Good lord, hundreds of comments and criticisms of your cuil “tests” and this is what you highlight? Being first sometimes doesn’t mean being best, I guess…

Michael, what did Cuil do/pay for getting 2000 posts a night?

Cuil must be loving the techcrunch coverage.

Unfortunately I fell into the ‘culi’ trap at work. Good job its not so serious here!

So far I’ve found cuil.com to be a joke. Where Google.com returns over 92,000 results for “Pat Dryburgh,” cuil.com returns none. I’ve written a post about it over at my blog.

They dropped an L from their domain name. It was CUILL.com now it’s CUIL.com. You NEVER do that. It confuses people for no reason.

As for not checking common misspellings of the domain it should reflect on the agency they hired to take care of their trademarks online.

http://tinyurl.com/CUILNEWSLIVE

Agree with the above comments. Cuil.com is definitely not ready for prime time.

Not sure either the company realizes it but in French Cuil could sound like “Balls”. The dirty meaning…

Another misspelling cul means ass in French.

http://tinyurl.com/CUILNEWSLIVE

Check out this major flaw in what they do with search parameters
http://www.gubatron.com/blog/2.....-keywords/

Major major flaw, give it more than 2 keywords and it will likely not return any results, no matter how popular the keywords are.

Missing disclaimer: TechCrunch offices and the Culi offices are two blocks a way from each other:

http://tinyurl.com/cronism

Slow is the new Cuil

I would add for french people removing the i or adding an “o” between “c” and “u” and you’ll have two words that you could easily find in a website like culi.com.

They could’nt do better

i have been confused ever since i read this post. now i hear there domain is competing with a porn site. the more i read the worse it gets. Another future of search disappoinment. This cant be real, its a big joke right? funny people.

I’m completley unimpressed with cuil. i’m all in favor of more competition (new and better ways to search). But unfortunately, after searching numerous terms, they simply have horrible results (pathetic compared to Google).

To top it off, i went through their site pretty exhaustively, they have numerous broken links and broken images … it’s amazing you can raise $33MM and looks so amateurish.

If someone is going to knock off Google, they need to come to the plate with someone that is better than Google right this second. You have one shot, and Cuil has lost me for life.

It’s called financial isolation and it transports software developers to another dimension. Gary Kildall was effected by it when he agreed not to sue Microsoft for distribution rights to DOS.

You gotta laugh. Being google’s ex’s might never get finished.

Chip

I Found cuil.com very good.

But They don’t index the Blogs as fast a Google.com. and the site i registered and which is up like for 5 months does not even come up…

But just the name cuil kind of tough and easy to type in worng like culi.com and stuff.. So watch out.

Their look and feel is good.

Cheers, Nag

I looked at Cuil, and also discovered it missedd a number of pages. SOmetimes it returns no results at all when Goog dumps thousands on you. It may still be too early in development, althouhg I don’t think it will challange Goog.

And, and please dont Ban me for posting this. I found an intersting new application a few days ago. I think it’s much better than Cuil.

You will need (at leats initially) Firefox to use this demo.

http://www.iglueit.com

Again, this is not promotion just my pitchin to the discussion here.

Just think of all the traffic they will get from the mispelled porn site.

Too early in development maybe but I’d like to see them alter the org design for how they display their results. As it is, the results blurbs take up a lot of space. Also, I need to get used to the black. I think of lycos and that’s not good.

-Bob
http://www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?RTA=web2

viktor–I like how you switched the letters in “worng” when commenting on the culi error. Very meta

Who cares who they paid to get exposure? What I see is
broken links, unrelated results, no results. How can I be
convinced that there is some special algos running behind it?

No thanks, I’ll stick to google for the net 30 years.

I’m usualy not a player hater. But this post is the new official TC low. Good job guys.

Culi in italian means Asses… so if you go to culi.com you can find that…

Is not really italian, is a kind of slang, but the owners of culi.com are surely italians!

