So, 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 officially unveiled today.
Pronounced like the world ‘cool’, cuil.com is touting itself as a better search engine, proclaiming to have indexed more than 4x’s the number of sites than Google.
Being the intrepid, young ‘all things tech’ afficiando that I am, I decided to look up some terms:
ybpguide
black web 2.0
jack and jill politics
clutch mag online
electronic village
To my surprise, I got zero results.
My natural inclination was to be upset. ‘Have they forgotten about us?’ ‘Do we not exist?’
But some digging by the Black Web 2.0 crew found that we weren’t alone. A well-known tech evangelist, Chris Brogan, couldn’t find anything on himself, either.
C’est la vie. I guess I shouldn’t be TOO surprised. Early-adopters usually get the shaft in some kind of way. I just wasn’t expecting that “the best, next search-engine” would….well, not have results.
July 28th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
I got all excited to try it out, too, and was sorely disappointed. Like you, I get the “no results found” message more often than I’d like. And for the things I find with a ton of results….not impressed. Seems a bit gimmicky to me, and doesn’t help me find the results I want any better. Be interesting to see how it grows.
July 28th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
I liked the layout but how can you claim to have more sites indexed than Google yet have no search results for so many sites? Naturally I checked my site but when I got the message chalked it up to us being a fairly new site. Still considering she sold her software once to Google it should be a good site to stay up to date on especially if it IPO’s down the line.
July 28th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
While I did have trouble finding somethings relative to the black blogosphere, I did find others. I found Sojournls.com in the search just fine. Let’s see where they fall in the coming months.
I like that it’s a better visual tool for searching, I’m sure Cuil has web crawlers scouring the net right now looking for people like ourselves making discussion about it. It will not be my first choice for digging around for info, but it makes for a pretty nice screenshot in your blog.
July 28th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
It’s awful so far. I searched for “Tiffany Brown Atlanta” and the first few results were about Tiffany A Brown, who ran for mayor. That’s all well and good, except that Tiffany Brown, a *Las Vegas Sun* reporter’s face was associated with several of those results. Several pages on what’s essentially 30+ versions of the same PBWiki page with my name on it appeared, but as of page 6, neither of my sites had turned up — and then I received an excessive load message.
Now I’m not trying to say “I’m the sh*t and therefore I should be results #1-10 on every search engine.” But Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, Ask.com and MSN Live Search return at least one of my pages listed in their first page or two of results. I have to ask, then, how cool is Cuil?
July 28th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
I think their gimmick is that they are moving away from keyword search, and more towards interpreting content or at least that’s what I got from the press releases and articles I read this morning.
The issue with this is, keyword searching just makes sense. Even in spaces where we are doing vertical searches, we search with keywords, so, unless they find a balance between the two, the results are just not going to work. It is too much work to come up with a series of words to find the results people are looking for.
I managed to get response for all of the things you were looking for, but I didn’t use keywords. I had to type out trains of thought almost, and even then 50% of the time, I found sites linking to the other sites, except for Jack & Jill politics, that one I just typed that in and got the site.
The other issue is, people have learned to code for Google. That is how we do SEO optimization and/or how we learn to do it. Google first, then Yahoo! With the way their engine works, theoretically you don’t need to do SEO at all because it searches for context, but, their algorithm needs a lot of work because it is not intuitive enough to pull up things based on simple searches.
We’ll see how it evolves. It looks like they have a capable staff and enough $$$ to work with. I will be curious to see what happens six months from now but I think the intial experience coupled with all the press means they lost a lot of potential converts today.
July 28th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
I did experience a few issues with the site today as well. My co-workers and I looked at the site with much interest. The reality is the site received an enormous amount of traffic due to all the buzz (poll on CNN, releases in all the major new outlets). The underlying strategy speaks volumes. The name of the game is to build a better mouse trap…so Cuil was able to provide a decent visual display, index a larger amount of pages, and do it at a fraction of the cost. Google’s infrastructure is so large that it could probably power the federal government. So much so that it invested in alternative energy enterprises to source electricity to power their data centers. Anyway, to build a potentially top tier search product with only $7 million is unbelievable. Cuil attempts to understand the meaning of content on the page vs. the popularity. If they solve the context issue…wow. Nonetheless, I think Cuil has an intriguing value proposition. And pretty smart founders as well. So, I am willing to give them a try…this is only day one!
July 29th, 2008 at 12:59 am
Since today was day one, I do plan to give the Cuil team time to work the bugs out. However, I was extremely disappointed when I searched for ‘Digital Camera’ and Cuil returned zero results. I was like you can’t be serious! I guess I expected more because Cuil has about 3 or 4 people on their team from Google that contributed to the success of that search engine.
Hopefully this supposed competition in the search engine space will keep Google from becoming complacent, which is easy to do when you own 65% of the search engine space!
Mikey
July 29th, 2008 at 6:57 am
There’s a reason these folks are ex-Google employees. We’ll see how they’ll improve given how many people have chimed in with their negative opinions, but I wouldn’t be surprised if nothing really changes.
July 29th, 2008 at 7:00 am
that may be their gimmick, but the problem is that we all know how to do a keyword search. the fact that it returned such awful results for keyword searches makes me question the site’s worth.
July 29th, 2008 at 10:48 am
I agree Tiffany. The problem then becomes how to change they way a mass amount of people search. Everyone has been programed to search using keywords, even if they don’t even know that is what they are doing.
July 29th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
They need to do some work to those algorithms for sure, and add some more servers, thats just brainpower, IP, & hardware. The have raised a nice amount of capital, and have done this type of start up before, and Google bought that company might I add. Give them the benefit of the doubt for being bold, and ambitous enough to go after the crown. Competition is healthy for consumers, and good for the economy.
July 29th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
I just did a search for my name and all of the content is related to me, and some even from my site, in fact the first result is my site: “http://www.cuil.com/search?q=Lynne+d+Johnson” Also just looked for Chris Brogan and do see the issue “http://www.cuil.com/search?q=chris%20brogan&sl=long” his own site does not appear in the first page results. Not even when I typed his name altogether “http://www.cuil.com/search?q=chrisbrogan&sl=long”. Interesting results indeed. I did just look at Brogan’s meta tags and his name doesn’t appear in either the description or keywords tag. This could be the reason. Why his site comes up first in Google, is because he’s the popular link for the name Chris Brogan. But since I haven’t read the science behind Cuil I can not make a full assessment.
More to come…
July 29th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Well at least Cuil didnt do what Microsoft did and hire an ad-agency to develop MSDewey.com - a search engine with a touch of humor that plays prerecorded movie clips of a female actress to entertain you while searches are being performed. This was an adobe flash based experiment for Live Search. Check out - http://www.msdewey.com/ - you’ll be cracking up
November 4th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
The lesson to be learned from this is to always underpromise and overdeliver. If they had snuck up on the world like google themselves did, they would have had the time to get their stuff together before everyone in the world hit the site, looking for the next best thing. Now it will be difficult if not impossible to relaunch.
November 6th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Dunno where you were looking matey.
I just read you posting and searched cuil.com for digital cameras.
Return was: 307,517,503 results for digital camerasWeb|Video
Gari
November 15th, 2008 at 9:10 am
I found this article in cuil search engine at first ranks. No comment more.