, 1 August 2008 7:55 am

At least you got listed. I entered “Dean Peters” and “church website design” (with quotes) and got NOTHING of relevance to me …

… for “Dean Peters” … alot of links about a now-dead professional wrestler, and some obscure rapper.

… for “church website design” … mostly commercial CMS providers for churches.

So if I wanted to look up tutorial information on how to maintain my church website, I’m out of luck.


6.
Avatar for Ray
Posted by Ray on Mon, 11 August 2008 12:33 am

Cuil… very useless.. cuil in Indonesian mean ‘chunk’


7.
Avatar for 3lilgems
Posted by 3lilgems on Sun, 12 October 2008 2:02 am

I thought Cuil will improve after 3 months in existence, but it can’t still find my blog! and they said they indexed 120 billion pages? Find.com and even the much newer mse360 are better. these two found my blog and give interesting results..


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