Cuil - (google beater apparently)

quarryman

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7528503.stm

Search site aims to rival Google
Screengrab of Cuil homepage, Cuil
The Cuil homepage is even more sparse than Google's

Former workers at the web giant Google have launched a rival search engine.

Called Cuil, from the Gaelic for knowledge and hazel, its founders claim it does a better and more comprehensive job of indexing information online.

The technology it uses to index the web can understand the context surrounding each page and the concepts driving search requests, say the founders.

But analysts believe the new search engine, like many others, will struggle to match and defeat Google.

Hard fight

Cuil, pronounced "cool", says it uses more than 120 billion webpages to build up its index of the information it finds on the web.

It claims this is more than Google uses though the search giant has stopped reporting how much it indexes. Without revealing numbers Google claimed its index was still bigger.

Cuil claims that its technology moves away from the methods that have driven Google's success.

Instead of just looking at the number and quality of links to and from a webpage as Google's technology does, Cuil attempts to understand more about the information on a page and the terms people use to search. Results are displayed in a magazine format rather than a list.

The company is also trying to set itself apart from Google by not retaining any information about what people search for.

Cuil founders, Anna Patterson, Russell Power and Louis Monier are former Google staffers. The other founder Tom Patterson worked for IBM and others on search and storage technologies.

By declaring its aim of taking on Google, Cuil joins a long list of others that have tried and largely failed to dent the search giant's market share. Other contenders include Teoma, Vivisimo, Snap, Mahalo and Powerset.

"The time may be right for a challenger," said Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of Search Engine Land. "Competing with Google is still a very daunting task, as Microsoft will tell you."

Did a quick search on "ethernet webcam" and got zero results. Me thinks it just might be crap.

stevire

A long way off a challenge imo!!

Timeout half the time, and results are slow and very inaccurate. Loads of terms not found.... :rolleyes:

Biggest web search engine?? way off, the engine doesn't seem to know how the hell to search!! :eek:

DonkeyStyle \o/

pfff, not going to replacing google for me anyhoo

NotMe

stevire wrote: »

prime example:
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=boards.ie

:eek:

Was just gonna post that.

Also it doesn't sound right to say "I don't know. Let me cuil it."

Diddy Kong

Thats very bloody slow....google was almost instantaneous. People will get very bored waiting when it can be done a lot quicker with google!

guliolopez

Not finished
It does seem to be a long way from finished:

• Times out or returns zero results for simple terms
• Even the static "About" page is currently rendering oddly in my browser
• Seems to give priority to pages which contain "is BLAH" after your term (IE: "TERM is BLAH". EG: in "[Cork] is [a town in Ireland]"). Probably so that they can do the categorisation stuff.
• etc.

Cuil is Irish for knowledge?
Not in any dialect (sean-ghaeilge nó nua-ghaeilge) that I'm familiar with.

In fact, as far as I know "cuil" means bug or fly. As in: cuil Bhealtaine (mayfly), cuil tí (house fly), etc.

Seems to be a bad choice to associate with the term "bug"!!!

Irish participation
Interesting that Irish involved in tech leadership - namely Tom Costello, ex-Trinity, and wife Anna Patterson, ex-Google.

Jonathan

Yup. Slow and search results are totally unreliable. I'm sticking with google.

stevire

NotMe wrote: »

Was just gonna post that.

Also it doesn't sound right to say "I don't know. Let me cuil it."

It worked the second time... Thought it was my browser, hence why I edited from the post!!

Dingatron

Not so cuil just yet by the looks of it.

Sherifu

I like the design.

mordeith

Sherifu wrote: »

I like the design.

That's about all that's going for it. Slow as a middle-aged woman driver (no offence ) and completely hit and miss results. The way in which results are displayed is terrible as well.

Thomas_S_Hunterson

At least they're going eco-friendly a la Blackle:pac:

Jonathan

Sean_K wrote: »

At least they're going eco-friendly a la Blackle:pac:

Get with the times.. Nobody uses crt anymore sean :pac:

Shiny

Yeah just tried it there with an open mind and used similar search terms
that I have been using the last few weeks while researching.

While cuil finds many related topics it couldn't actually find the topic
I was searching for...(Which is the whole point of a search engine!)

Also found it very slow. I know there might be alot of demand as it has
only been announced but that is unacceptable in this day and age.

ethernet

Shiny wrote: »

Yeah just tried it there with an open mind and used similar search terms
that I have been using the last few weeks while researching.

While cuil finds many related topics it couldn't actually find the topic
I was searching for...(Which is the whole point of a search engine!)

Also found it very slow. I know there might be alot of demand as it has
only been announced but that is unacceptable in this day and age.

Tried it and found the exact same. Should improve in time, I suppose (hope).

An Fear Aniar

Ailm, beith, coll.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br%C3%ADatharogam

In Ogham, it's Coll, not Cuil.

In any case, I would pronounce "cuil" as Quill, rather than "cool".

Well, good luck to them I suppose. They'll have to hope Steve Ballmer doesn't take an interest, hee hee!


.

TomTom

Just came accross it there now and gave it a test. It appears to be suffering a bit as I think stumble has got a hold of it today.

I did a few searches to compare with google and MSN and to be honest I found what I was look for alot quicker with it. Results were not the fastest but what I was looking for was on the front page as opposed to being 2 pages down in the others.

To make sure it was not a lucky dip I tried again by searching personal names and it almost gave me profiles of the people I was looking for apart from google which gave me PDF's where a persons name was mentioned in a random artice (Was not the person I was looking for). It is slow, its is buggy but I'd give it a try. I'd like if it corrected that 'cuil' thing though.

