Cuil
Various Authors, Website, July 28, 2008.

Cuil (pronounced 'cool') launches today. Cuil is a new search engine that reports searching more than 121 billion web pages. It's nice and snappy, but the results ordering is questionable. Also, while I like the little images it associates with the link results, these could be done better, as I saw my own image associated with other people's pages. The drop-down category listings, though, are quite nice. See especially the search for e-learning. Vicki Davis, who got it to work before it crashed from the overload this morning, offers her own review. (Hits Today: 0 Total: 1575) [Direct Link] [Tags: Online Learning, Ontologies]

Share |

Comments

Re: Cuil

Anymouse, July 28, 2008

When I search for the name of my school district, exactly as it appears in the domain name, I get zero hits from our servers (i.e.: no official pages from our district). Safe search is on and the first page has a result from "sexpornhost.com". When I modify the search to get several results from our district, the images shown with the results are about 50% exactly right and 50% completely wrong. I can't see the 10th result on a page without scrolling, but the layout sometimes makes it seem as though there are only 9 results per page...would be very easy to skip the 10th result and go straight to page 2...which is necessary, since the results aren't that good.

I'm a web guy, and I've got to say that the code for the results page is kind of silly for a site trying to contend on the level of Google: Everything has it's own class or ID, there are _tables_, alt tags are just missing when they should be alt=""...

On the plus side, I searched for edupunk and the middle left result on the first page had a picture of you with it.

I think they did pretty amazingly for basically coming out of nowhere. As far as Google-killer goes, this is about as good as it gets, I think. Good to have a secondary site, a backup, but it's no Google.

I will say that it's probably not intentional but still somewhat disturbing to have a Scientology image appear with unrelated content as it did in Vicki Davis' blog post. That's exactly why you don't match content like that unless you're really sure it's supposed to be together. [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

Re: Cuil

Anymouse, July 28, 2008

Cool with pictures, but after a couple of searches I noticed that the same sites just seems to repeat themselves in the list of hits. When I clicked through to page 2, 3 etc. The same site come back several times? Seems they need to do some work on their algorithms... [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

Re: Cuil

Emma Duke-Williams, July 29, 2008

Does it take note of where you are? When I did Stephen's suggested "e-learning" (I'd previously tried eLearning when I tested it earlier) the first hit that it came up with was UK based. (As I am). Or, did everyone get that result. ( www.e-learningcentre.co.uk/ - I have to say, I'd never heard of that particular centre before) [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

Re: Cuil

Stephen Downes, July 29, 2008

> www.e-learningcentre.co.uk/

I get that too, in Canada [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

Re: Cuil

Anymouse, July 30, 2008

How much were you paid to promote this? It's clearly a bit rubbish at the moment. Sorry to ask the question but, as you yourself said a little while ago, the question needs to be asked of bloggers etc who promote various tools and services.

Chris Hall [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

Re: Cuil

alqpr, July 30, 2008

Stephen, your image "problem" is not unique. They appear to have a limited number of images for each subject which they often attach to posts to which they do not apply. (But Chris, maybe Stephen didn't need to be paid in cash - just having all those pretty pictures of himself staring back at him might be all the reward he needed :))

Another problem I noticed when trying it out is that there is much more duplication of results than in a Google search. This is so extreme that on clicking through the subsequent pages of results I often had to go back and check carefully to see that it was in fact a "new" page. [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

Re: Cuil

Stephen Downes, July 30, 2008

Well, describing a service is distinct from promoting a service. And I would hardly say my link constitutes a promotion.

That said, I was paid nothing (zilch, rien, nada) to link to this site (nor am I ever paid to link to sites or to promote any product or service).

And all of that said, the reason I linked to it was that I saw it on CTV news that morning. Then I saw it on CTV news again this morning. Which suggests to me that *somewhere* money is changing hands. But none of it is coming near me.

[Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

Comment



Title
Your comment:
Enter email to receive replies:

Your comments always remain your property, but in posting them here you agree to license under the same terms as this site (CC By-NC-SA). If your comment is offensive it will be deleted.

Automated Spam-checking is in effect. If you are a registered user you may submit links and other HTML. Anonymous users cannot post links and will have their content screened - certain words are prohibited and your comment will be analyzed to make sure it makes sense.