The new Cuil search engine apparently got a bit more traffic than the team anticipated immediately after launch a couple of hours ago. Everyone is trying it out to decide for themselves how disruptive it may be to the old guard search guys. For now, you’ll have to wait, a message on the site says “We’ll be back soon…Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity. Thanks for your patience.”
Launching a startup ain’t easy. And flatlining right after your launch is more of a rite of passage than an embarrassment. Here’s hoping Cuil is cool again by morning.
Update: Yay! It’s back.
mike, you must be kidding? you wrote: “We’ve been testing the engine for the last hour. Based on our test queries Cuil is an excellent search engine, particularly since it is all of an hour old.”
i tried ciul on several searches and NONE of the returns were at all RELEVANT.
come on, where’s your integrity?
it’s right here. show me the irrelevant searches you did. I stated the queries I ran, the engine looks good to me. Not Google-good, but good.
Well, searching for cuil doesn’t return the best set of results ever..
http://www.cuil...m/search?q=cuil
Plurk.com also doesn’t return great results,
http://www.cuil...com&sl=long
As far as I can tell, Cuil have missed off the simplest most useful part of a search engine for huge numbers of users out there, they open their web browser, which has a homepage of live.com or google.com and they type in “www.amazon.com” into the search field, not the address bar. They then click the first link, and they’re at their destination.
This is how huge numbers of people use search engines, and Cuil just doesn’t cut it.
Why are you so extremely optimistic about Cuil?
btw: A really bad result: php eregi
That´s really funny. Now Cuil is finding results for “php eregi” but only showing 1 result. Probably the number one result to show.
But i am wondering why they are now showing a result, that´s odd …
ok dude… search for asp.net mvc… nothing, zip, no results. Try asp.net mvc framework… many results but not link to asp.net/mvc (official site), no link to scott guthrie (microsoft bigshot and presenter of the framework) or phil Haack or Rob Conery… all pretty irrelevant compared to google’s results… i’ll try some more and keep you updated!
but to be fair, a seach for “tamariu” displays better, more relevant results. I also like the way they are presented for general quieries like this…
Cuil-ing myself didn’t return any websites. Googling myself gives my linkedin twitter friendfeed, a few random articles, and an old picture from an engineering course.
fyi: http://re.searc...tml#php%20eregi
might not be the best – but at least they aren’t claiming a 150 billion page index
searching for ‘google’ and ‘microsoft’ both get “No results found”
But ‘yahoo’ gets http://www.yahoo.com as the first hit.
Here is one, type in the name of my company into CUIL “marcon computations” and you get
We didn’t find any results for “marcon computations”
type it into google and it is top of the list….
I have to say, it’s quite pathetic – the results that are being returned. I tried cuil, cuil search, cuil search engine, cuil.com, http://www.cuil.com – and not one of these returned anything about Cuil, the search engine.
Also, I tried many queries which simply don’t return any results.. try online observations.
The UI is nice (I like it) but that’s about it.
The last little bit of credibilty or integrity Mike had went out with the latest Google/Digg rumor loop.
When a search engine can’t even find ‘itself’ – that’s pathetic. Search for cuil and you get everything but anything about itself… Microsoft definitely doesn’t have anything to worry about as far as competition from them…
M knows. Be nice to his neighbors and to never to “BLEEP” in your own back yard.
I agree, the results are hardly relevant.
I searched for our company, and one of the links was our Managed Spam Filtering Service, with some other company logo!
It also had a link to our site, but with an image (which I am 100% sure is not from our site) that shows a graphic of “the $$$ solution” looks like someone’s menu bar. Odd image, but kind of bad image to have displayed about your company.
mike, maybe you’re just pimping this one out or something?
settle down.
mike, cuil isn’t even as good as alta vista.
even lonely old dogpile is better. if this wasn’t started by some ex googlers nobody would give a hoot.
in a week nobody will give a hoot anyway, cuil just doesn’t deliver. i’ve been in the web 15 years now and seen ‘em all…from gnn to hotbot to alta vista to google and more besides
this one ain’t a contenda
You’re too easy on these guys. Two years and $33 million should be sufficient time and resource to prepare for a totally predictable spike in traffic. Abject failure is what you are looking at. The product itself lacks basic integrity – where is the fundamental value added? It’s yet another over-hyped, over-funded project that talks down to the intended audience. Why do I care if there are random pictures on the page? Or slightly longer random snippets.
hmm. The haters are out in force tonight. I’m going to give Cuil another day or two before deadpooling them. Or mentioning them in the same sentence as Dogpile. oops. wait.
Why is the domain cuill.com when it’s called cuil? Or is that a typo in the company details snippet?