Makes it sound like a serach engine founded by o'carrols gift shop.

Khannie

I'll give it a lash in a few days when things have died down. They obviously didn't expect the level of interest they got and got caught with their knickers down on compute power / bandwidth. I remember thinking "google what now? altavista's great".

Epic Tissue

I was optimistic was using it but tested when tested against Google:

1) Google had what I wanted in the first link. Cuil didn't have what I wanted anywhere (looked through a few pages)
2) Google was faster, almost instant. Cuil took ages.
3) Page rendered wrong in cuil on IE and Opera.
4) Cuil returned no results for a lot of queries.

dulpit

It is very slow, but it does look promising though, so give it a chance for now...

jamesozzie

I dont like the plain black background. And some things I love about Google are the simple 1 click option for image search, a link to your gmail at the top and features such a currency converter. (ie - type in "1 EUR in AUD")

Its new though so maybe it will improve

AARRRGH

Searching for my name and another specific word results in German and Polish websites. It really should result in something else...

quarryman

I did a search for 'Cuil' in cuil and it couldn't find itself.

BrokenArrows

i typed my name into it and it came back with 13 entries. only 1 of which was valid.

google returns 21000 entries.

a few hundrew of which are me.

me thinks this search sucks. Any search engine worth anything should easily be able to find someone as great as me.!:D

kevpants

Search for "eircom" and look at the image on the first result

Khannie

kevpants wrote: »

Search for "eircom" and look at the image on the first result

Haha.

mikewest

kevpants wrote: »

Search for "eircom" and look at the image on the first result

Priceless :D

Carlow52

put in your user name after boards.ie:
same if you contribute to any other forums
the results could be surprising

ethernet

They've been hacked! Quality Italian porn, or so it seems

Flukey

The home page is terrible. They'd need to brighten it up a bit and put something on it. They have some nice images on the "About us" page, along with the explanation of what Cuil means. Compared to some searches I did with Google, it did not give up as many, and in at least one case it did not give up any results. It has potential and some nice ideas. In short it is cool, but not very hot.

Tha Gopher

Why in this day and age set up a rival for Google?

I was shocked that "only" 60% of net searches are via google. Honestly, who the fcuk uses Yahoo, Lycos or Jeeves these days? Not sure Ive touched any of them since about 2001.

In truth Google is probably the most important tech advancement since the mobile phone.

aidan_walsh

Tha Gopher wrote: »

Why in this day and age set up a rival for Google?

I was shocked that "only" 60% of net searches are via google. Honestly, who the fcuk uses Yahoo, Lycos or Jeeves these days? Not sure Ive touched any of them since about 2001.

In truth Google is probably the most important tech advancement since the mobile phone.

A lot of people have (probably) legitimate concerns about the amount of information collected by Google and other search engines and how they choose to use it, for one thing.

pickarooney

I think much of the Far East is still Yahoo-loyal, or it was up to a few years ago at least. There are some geographical areas where Google just hasn't caught on for some reason.

dulpit

kevpants wrote: »

Search for "eircom" and look at the image on the first result

Haha....

Carlow52 wrote: »

put in your user name after boards.ie:
same if you contribute to any other forums
the results could be surprising

Just did, 1 item found for an archived topic. The post highlighted isn't even me...

suckslikeafox

Anybody here hear of scour? It basically combines the results of google, yahoo and msn searches and it has a reward policy for regular users as well...been using it for a few days now and its pretty good

Dont really like cuil, the layout of results is awful

The Sparrow

I just did a search for myself on cuil to give it a go and no results that were me came up. Conversely when I did the same search on google my bebo page was the first result.

So I googled my name and bebo on cuil and it came back that there were no results!


PS yeah bebo... I know... I know

Rew

Everyone is saying the same things about its not great and they were mad to do so much press till they have it a bit further on.

Black_Knight

I dont know now, i tried searching a simple TV model number, results = ZERO!
Googled it, many many results! Got my info in seconds.

AARRRGH

They probably got hundreds of millions in investment money.

Sometimes I wonder should I just set up soem bull**** company, get loads of VC funds, and pay myself a fortune for a few years.

Thomas_S_Hunterson

dublindude wrote: »

They probably got hundreds of millions in investment money.

Sometimes I wonder should I just set up soem bull**** company, get loads of VC funds, and pay myself a fortune for a few years.

Yea, it looks to me very much like another dot com money burner.

EKRIUQ

source

Cuil - Latest Stats
August 11th, 2008

Hi folks,

Following on from your suggestions, we have been keeping an eye on the usage stats for the new search engine Cuil. Unfortunately, we have been watching a quick decline rather than a steep ascent to success!

Despite an impressive start, stats for Cuil have been falling steadily. It’s unfortunate that the engine couldn’t capitalise on the initial interest it generated following widespread media coverage, and it remains to be seen if and how Cuil plans to tempt many disgruntled users back to the site as the index improves. It looks like the folks at Cuil have some tough work ahead of them.

In the meantime, please find below the latest stats for Cuil - these figures show the % of searches performed using Cuil relative to the total number of searches performed.

yoyo

This search site seems very poor tbh, also lol at its first result for "eircom" with a smart telecom logo, it definately needs a lot more work and fixing if its going to be a "google/yahoo etc killer".

Nick

Khannie

I'm gonna try it for the next week and see how I get on. Added it to the list of search engines in firefox (went to the site, selected the dropdown list and then "add cuil").

A bit of competition would do google no harm IMO. Do no evil me b*llix.

Interesting....Just did a search to get the famous tiananmen page from google.cn and found that despite their censorship (which was complete before) there is now a picture of tanks as the first hit.

http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen