Cuil?



  • Ex-Googlers launch rival search engine

    "Developers of new engine say it offers a more comprehensive way to search the Internet."

    Um, I don't think so! 

     http://money.cnn.com/2008/07/28/technology/cuil.ap/index.htm?cnn=yes

      

    wtf



  • Less than impressed so far here, as well. Just punching in what should be a fairly easy and common phrase for what I often use Google for (troubleshooting error messages) I fed it an easy one. http://www.cuil.com/search?q=the+page+could+not+be+displayed+404
    Yes, that's not the exact wording you're going to see on a standard 404, however it is how a user may see/report the error. And relay it to somebody trying to help them. Google returns a mess of results by using the keywords. Cuil seems to vary between 1 singular result and telling me that there are no results, perhaps I should check my spelling. Yes this is an overly simplistic example but I would want better keyword searching to pull a proper amount of results before I used it.



  •  Well that term gave me 10 million results so I think that was a transient glitch... but holy hell that thing presents search results in an amazingly ugly way. Most people like Google search because it's concise, that's anything but.

     

    edit: Dammit, where the hell did my quote go. That was in direct response to Fonzy



  •  I don't like it too much, either.

    Well, "C# reflection" gave me 10 million results. So I clicked next page... Next page (pi=22. I know it's hard to say exactly what pi is, but most people at least get the 3.14 right)... BAM.  "We didn't find any results". I really wonder what they were just showing me, then. Random junk?

    I *somewhat* like the way the results are shown. Well, I'm not really impressed, but the idea is quite good. The result just sucks.

     

    Seriously, what kind of joke is this site?



  •  I would have to agree with the above. This site is horrible. If you go into their "About Us" area, broken links are every where. If they cannot even link their own site properly, how can they do the internet?

     I tried a simple search for my own website, and got 3 results showing that seemed completely random (2 were foreign languages), yet the results said I had millions of results? WTF?



  • Wow that site sucks.  Just for the heck of it, I search for "tcl open".  Normally, on google, searcing for programming language + command gets you some helpful ways to use said command.

    Cuil, on the other hand, assumes I need to download the programming language itself.  *sigh*



  • The "about cuil" link even worked for you. I couldn't even go there without seeing a 404.

    Poor results, pages that lead to 404s.....we have all been spoiled by Google.



  •  Good old CNet to the rescue. All I saw from news threads was how the "Google Killer" had been launched. Only forums seemed to have any sanity.

     This article about sums it up though:

    http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10000670-2.html



  • Finally CNet to the rescue, the only news site I saw so far that does not claim this to be the "Google Killer":

     http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10000670-2.html



  • I can actually see how the results layout might be more novice-user-friendly.  But they need to rethink the main page -- the black background for a portal-type site is just off-putting -- and it will never fly without a better name. 



  • I understand that new sites sometimes have issues, but I would have tested it on a larger scale before sending the "Google killer" press releases.  I had the same problem: try searching on more than one word and it returns nothing.  That's pretty pathetic.

    On the other hand, this fits right in with Virtudyne's Microsoft Office killer



  •  I'm using this link to search for information about a search engine called Cuil, but I'm just not getting any good results. :p

    http://www.cuil.com/search?q=cuil



  • Google can tell me how to pronounce "cuil", Cuil can't.... 



  •  @ActionMan said:

    Google can tell me how to pronounce "cuil", Cuil can't.... 

    I noticed the same thing.  The fist thing I thought when I saw the name was "WTF is Cuil and how do you pronounce it".  I even spent some time looking around on their webste -- surely it would be in the "About Us" section.  Wrong.  When your name is a WTF, you're not getting off to a good start.


  •  i'm assuming it should be pronounced as "cool", in a sort of bill and ted's adventure, surf dude way.

    Anyhow, about the search engine itself, i think it sucks. it can't find my personal website and google can :)



  • I tried searching for my name, which in Google brings back my website as the first result and various other things I've contributed to.

    Cuil does bring back my website... sort of. It brings back a variety of sub pages, and not actually the home page. And it's all rather confusing: in Google, although the results are displayed in a linear fashion the highest ranked pages are displayed at the top. In Cuil, the columnar layour seems to be completely random, i.e. there isn't really a logical order to the search relevance.

    Definitely not a search engine I will be using, until they straighten it out anyway!



  • Cuil is pronounced "Cool" which makes the name even stupider. Yes it's Irish for knowledge, but who the fuck cares?

    I'm baffled that people still haven't learned what happens when you slate yourself as [Big X Name] Killer: you destine yourself for failure. 

    Cuil will now never be more than Yet Another Search Engine that's Not Google, so good job destroying your own product before it even got off the ground, guys!



  • I put my screen name into cuil and the only thing that came up was the worsethanfailure (!) forums. 



  • It also hard codes the displayed number of web sites you can search..  

     

    there could be millions more sites by now! 



  • @matthewr81 said:

     Good old CNet to the rescue. All I saw from news threads was how the "Google Killer" had been launched. Only forums seemed to have any sanity.

