News is all over the place today about the new Google competitor, Cuil (pronounced like “cool”). There are a few interesting aspects to it, like the paneled search result display and related categories area. However, when I did a little ego-surfing, the results were very strange.
First of all, my own website didn’t even show up on the first page of results (on Google, it’s the first result). The weirdest part were the seemingly random images associated with the results. My LinkedIn page, for example, shows a still taken from a video interview I gave over a year ago that isn’t even mentioned on my LinkedIn page. The Cranky Geeks result has the old album art for The Sword and Laser, my sci-fi/fantasy book club’s podcast.
Cuil says that they have 120 billion web pages indexed, which according to Techcrunch means they could be “arguably the most comprehensive search engine on the web.” But what good is an index that large if the results don’t make any sense? On one discussion thread started by Jim Goldstein on FriendFeed, commenter Jared (W.) Smith says:
This picture thing treads incredibly dangerously. Think of the potential misappropriation claims when someone’s photo is randomly associated with an article about, say, a person with a similar name committing a violent crime. Cuil needs to stop the practice. I found my LinkedIn profile with a completely random picture of a person who was nowhere near the profile. Not cool.
What do you think? Have you tried Cuil yet, and if so what did you think of the results that came up? Should Google have anything to worry about here?
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68 Responses for "“Cuil” is anything but"
If it stays like this, Google has nothing to worry about. And I 100% agree with Jared that the misappropriation is very bad. Doing searches or my sites resulted in all sorts of very weird and random things. Even typing in the exact URL displayed no results, yet in all those same combinations, we rank top spots on Google.
It does not amuse me. This isn’t searching but rather something perhaps far, far worse. If this is the future of the web as we focus on semantics, we are verily screwed…
I wonder how long these ex-Googlers were developing this on the d/l? The images are a serious issue and under a personal vanity search i get some inconsistencies. Not to mention, the cuilimg.com Image server drags significantly.
Finally (terminally?) I’m getting redirected to http://www.cuil.com/info/unavailable.html
with a FF error message: “Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.”
It’s down. VDOS?!
Victor – apparently they’ve been having stability issues all day. Does not bode well for a search engine to not be able to take traffic hits.
There’s not competition from Google. Until someone is able replace Google from Firefox, iPhone, Safari and various other mobile phones and mobile browsers, ( not to foget the websites that use Google ), even a better quality search engine wouldn’t be able to beat Google Search. So, Google worried about this? I don’t think so. Cuil is another one in the long list which includes Ask, AltaVista, Yahoo, Live Search, Wikia Search and many others. (Wikia Search had gotten hype too as it was termed a Google competitior, but then it failed miserably, by not working on the first day! )
If your site is down when someone goes to try it out, chances are they won’t go back.. Google doesn’t have anything to fear
I tried the same ego-driven searches and the results were terrible. I get better results on live.com at this point. I think everyone needs to cede the search space to google and look elsewhere for opportunities (Microsoft needs this advice more than anyone).
I agree, V. Also, Cuil wouldn’t even come up with results for the simplest of searches. Search engine fail. Back to Google, as usual.
So far I am very unimpressed with Cuil. Frankly I am more excited about your photo being uploaded with Skitch. I love Plasq apps and am glad to see that not all “interwebs celebs” use Photoshop just because.
Cronyism watch – TechCrunch and Cuil are two blocks apart:
http://icanhaz.com/cronyism
Be careful, you might V-Dot Cuil. Actually, maybe that would be a good thing…
constructive criticism to be sure, but let’s remember the site is brand new. google has set a very high standard, and if it encourages others to try to beat it, we all win… except those who fail in the attempt!
(although my mom would say that even those who FAIL have still won something. but i can’t remember what.)
let’s demand better ego surfing for all.
I checked it out earlier today, same ego-driven search (gosh, we’re all awful) and it made no sense whatsoever. The results page is confusing and the front page is ugly. Bye bye cuil
We’ve all been trying it at work-it’s awful. It doesn’t recognized quotes or punctuation which is completely counterintuative. Can’t be a good lawyer if you can’t do the research.
