http://www.cuil.com/

aside from the fact that their servers obviously aren't up to the task of dealing with thousands upon thousands of hits as a result of CNN's little blurb...it's not too bad

i was a bit confused when i put in my name and it found a page that previously had my name and email on it...except that the page was deleted about 6 months ago

7/28/2008 2:33:25 PM

it's all the rage right now, needs a LOT of work.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080728-ex-googlers-launch-biggest-search-engine-on-the-web.html
http://lifehacker.com/399336/cuil-search-engine-out-to-challenge-google
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=12510

7/28/2008 2:36:53 PM

i tested it out, not very good at all.

7/28/2008 2:37:27 PM

If it ain't broke, don't fix it ... and that's exactly what they're trying to do by competing against Google.

I typed in a few obscure searches that Google handles perfectly, and all I get is ad-link trash pages for results from Cuil.

I'm going with a resounding ... "I don't think so, Tim" ... for this one.

7/28/2008 2:42:16 PM

Gonna have to do a lot better than this to even be a threat to Google.

7/28/2008 2:46:21 PM

i tried it out this morning a bunch around 730am. Google had more relevant results nearly every time and I really did not like the presentation. There is a reason that google doesnt index that many pages I would think.

7/28/2008 2:48:17 PM

the results I've gotten back are terrible - I'm getting obvious spam links on the first page of many queries. Pretty awful actually.

7/28/2008 2:56:40 PM

they spelled "FAIL" incorrectly.

7/28/2008 2:57:10 PM

^^ same. I cross checked stuff b/w them and google like I said, and there were several times that google gave me the best link as the very first link and Cuil didn't even have it on their first page.

[Edited on July 28, 2008 at 3:00 PM. Reason : ]

7/28/2008 2:58:15 PM

^^Haha

7/28/2008 3:01:26 PM

It worked extremely well for mainstream topics.

It failed COMPLETELY on anything obscure/new.

Try the "Lotus Evora" or "Nikon D700"

zero results returned my ass

7/28/2008 3:11:08 PM

^ i noticed that phenomenon as well

7/28/2008 3:12:07 PM

Sorry, an error occurred.

Please try your search again. If the problem persists, please be assured that our team is working quickly to resolve the issue.

7/28/2008 3:19:19 PM

searched "Nikon D60"

Quote :

"Sorry, an error occurred. Please try your search again. If the problem persists, please be assured that our team is working quickly to resolve the issue. "

7/28/2008 3:21:36 PM

team of 2 people

7/28/2008 3:22:34 PM

They claim that they scan more sites than Google (whatever that means), yet I couldn't find any of my friends blogs after I typed in their exact title.

And no image search? Fail.

7/28/2008 4:08:42 PM

I tried a few things this morning on it that I was researching. 2 searches in a row with NO HITS. The site sucks.

7/28/2008 4:18:46 PM

Some rather amusing quotes:

PC World:

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/149048/cuil_stumbles_out_of_the_gate.html

Quote :

"But the site seemed unable to handle some softball, straight-forward queries. For example, a search for "barack obama" returned on the first page of results mostly links to different pages of Obama's official site, hardly useful if one is looking for a variety of sites on the presidential candidate. A search for "St. Louis, MO" initially returned zero results."

Or perhaps the appropriately titled "The New Cuil Search Engine Sucks"

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2326643,00.asp

7/28/2008 7:00:49 PM

Quote :

"they spelled "FAIL" incorrectly."

speaking of which- how is this pronounced?

coo-ill?

also

Quote :

"No results because of high load... Due to excessive load, our servers didn't return results. Please try your search again."

[Edited on July 28, 2008 at 7:18 PM. Reason : Ø]

7/28/2008 7:15:56 PM

Quote :

"team of 2 people"

It's a husband/wife team with at least a few other ex-googlers according to most of the articles.

7/28/2008 8:06:16 PM

mahalo is way more better.

7/28/2008 8:20:46 PM

better how?

7/28/2008 8:29:08 PM

usability

definitely a better startup than this.

7/28/2008 8:37:30 PM

Quote :

"how is this pronounced?"

"cool"

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iaKPOdTQnHVB4WqdVRWYKXDQIwdwD9270VEG0

7/28/2008 8:39:39 PM

Thanks for wasting my time whoever

7/28/2008 8:51:35 PM

hahaha I type 'the wolf web' into Cuil and Google, Google's #1 hit is the correct site, it's nowhere to be found on the first three pages of cuil, just a bunch of garbage...