     This article about sums it up though:

    http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10000670-2.html

     

     From the article you linked to...

    Sollitto said there were two issues affecting Cuil search quality currently. First, he said, "We are trying to give people different results." Cuil is pitched as an alternative to traditional search engines, and users should not expect the results to be the same. 

    Say what? What if the result they decide to exclude for the sake of "giving them unique results" was the exact page the user was looking for? Sometimes when I tell a friend of something I found on the Web, they'll ask me for the address. Usually I don't remember it, so I just tell them what I typed into Google, and about how far in I found the result. Most of the time, they can then replicate my actions and find what I was talking about. The way Cuil does it just potentially screws it all up.

    Google killer? No chance. "Ask Jeeves" gives me better results.



  • @JamesKilton said:

    Cuil is pronounced "Cool" which makes the name even stupider. Yes it's Irish for knowledge, but who the fuck cares?

    Given that they don't tell me how to pronounce it, I'll go for "Coo-eel" which would be the approximate Spanish pronunciation. Can't quite find how to pronounce "Cuil" in English.

    BTW, I was amused about 6 months ago when someone who supposedly knows "a lot" of English tried to correct me on my pronounciation of "google" as "goggle". Ooops!



  • Can someone please tell the terrorists where the Web 2.0 Site Name Factory® is so that they can bomb it? We seriously need a clean slate. I don't care if every website is named "Freedom Something" after the fact. It'd be much better than the depressing, painful situation is now.

    I read this thread yesterday, and was today thinking about "yeah... that search engine thing I read about in TDWTF... what was it named again?" I had to reread this thread to find out about it. "Cuil". Okay, "Cuil". Got to develop some kind of a mnemonic: "Kinda like cURL, but not even close". I hope I won't forget this thing by tomorrow.

    A while ago I rediscovered what the bloody new big-name video site was actually called. Before that, I tried to ask that from my sister and she said "Was it..." -god damn it I forgot what the other site was. VEOH. Right, "Was it Veoh?" Because it wasn't that. By random dumb luck and accident I ended up to the site anyway: Hulu. Mnemonics? Hmm... "Kind of like Lulu.com, but without actual content." Hmm... not quite right. "Almost like 'hullu', Finnish for 'insane'." Now, if anyone has seen a petition to rename Vuze back to Azureus...



  • I searched for "A20 line" and 5 out of the first 11 results where wikipedia clone sites with the same content. Not exactly what I look for in a search engine.



  • @WWWWolf said:

    Can someone please tell the terrorists where the Web 2.0 Site Name Factory® is so that they can bomb it? We seriously need a clean slate. I don't care if every website is named "Freedom Something" after the fact. It'd be much better than the depressing, painful situation is now.

    I read this thread yesterday, and was today thinking about "yeah... that search engine thing I read about in TDWTF... what was it named again?" I had to reread this thread to find out about it. "Cuil". Okay, "Cuil". Got to develop some kind of a mnemonic: "Kinda like cURL, but not even close". I hope I won't forget this thing by tomorrow.

    A while ago I rediscovered what the bloody new big-name video site was actually called. Before that, I tried to ask that from my sister and she said "Was it..." -god damn it I forgot what the other site was. VEOH. Right, "Was it Veoh?" Because it wasn't that. By random dumb luck and accident I ended up to the site anyway: Hulu. Mnemonics? Hmm... "Kind of like Lulu.com, but without actual content." Hmm... not quite right. "Almost like 'hullu', Finnish for 'insane'." Now, if anyone has seen a petition to rename Vuze back to Azureus...

     

    Thank you! The name Vuze is a WTF and we should petition to change it back along with the new interface. It's just like flickr, flutter, twitter, and whatever other stupid names these people can think to take half the vowels out of. Even worse are the sites like Bebo, which have absolutely no meaning, even if you try to put vowels back in....in addition to the fact that their site is hard enough to use without having such an annoying name. As I'm working on a "Web 2.0" site, currently under development, I cringe at the thought of naming it something like that. And honestly, as much as I hate YouTube for exposing the world to the largest group of strange people with way too much time on their hands (if you don't believe me, just go there and search for charlie the unicorn), at least the still have a decent name.



  • Their web crawler is also something of a WTF.



    My website has a non-standard layout: www.mysite.com returns a 404 error, while www.mysite.com/realstuff/ is the root page of an extensive site. www.mysite.com/realstuff/ is linked from many other sites, while www.mysite.com isn't linked from anywhere. The Cuil crawler has only ever asked for "/", usually twice a day, and never for "/realstuff/" or any other part of the site.



    Google, on the other hand, has managed to actually index my website.



  • @Carnildo said:

    My website has a non-standard layout: www.mysite.com returns a 404 error

    That is amazingly stupid. Your server configuration is the WTF here.



  •  I did some ego surfing and Cuil gave me all kinds of other crap, but not my stuff.  I own a domain similar to my name and it didn't find it.  Not even if I entered my actual domain name.  Google has been indexing my site for years. 