Not so cuil.
Tried cuil. HATED the random photo association – so back to google.com.
FAIL.
I was just about to write a blog post saying the exact same thing, instead I will point to this. It was interesting to see that when I searched my nick name, which normally brings up all my social profiles that nothing came up. It is a rubbish search engine and not worth people talking about it. I am mad at the media for over reporting this search engine, as it SUCKS!
Cuil is very, very Meh. They are reinventing the wheel as a square object.
Should have invested their time and money in new and exciting ways to display pre-existing indexes, if anything. I recall a project that did just that mentioned on TWiT.tv a while back, seemed somewhat successful.
You hit the nail on the head with your post title, Veronica. All the press and initial announcements painted the Cuil dev team as a ragtag band of innovators bent on taking down Google, their previous employer. Sadly, in my testing it’s a bit closer to the disaster that has been Apple’s MobileMe rollout…buggy, late to the game, and at times downright unusable.
I did a search for ‘follow focus review’ (no quotes), a result that FreshDV has consistently been ranked #1 on Google for nearly a year now. While it did in fact show FreshDV articles in the table of results, I found the same nonsensical images attached to the links. Seriously, a picture of a what appears to be a tuner car attached to a technical article about filmmaking gear? That’s completely uncuil (see what I did there?), and as you noted it becomes a slipperly slope. Not only that, but the table of results feels like a completely unintuitive way to present info, it is confusing and offers no apparent advantage to how most search engines present results.
Thanks for being one of the first to point it out and draw attention to what is not only a massive fail, but a potential liability.
Matt Jeppsen
Editor, FreshDV
The real question is – how can “Cuil” be pronounced “cool”? Qool would have worked and so would Kool, but “Cuil”? Somewhere out there, an English teacher is crying.
One of the searches for my name came next to a SCIENTOLOGY image. WTF
The page didn’t even have any images on it, so I don’t know where the hell they got the image.
Please follow internet standards dudes.
So bad!
The first three searches I tried returned:
“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.”
I got an error for any search.
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.
I found the same thing.
1. First search result for person: always linkedin (if they have one)
2. All other search results are from random blogs and RSS feeds.
3. Random pictures everywhere (hosted by cuil, and with no link to the original)
4. Random associations everywhere.
cuil = totally useless, aka uisleiss
I call it Cuilthulhu.
did a little ego surfing of myself – found a link that had a title “myspace/suicide” and the link was back to an edit I had made on Mahalo about oAuth. Confused to say the least.
Not Cuil if you ask me.
Cuil (pronounced “fail”)
Yep, weird search results. The only thing “Cuil” about it is the look.
Thanks for the link Veronica.
When searching for my name in Cuil I knew it wouldn’t be pretty. There are two other Jim Goldstein’s that come up often when searching my name. Lucky for me! One is Jim Goldstein and his Band of Angels. Doh! The other is an eccentric Jim Goldstein with a house often featured in architecture magazines and in sports magazines due to his fanatical attendance to various pro basketball games. Flip a coin as to which is most inappropriate to my photography oriented web site. Sure enough the architecture/basketball Jim Goldstein has his image associated with my web site.
Even worse someone else’s photo of the Golden Gate Bridge is associated with a commercial site of mine.
Not cool at all.
That site is ridonkulous. None of my websites came up in a search for my name. Only LinkedIn (do they have some sort of sponsorship going with LinkedIn?) and popular sites/blogs that mention my name. My very own website doesn’t come up, because it doesn’t get as many hits as, say, Techmeme. Cuil seems to give preference to the sites with the biggest audience — not the most relevant sites. Definitely not cuil.
So – you tried to search for your name – Oh? I bet everyone tries to search for you. Wait. No. Everyone is trying to search for their own names.
Are you really going to base a review of a search engine on searching for your own name? Really?
That is not egotistical but poor reviewing. You rushed to be a “me-too” blogger. Shame on you.
