Cuil - rival to google?

[Pressure Drop]

http://www.cuil.com/

so i read about a new search engine that was made by former employees off Google and also a former IBM employee and they are claiming it is better search engine than google.

So i've decided to buy into the hype and check it out

so far i'm none too impressed, it doesn't seem to suit my random bored-in-work and unthought out searches, quite importantly for me it doesn't seem to have a spell checker.

Anyhow i'll give it more of a go and give it a chance, perhaps it has some niche benefits for certain searches over google

[stark]

I don't like it.

[Saturn V]

not cuil amirite

[milosh]

sucks

[Vykromond]

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/27...e-whole-story/

[Ewan]

Ha, I heard about this yesterday, and I have to say all of the discussions about it have come to one common conclusion: It's laughably bad.

It often comes up with different results when searching for the same terms. The "blurb" it has for the site is often the navigational elements. I.e. Searching for Xbox, one of the first results is the IGN page with this wonderful Blurb:

GN.com | PC Games | PS2 | PS3 | PSP | Xbox | Xbox 360 | GameCube | Wii | DS | GBA | Wireless | FilePlanet | Cheats | Movies | TV | DVD | Music | Comics | Gear | Sports | Cars | Babes. Search: The Web. IGN.com. IGN Xbox. Search. Log In | Register My Account | My Email Alerts My Collection (0 Games) | My Wishlist. SECTIONS...

The pictures it chooses to go with the result often just seem to be randomly chosen from the page and irrelevant.

Finally, and I guess most importantly, the results it gives you suck. Sure it might give you "more", but it's no use if they aren't what you want.

Here was a comparison I did.

Searching for "france 2008 squad" without the "" in cuil, the first page's results:
A general euro2008 news site
A link to Germany's Euro 2008 squad
A link to Portugal's Euro 2008 squad
A link to an Iraqi club team's squad
A link to a Serbian club team's squad
A link to a Finnish club team's squad
A news story about Netherlands not picking Boulahrouz
A news story about Kuzcak pulling from the Polish squad

Google's 1st page results:
Wikipedia link to the France national football team
Team guide for the Tour de France
News story about the announcement of the France squad for Euro 2008
France Euro 2008 squad profile
France team page on ESPN Soccernet
And 3 news stories about players picked/left out of France's Euro 2008 squad


Apart from the Tour de France link (although, I never actually mentioned football in the search query, so this can be forgiven), Google's results are HUGELY more relevant, not a single one on the first page of Cuil's results are at all what I wanted.

So anyway, that's $33million down the drain!

[Troll King]

From what I've seen of it and from what I've read about it, Cuil didn't look like it was ready for its launch. It's far too early to judge, but it was definitely not the way to start things off, especially compared to the way Google's usually clean-cut image.

[DankNuggets]

i'm sure tone will love it since he thinks google's ranked results are all conspiracy

[Squeezer]

someone at our school hacked the system and set all the homepages to cuil.

they also made it so that you can't visit any other site. I'm on my laptop in the computer lab right now.

[Bioture]

i cuiled (ALMOST TYPED GOOGLED LOLzLZ) myself and got results on some amazon shit I rated years ago.

thumbs down for the time being. but it has potential.

[Edify]

(OffTopic: the boards feel slow today. The smiley's are loading so slow as I write)

Heard about this yesterday too, but most of the hype seems to be because it's founded by an ex-google employee and a couple of ex-google people work under the Cuil team so it's supposed to pack some kind of punch.

[kthx]

What a joke, I remember when google came about, and nobody thought that it would trump Yahoo, but it did. Google was new and well designed. Google won't be as easy to fall as Yahoo did, especially not after releasing the half-ass version they have right now.

[Pressure Drop]

So far the only 2 things i like about it is the research results displayed as columns and their privacy policy (there style is quite nice too for an extra brownie point)

But my search results aren’t that great and there is a far more functionality that’s been added to google over the years.

It would need a hell of a lot more added to compete for default search engine and as of yet (not searched it that much) google wins on a normal search …But it also has image search and maps and prices etc … which is very useful when the need arises.

Perhaps in the future that will come but with the search engine market dominated by google to try and stand a chance to grab market share surely in your big debut launch where people like us use it, it is important to have something better or different on show.

They went for the search results are better, well so far I’m not experiencing that at all.

[Xog]

It's got a unique design that I like. If google were to take it, they'd be on the top of the world.

[Ewan]

It's also lacking heavily in the more "hidden" features.

On google, you can do things like search for:

2in in cm -> returns the conversion of 2 inches into cm
8.4usd in gbp -> converts the currency
2 + 4 * pi -> does the maths
define existentialism -> returns the dictionary definition of the word

Also has a passive spell checker (did you mean?), the results it returns for simple searches are generally very relevant first (typically wikipedia will be first, followed by other high respective informative sites).

It also has very good logic for working out if you mis-worded something.

For example, I was trying to find www.googlefight.com. I searched for google wars. It showed me 3 results from google wars, then showed me 3 results for google fight with an option to show more (the 1st was the site I wanted) before carrying on with the rest of the results for google wars. Without this logic, it would have been hard for me to find the site.

A new search engine (and to be honest, any of the other ones around) simply cannot compete with this.


This is even before you consider their prices, images, news, email, maps etc etc.