  • @Zylon said:

    @Carnildo said:

    My website has a non-standard layout: www.mysite.com returns a 404 error

    That is amazingly stupid. Your server configuration is the WTF here.


    What's so amazingly stupid about it? If there's nothing to see at the root level, should I return a page that says "nothing to see here" instead?



  • @Carnildo said:

    @Zylon said:

    @Carnildo said:

    My website has a non-standard layout: www.mysite.com returns a 404 error

    That is amazingly stupid. Your server configuration is the WTF here.

    What's so amazingly stupid about it? If there's nothing to see at the root level, should I return a page that says "nothing to see here" instead?

     Why not move everything up one level?  Or at least send a redirect.



  •  Holy crap, Cuil is worse than I thought. I saw something over at Reddit which was so hard to believe, I had to test it out for myself. Apparently, Cuil doesn't return any results for "Cobol". Although I never want to see Cobol again (one semester was enough for me), this is a search engine from crying out loud.

    The link from Reddit:  http://www.cuil.com/search?q=Cobol



  • @anonymous_person_1337@yahoo.com said:

    The link from Reddit:  http://www.cuil.com/search?q=Cobol
    TRWTF:  It's spelled COBOL.  all caps.

    Searching with all caps doesn't bring back any more results.



  • I searched for COBOL and the All Results tab returned nothing.  Beside that there is a tab called COBOL Programming.  Clicking on that gave me the results I was looking for.

    You'd think the All Results tab should show ALL RESULTS.



  • 3 days after going Live, this stupid search engine still can't find "cuil.com".

    though it has no problems finding all of Google's different pages.



  • 3 days after going Live, this stupid search engine still can't find "cuil.com".

    though it has no problems finding all of Google's different pages.

    Works fine for me - this seems to be a transient problem of theirs; Every so often a search on something generic gives, "No results". Which is a programming error if I ever saw one.

    Seem to victims of their own publicity if nothing else. I've no idea who did their PR, but their must be big money behind them. I think their hook was, "We have a bigger index than Google". The media loved this and of course have no idea that a bigger index doesn't correlate to better, quicker or more relevant search results.

    The only thing I like is the related categories. Could be useful if you're researching a particular topic.

    For the record, the correct pronunciation is close enough to "cool". It's an old irish word for knowledge.

    The modern Irish word for knowledge is "eolas", pronounced "Oh-less". In a modern context, "Cuil" means "Goal", and is occassionally used as slag for "Arse".

     I have no idea why they chose an extinct Gaelic word for their site, when it already has another meaning in modern Irish.

     



  • @seamustheseagull said:

    I have no idea why they chose an extinct Gaelic word for their site, when it already has another meaning in modern Irish.

     

    Because they thought it would be cuil.



  • is that lacuna coil? I love lacuna coil!



  • It's funny that they manage to name it after "arse" in both French and Irish

    http://xmlnetworking.blogspot.com/2008/08/cuil-or-what.html 



  • After a bit of searching for documentation on a random .NET class...

    Search: System.Collections.Generic.List

    Google: First result is MSDN, in addition to one other page from DotGNU.

    Yahoo: First result is again MSDN, in addition to a page from Mono.

    Ask.com: First result is also MSDN, as well a a page from gnu.org.

    Cuil: 6/11 (54%!!) is from lists.ximian.com (including first result), only one source of documentation (gnu.org, same as Ask.com), and nothing from MSDN.



  •  Besides the so-so results (and the random porn images they were getting: http://www.reddit.com/comments/6tzpv/quantum_porn_cuil_reinvents_web_search_nsfw/), I have a couple additional gripes.

     First, if you are entering your search and it happens to find similar keywords/phrases it will pop up the suggestion box. This is very similar to google....however once this box pops up you can no longer press the enter key to perform your search. The suggestions list steals focus and doesn't know what the tab or enter keys mean, so you have to actually click the search button.

     The "Explore by Category" area is also pretty useless. Though I find it funny that a search for sql injection brought back the following category results:

    • Security Exploits
    • Computer Network Security
    • Computer Security Organizations
    • Windows Web Browsers (eh?)
    • Computer Security Specialists
    TRWTF is that expanding the Windows Web Browsers category lists K-Meleon, Safari, Internet Explorer (twice) but no firefox.


  • @viciouscircle said:

    It's funny that they manage to name it after "arse" in both French and Irish

    http://xmlnetworking.blogspot.com/2008/08/cuil-or-what.html 

    And it looks very similar to "culo", which also means "arse" in Spanish. Pronounced like "quill", it even strikes more similarities to that word!


  • @stinch said:

    I searched for "A20 line" and 5 out of the first 11 results where wikipedia clone sites with the same content. Not exactly what I look for in a search engine.
     

     This is interesting, because it shows that the search engine almost ignores popularity. You get all the clones because they have identical content - the search engine must focus exclusively on content.


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