In fact both http://www.cuil.com and http://www.cuill.com work… hmm I mean’t don’t work
$33m raised? site down? i thought these guys understood scale and uptime, what with all that google experience…try handling 1 billion searches a day as google does — i’m all for challenging google but not lame attempts and pr hype
Here is an example of cuil’s search failure:
http://twitter....tuses/870337698
no hate, just REALITY check
Cuil.com didn’t find “cuil” before it went offline, but for some queries I tried (CNET, CBS, Google, some names of CEOs and their companies) Cuil delivered very relevant results and the context around the original query.
I think Cuil is a good way to explore a topic you are not an expert for … so there is a market if more and more people go online for their research and more topics are searched for.
They’ll cool down a bit and will need to scale very fast … a lot of people wait for an alternative to the well established search, ads and apps companies and most people I know will give them a second chance.
I did a search on the word “fanboy” and got a blank page!
Just to share a bit of knowledge that Cuil is irish word which means KNOWledge…
Interesting if you view the timing of their (rushed) launch it seems more than coincidental as Google is getting into reputation issues with the launch of KNOL. Perhaps CUIL attempting to steal a little bit of the thunder and snatch a little of that Google ‘Goodness’ and give users a viable alternative.
On another front – perhaps their goal is not to compete with Google- but rather to show G and others how the are able to index the web so much cheaper – and thus set themselves up not as an ALT to G, but as an acquisition target in other to reduce the bottom line of the players in question.
And their back again with the same old shitty interface and irrelevant search results, along with a dumb search engine.
First Impression:
looks interesting, if you do a “common search” – like “Schauspiel” (acting in german) – it delivers relevant sortet results fast.
BUT if you start digging deeper – e.g. looking for “schauspiel marketing” (marketingservices for actors, which is always my bottlenecksearch, because there´s hardly any content on the web aroud this topic) – NO Search results. So if you compare Cuil with google – sorry – not possibel (google has 317.000 results for schauspiel marketing)
I like the presentation, refreshingly new as opposed to the now dumb one column results.
Quality of results: a mix bag on the one I tried. A lot of pollution in the results.
It’s hard to launch a SE these days. Even MS and Y! scruggle!
O OH they are Back Again in no time, I think they done it By planning, To give a more powerful link bait, just michael did and many otheres, Isnt it?
it is back just right now…
Cuil.com failed the full name test BIG TIME
http://tinyurl.com/5ensme
Golem reported on Cuil too and they did some searches. Check them out here: http://scr3.gol...a=61339&s=2
The best thing is that one of cuils recommended categorys didn’t even give any results…
I was expecting a fancier “we are down” message from a company that wants to hit google:)
As I said before, they’re new. Give them a chance. Let them massage out the kinks and they can have some serious potential. Will they overcome Google? Perhaps not, but they can appeal to a large crowd, anyway. Give it time, guys, don’t be so quick to judge.
Warning : safe search is not really safe.
Not only that, but the images displayed alongside the search results don’t even seem to come from the same page (?) — a search for a defunct Canadian Football League team returned fairly relevant results, but the accompanying photos were quite illegal (nowhere close to borderline).
I’d try to replicate it, but the search engine appears to be down again. My original search was for “memphis maddogs” (no quotes btw).
Try Cuil search on Cuil…kind of worrying http://www.cuil...il&sl=long
I can see results for Cuill, they are pretty much good too. I think you just searched at a wrong time. I can 81,689 results for Cuill. Search again.
its cuild day on techcrunch
“Patience is the companion of wisdom.” (Saint Augustine)
“Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press” (Alexander Solzhenitsyn) – And I surely perceive “Comments on Articles” as part of the press.
Lot of Google fanboys commenting here. Cuill is just awesome. I can’t find my blog on it yet but for common queries it delivers perfectly. I just tried “Half-Life” on Cuill and it gave me a better search experience than Google. It showed me very relevent results with categories on the right-hand side with the names of game-character in Half-Life, other FPS, mods of the game and other categories. All Google did was throw results in my face where i had to go through one page after another wondering if this is right.
People who are saying Cuill is a failure don’t know thing about search. Search is an experience and Cuill is doing an awesome job without storing users private information. Go Cuill.
Cuil is great and it made a great start as well- this is underlined by the traffic it gets! it is just cool and I hope they will be able to fix it very soon, altough I am a google fan this start up of Cuil is just great and their interface is really good and the best thing about it is that it is not a second Gogle white background thing but it is so different!
It’s funny that they have search suggestions but no typo suggestion.
cmon yall haters, you cant expect a new contender to be instanstly as fast and relevant as google.
The interface could prove definitely practical and useful once they improve on that relevance issue.
In the long run (months?) it may beat both Searchme and Powerset at their own games.