I’m not even sure I like Cuil but I’m giving it a chance. What is the harm in actually trying it? For real – and not some lame “put my name” and see the results.
You “net dweebs” are all the same – you want to be first to “review” something but you have nothing to say. Searched for your own name – hahahah – as if that is what we do all day long.
Such crap! BOOOOOOOOOO.
@Brad – OMG that is much better title for this post!
I too did the vanity search and while a picture of me showed up from my company’s website, it was shown next to something about Faberge jewel collection….this is a joke
Layne – If that’s what we use the search engine for, does that make it any less worthwhile? In fact, as someone who makes her career online, how my results are represented is one of the most important factors for me.
Also, quit being a troll. No one listens to one. There are ways of making yourself heard without insulting people. Grow up.
Word! What Veronica said RE: Layne H.
Trolls are the suxor.
Not that it matters but I tested a variety of other search queries as I’m sure Veronica did as well. Vanity searches are the easiest to exemplify search result flaws and are easiest for others to understand… so easy even trolls can understand.
I “cuiled” myself and got a bunch of weird stuff, including a photo of someone else next to text about me. Not cool is right.
Thanks for the mention Veronica! I got pretty fired up to say the least when I saw that random guy associated with my LinkedIn profile. Completely, 100% uncool. Thanks for bringing this into the light a little more.
Hi Veronica,
I agree. I tried it out, and came to similar conclusions. The search results for me were worse than Google search results. At best, they have more work to do. At worst, their technology can’t compete with Google’s.
I tried several Cuil searches.
I searched on my name and found me plus several others who aren’t me.
I searched for my cat pages and found zilch while they are easily found on Google (“Baldric cat” “Basil Cat” and “Molly cat”).
BTW, there are an awful lot of “Basil the cat” and “Molly te cat” web pages out there.
I tried it this morning, and after waiting 10 minutes for the results, I was thoroughly unimpressed. Like everyone else, I looked for my own name, and the hits were more miss than anything else.
Even cuiler, when I tried to hit the third page of results to see if my blog would show up on its own, I got the error message.
So far, this is pretty weak sauce. But I’ll give it another try if only to have another excuse for looking myself up again like a good little narcissist.
I did a few searches also. My name brings up 15 pages of someone from the Detroit Lions where Google brings up my name on page one.
My friend isn’t even listed until page 12, whereas on Google she’s page one.
Eric Rice, well, he’s Eric Rice
.
Tom and Molly said their searches brought up strange results also.
These people don’t seem to get that Google works because it brings up what people link to the most first. While it might not be the best algorithm, it works for me and most people on the planet. You can index as much as you want, but without a proper search ENGINE, the results are useless.
Also, I found many, MANY wrong pictures associated with links.
Not Cuil.
Sorry, I forgot to add something:
Why even bother with another search engine on the ‘net? I can see making another Twitter or something that isn’t working, but Google WORKS. Does anyone really think for an instant that this is going to even come close to replacing it?
Playing Devil’s Advocate here:
1) Everyone and their mother is linking to Cuil today.
2) Google’s search algorithm sucked when I first used it when it was pages it had indexed I was searching for. It got good after ALOT of tweaking and improvements over the years with alot of hardware backing it up.
3)While Google zagged when everyone else in search was zigging to cut it’s own swath to work as a compliment to the other engines. Now that google is in charge Cuil is zagging now that the dominant way is Zigging to do the same thing.
When a SEARCH ENGINE gives me this as a result:
No results because of high load…
Due to excessive load, our servers didn’t return results. Please try your search again.
It sucks! They are already having problems with server load, and they haven’t even been considered useful yet. They don’t have a chance of reaching google status.
Umm…wow. Does anyone here remember what Google was like back in 1999-2000, when it first started catching on? Take a look at some old screenshots–looks primitive. And a lot of its search results were just that. Cuil is in its infancy. It’s a baby. All baby’s have bugs. And I can’t believe people are complaining about server load. Considering all the press that’s been released the past few days, it’s understandable they weren’t prepared for the volume. Look at *any* starting MMORPG, even WoW, if you want to talk about server load. Get some perspective and chill out over a new way of search. Yeesh.