7/28/2008 10:19:36 PM

yea this thing sucks.

I just did a search for 'cuil sucks' and got only 3 results which are completely non-relevant

Quote :

"Weavings: Pagan & Wiccan Forums & Sky"

Quote :

"RainSliver Board :: View topic - Penis 40cm Sexe"

Quote :

"TR.TRYMAYTWNFIV.COM"

7/28/2008 10:19:51 PM

It's pretty bad.


The categories part is nice.


The presentation - columnar, 2 or 3 columns, is attractive


The results it kicks back are OLD and irrelevant, mostly.




Overall, I give it a C- for presentation (nice ideas, poorly executed) and a 0 for everything else

[Edited on July 28, 2008 at 10:52 PM. Reason : thats a 0 as in F-------------------------]

7/28/2008 10:44:26 PM

Is this site just a joke?

Search for "Cuil", guess what doesn't show up.

Awesome.

7/28/2008 10:53:03 PM

they got 33 mil out of it.

I'd take that.

in other news, yeah it pretty much sucks.

7/29/2008 12:15:17 AM

Ex-Googlers reinvent web search
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/29/cuil_launch/ [NSFW]

yea, i was wondering the same thing, how can this article be nsfw, goes to show you how much this search engine sucks, and this is with safe search "on"

7/29/2008 12:39:16 AM

too much hype too soon.

7/29/2008 12:54:59 AM

I gave it an honest shot.

Yet another google-slaying search engine has dashed itself against the walls of mediocrity.

poor cuil. better luck next time

7/29/2008 4:26:12 PM

http://sampullara.appspot.com/yuil/

lol
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-07-30-n79.html

7/30/2008 4:10:23 PM

Quote :

"all I get is ad-link trash pages for results from Cuil."

8/1/2008 9:00:06 AM

aren't there laws that prevent you from leaving your company to start your own and make competing products? something about trade secrets?

8/2/2008 1:58:31 AM

there are non-compete agreements and stuff like that, but thats between you and the company, not necessarily laws.

8/2/2008 3:28:08 AM

^^ and most of those have time limits, 3-5 years before you can work at a competitor

8/2/2008 9:27:41 AM

powerset is a much cooler idea ... I dont see anything different about cuil, except that it sucks worse that ask jeeves

8/2/2008 11:36:59 AM

^Heh, and that IS hard to do.

8/2/2008 11:49:59 AM

hah, remember this garbage

11/19/2008 8:03:06 AM

lolz

11/19/2008 8:04:42 AM

Quote :

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it ... and that's exactly what they're trying to do by competing against Google."

While I think we can all agree Cuil sucks, this isn't a good way to look at it either.

You know, everyone thought that search was already a solved problem when Google got on the scene.

11/19/2008 8:07:25 AM

Um ...

Quote :

"everyone nobody thought that search was already a solved problem when Google got on the scene."

FTFY.

11/19/2008 9:06:18 AM

yeah, i don't know what that guy was talking about. I very vividly remember how frustrating it was to try to find anything.

before google, i used dogpile, which basically searched all other search engines at once, and that was sadly the best hope there was of finding anything.

it's crazy to think that the majority of people using the internet don't remember life before google, much less life before the graphical web.

11/19/2008 9:19:55 AM

These days I look back and I can appreciate the much smaller noise::content ratio we had back then.

Of course, I'm so used to what we have now that it'd be admittedly impossible to go back.

11/19/2008 9:33:22 AM

^^shoot, i remember back in the day some of the search aggregators would open up 9 frames, yes folks, FRAMESET (search 9 different search engines) for you and cascade them so you could see all the search results at once.

you used to have to search like 5-6 different search engines back then.

11/19/2008 11:44:42 AM

^ haha that's exactly what dogpile did.

i remember yahoo, altavista, lycos, hotbot, excite, infoseek, webcrawler. probably more that i didn't use or forgot about.

11/19/2008 11:49:57 AM

I remember using Yahoo's web-directory extensively in high school..... whenever you needed to find something, just go to Yahoo and dig through a dozen layers of hierarchy to get to a hand-crafted list of 5-6 websites

11/19/2008 11:53:01 AM

Right. And if you had a website, you pretty much didn't exist unless you could get onto that list. Which you couldn't, because they were too busy milking their ad revenue to ever update it with new information.

11/19/2008 1:28:47 PM