Aah well… I used Cuil.com and like the UI… its no google… but i think it is unfair to compare – although it is human nature to compare… the search results are pretty unbiased, and are based on real searches… google on the other hand, trawls the web regularly and therefore has MORE relevant results… for us who go to google EVERY so often…. this is a nice refreshing change!!!
Agree with @Azhar
To begin with, its refreshing to see the different search result page after googles and yahoos. It does well in many queries, even though can’t deny giving over importance to twitter & twitter proxies. But with relavant categories and thumbnails in SRP it does sound promising.
Hey Cuil team!
If you are experiencing scalability issue, I have a great tip for you – use Google’s App Engine!!
I’m a bit surprised you haven’t heard about it..;)
The search result are expanding rapidly for a given keyword. Cuil, for example, is up to 124k results as of this post. A search for qik had no results at first but now has 114k. Strangely, though, it uses an X-Men cover as the qik.com image.
Ha-ha))) Just searched for ‘TechCrunch’ @Cuil. techcrunch.com is the first result, but somehow it has Gmail logo as a thumbnail
as it stands, it’s obvious to anyone with half a brain that cuil is an epic fail. unless they can somehow improve the relevancy of search results by oh i don’t know, a factor of infinity (from random/spam pages to pages you’re actually expecting to find), it’ll remain an epic fail. no point even talking about its UI for now. the fact Mike is so easy on it is a little fishy though.
Type in Om Malik, you get no results. Other than that it is a great search engine,
Cuil looks good for its age on web. The ‘Explore by category’ option looks really nice & gets you 1 step ahead in the search depth.. useful for those new to the topic (which we all are,.. to atleast for some topics that we search in a while)
It looks like they had a bug of not stripping up trailing spaces in search string,resulting in ‘No results’ err,.. it seems to have got fixed now..
A search for my full name came up with random results which include my site in 3rd place where it’s first on Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc… Not very relevant but as Mike said, still too new to decipher.
Although I don’t like the results page and the way things are displayed
I did a few searches, for “friendbinder”, no link to the site (top on google) but some of the people who have talked about it, including anyone on twitter who mentioned it.
A search for “web 2.0 aggregator” shows only 2 results, but on the page it says 248 results!
A Search for “Louis Gray”, only starts showing pages from his blog on page 2 and even then there is no result for the front page of his blog.
A Search for “Search Engine” doesn’t have Google, Yahoo or live search at least in the first 10 pages
It seems have a strong weighting toward the authority of the domain, so you can post any old thing on twitter and get quite far up the listing.
I paged all the way though a couple of queries – they are limited to 23 pages (230 results)
Not, impressed in general
Big difference between faster indexing and accurate indexing. Search for ‘Veda Informatics’ does not bring any relevent results, apart frmo one of our team members Linked in profile. This same link is displayed on page 1, 2,3 and 4 and after that I stopped checking.
Don’t know if this a planned “error” CUIL.com doesn’t provide a robots.txt and does not exlude other Search engines from indexing their result pages. This way their main traffic driver – as of all other fake search engines out there – will be Google, Yahoo Search and Live Search. At least until they kick CUIL out of their index.
But at least Google is very fast in indexing CUIL so we might find better results from their huge index by Google in the future:
http://www.goog...=N&filter=0
Its down again!
when i tried, Cuil was down. but after some tries, it start working. i think unavailability factor is also there with google and its services. so that should not be used for comparing Curl with google.
theoretically their algo looks good, but when i tried some search, results repeat on many pages. image shown with results is not related to the content of that page (as Cuil claims). moreover some pages were very old, and link was not working, and i didn’t find any cache pages
but at least one challenge/change(possible) is there, i hope Cuil have plans to overcome these issues
Cuil: Thrive or Fail? [VOTE] http://snurl.com/36fll [www_thriveorfail_com]
Read
my review here
http://moneymanagem ent.wordpress. com/2008/ 07/28/how- cool-is-cuil- a-review/
Regards
Shalini
Read
my review here
http://moneyman...ement.wordpress. com/2008/ 07/28/how-cool-is-cuil-a-review/
Regards
Shalini
Read
my review here
http://moneyman...-cuil-a-review/
Regards
Shalini
Cuil looks terrible on my iPhone
Last night I was trying to get the Remote app for my iPhone working, so I searched on Google for “apple iphone remote vista” and got 732,000 results, and found the fix for my problem on the first page of results. This morning, I typed in “apple iPhone remote vista” and got NO RESULTS. This is not a complicated query, and I am not even trying to throw the new service for a loop. This is just a sample query that I needed to run in the course of my life, and I would have come up completely dry if I had relied on Cuil. This is why I will continue (for now) to use Google almost exclusively – the results it turns out are quality.