Hi Veronica,
You are absolutely right about this. It is indeed throwing up funny search results!! Just did some experiments… here is my post about it:
http://beingyogendra.blogspot.com/2008/07/cuil-wiered-search-results.html
Yogendra
Yeah I found the results really poor, I wrote it off 24 hours ago. Not to get all ‘Stephen Fry’ but why was this article so newsworthy that the BBC covered it? An ill though out search engine probably gets launched every day.
I (like you) also made a search for me (Halfdan Reschat) and the results was absolutely rubbish. For the most part I found pages where I have dropped a single comment on a news article or something like that in the last many, many years. Next there was a lot of pages I have never heard of and there was nothing on about me or even the name Reschat mentioned.
On Google I find my homepage, my profiles on Digg, Twitter, Facebook, last.fm, deviantART, etc. and the rest are the pages I have commented on or stuff like my YouTube videos.
So I really don’t see Cuil as being anywhere near Google. It is simply too useless.
– Halfdan Reschat
Come on people, all your “cuil” puns are killing me.
CNN featured Cuil yesterday, and the anchors were laughing when a search for “George Washington” returned “no results”.
Ouch. that’s embarrassing.
AndrewP – It’s much different when you’re launching a new search engine. There are certain expectations involved. And they’ve apparently been at this for years? If the images that come back are so far removed from the subject that they don’t even make sense, then they have a major problem with their software.
Yes, anything can get taken down by server load, but there are bigger issues than that going on.
No quick links to maps, news or even image search? That means no PicLens – EEGAD! What would I do without googles image search capabilities? How else would I ever scrub through a gazillion photos of Veronica Belmont doing crazy things – like yoga??
The ironic thing is that Google, purchased its search indexing algorithms from Anna Patterson the same developer as Cuil.
The Register posted an article today that talks about Cuil and some of the issues with non-matching images attached to search results. Here’s a hilarious quote: “…as loyal Reg reader Dr. Jonathan Grattage points out, he and his quantum research are identified with “little pictures of a US serviceman and a guy masturbating over some other poor sap”
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/29/cuil_launch/ (NSFW picture)
i don’t know what they’re indexing, but it’s not working. i can’t even find my own website and i searched for the name of my website. how is it that when i search for “thoughtsforbarter” that i don’t get anything for thoughtsforbarter.com?
it is so weird, unlike my first use of Google back in 1999, I searched all my sites and they all have some random image that is not remotely related with the sites.
Then they go from a dark awful screen to a white screen with results splattered all over, sorry Cuil…
no go.
BTW, Veronica I just found out you existed a couple of days ago and everything I’ve found of you on the internet is awesome, keep up the good work.
-Theo
Yeah but Veronica,
Considering what’s happened over the past few days for Cuil, it’s essentially been a stress test on a very early Beta product that avalanched into way too many people passing early judgment. (It doesn’t even have its revenue system in place for crying out loud.)
What expectations did people *have* for this thing? Its launch stage to be on par with Google, a tech giant that’s had one of the biggest growth rates in tech history that’s reinvested its profits into recruiting hundreds of the nation’s best and brightest programmers/IT professionals? For perspective, Google used to have links to *other search engines* on its main page, years after public launch!
Give Cuil some time to sort out its bugs and recruit additional talent. I think we’d be doing a service to rationality to look at Cuil’s potential–*that’s* the direction the search engine will be approaching over time.
Veronica, like you a vanity search for myself on Cuil results in only 5 out of the 11 are actually me. The other six are old news stories of Howard Dean and things that mention “simmering” in the articles. Thankfully there was no image spam, but considering I checked searches on Google and Yahoo, it’s clear that this new search service is truly not cuil.
Yeah but Veronica,
What Cuil has gone through over the past few days is essentially a stress-test of a very early Beta product. Cuil doesn’t even have its revenue system in place for cryin’ out loud! We’re the same age V–I can’t tell you how many times I ditched Google for AskJeeves, Mamma, or AltaVista when I was working on college papers back in the day. (Google made it easy–at that time, they offered hyperlinks to other search engines on its *main search page!*) Took years for its algorithms to be great.
And what was everyone expecting Cuil to be at launch? At the same level of Google? One of the fastest growing, most successful tech companies in history that reinvested much of its enormous profit into recruiting hundreds of the best programmers and IT professionals in the country to further develop Search and other services? Google is a monster.
Cuil’s a baby with potential to do some very neat things. I just think it would be wise to exercise some prudence in judgment and wait for the company to continue to invest in personnel and improve its programming to turn in some more relevant results. It’s only officially a few days old. Search is tough to polish.
I still remember when everybody said that Google was nothing next to Altavista, Yahoo, Lycos or Excite…
I give credit to Cuil for trying to make a search easier and more meaningful… I agree that the “popularity” criteria has made Google what it is… but it has its shortcomings when looking for some secondary aceptions of a word or topic…
Let’s give this people a chance to prove their concept. After all, some competition is good for everyone… even for Google.
I still don’t understand what the big deal is with this thing. Is it just the panel breakout and inclusion of images within the results page? Because other search engines like Ask have already been experimenting with things similar to that for awhile (and in a much cleaner, more logical form IMO.) Even Google’s slowly inching its way toward the inclusion of more non-text items in the results . . . when appropriate. I guess having everything above-the-fold could be considered different, but that’s about it.
There’s a reason Google and others haven’t deviated too much from the list-like results page form. It works. It’s worked in database search results LONG before web search engines (heck it works in print) and it still works now. It’s clean, simple and easy to scan. And when you’re searching for something, that’s what you want. To be sure, you can make design tweaks here and there, but to me this is the search equivalent of Cover Flow – pretty, but functionally worthless.
In portuguese, that word “cuil” looks like a bad word for “anus”, pronunced as “koo”.
Know Conde Dooku from Stars Wars ? Here in Brazil, the translations turned his name to “Conde Dookan” because of that. The sound “dooku” sounds very bad.
I did the same vanity search as you, Veronica, and was just as disarmed by the crappy results. But you’re famous, so you should be more disarmed. Love your work, muchly!
Cuil’s on for good looks.But search results are’nt appropriate.would love to see the images tab up there..just like google
Some time ago, one of my sites received a ton of traffic from a relatively new spider. After researching the source it turned out to be cuill’s spider crawling the web for content at an unacceptable speed.
In my research I found thousands of webmasters who experienced the same hyperactive spider robbing bandwidth/resources.
As a result of Cuill’s spider’s activity, thousands of sites requested to be removed from their spidering. Cuill obliged, possibly to the detriment of their SERPs.
1. Will these same webmasters want to be indexed by Cuill’s spider now? Doubtful.
2. Will this have an adverse affect on Cuill’s results? Absolutely.
3. Will Cuill remove the requested bans in order to improve their search results to keep their investors happy? It’s hard to say.
I tried it out a bit when news about it first broke and found it to be pretty laim.
Veronica:
I watch yopur “Tekzilla” show ALMOST every day..
It’s the BEST!!!
Keep it up. Over the years you forget the little things about the computer.. Your show is a real wake-up.
Love it
Steve
Tried Cuil the day I saw that it went live. As searches go it sucked. Our company is #1 on Google for a hotly contested search term. We didn’t show up until page 10 for Cuil. And, as stated, our logo appeared at random results (but nothing that we felt warranted misappropriation claims).
None of my searches for specific things returned results sets that were useful to me. And the layout of the returned results is annoying as all get out. There should be an option for the layout style you’d want to see.
“Cuil is anything but.” Indeed.
I too did the vanity search and while a picture of me showed up from my company’s website, it was shown next to something about Faberge jewel collection….this is a joke
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