Wow, great search engine, Google should be scared…

We didn’t find any results for “online advertising”
Some reasons might be…

a typo. Please check your spelling.
your search includes a term that is very rare. Try to find a more common substitute.
too many search terms. Please try fewer terms.
Finally, try to think of different words to describe your search.

LOL. Zero results for ‘online advertising’ hmmm? very rare term.

I think maybe more of the 33mill should have been spent on engineering, infrastructure and testing.

oh dear….

Another misspelling

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=cuil&sl=long

Whoops, they’re not the most relevant search result for the term “cuil”

One justification for coming up with a google competitor is that “google doesn’t change often enough”. Strike one.

I want my information appliance to be familiar. I don’t want it changing interfaces on me every so often. Strike two.

Searched for my name in quotes. Found the most prominent person sharing my name. Attractive results.

Click on page 2, and… No results! It added another set of quotes around my original search. The thing doesnt flippin’ work. Strike three, and I’m out.

I may give it another shot in a year or so when my friends get around to recommending it to me.

tiny tip
switch the safe search off and you see the results that are missing

When tried the search engine, I got a message stating it is down due to overwhelming usage. They should start using their 33 millions and scalling up
“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.”

Not. Searched for my business name on Cuil…nada…
Searched Google…every link and the website itself appeared. I am disappointed because I was looking for a reason to dump Google. Too many search results include Canadian, Australian and British sites which are useless and annoying to scroll through.

lo…it says more than 3*more webpages than googel but it didn’t even return one result for winpwn…lol

Just gave Cuil a go to see how accurate the results were. I like their innovative ideas on layout, but the results are severely lacking. I couldn’t find some pretty common things that should bring plenty of results. Also found that in some cases the common phrase with no results magically brought up results with quotes placed around it.

Definitely not ready for prime time.

quite dissapointing/
cuil is nice looking, that much they did better than any other google competition, but if you try to type sentences that contain words that are not searchable eg [where can i find gone with the wind] you get zilch. Google does quite well with these searches, sometimes finding sites that actually answer the question you are asking. Or type [gonne with the wind] - aside from the fact that there are sites that purpously misspell that, half this planet cant spell!

it seems cuil only allow ‘correct’ spelling and doesnt do much semantic search on the sentence entered. Disqualifies it a priori. Sorry Cuil. You are consigned to the trash bin unless you fix that;

Cuil means dirty search engine that can’t beat google in Arabic

Amazingly even the single keyword “seafood” did not bring up any results. The incorrectly spelt “seagood” did bring up multiple results.

Something must be wrong with the algorithm or the crawler. Unless it has to do with the load on the server and we are seeing a custom 500 error that is the same as the error when no results are returned.

it kind of sucks… you have to enter every search term twice.. the first time it says no results, then run the search again and it works….

How about making your homework first before rolling it out and simply screwing it up so badly… most users will run a search term once.. then no RESULTS after claiming having a larger index than google…

THATS PRETTY BAD

Looks like Cuil has a bias problem as well. Lots of results for Obama. None for McCain:
http://tinyurl.com/6rrdna

“google adsense” returns zero results but “Google Adsense” returns 3,000,000. Cuil loves capitalization and that’s good for more precise results.

What a revolutionary new idea, I think this thing called a “search engine” has a big future.

“pay per click management” - 0 results. Go to jail, do not collect $100. See you in one year.

techcrunch is getting stupid

$33million and they couldn’t spend more than $8.95 on a domain name people could actually spell and remember.

I don’t think Google is perfect at returning search results. With its basic search it just gives you lists of web pages, so it requires the user to do the work to find the content/information they are looking for.

Ask.com has focused on better presentation of their search results, and Cuil is doing the same. Will that do anything to undo Google’s dominance? No, but maybe they will help to make Google better because they will give Google some new ideas and force them to stay on their toes and not get complacent.

I think Cuil has a slick interface. It displys fairly well and is probably an okay search engine. But the core product needs some serious work and this site isn’t going to catch on as easily as they might have hoped partly because of the name and partly because the search has a lot of issues.

@deleo: I find Ask.com’s approach to search too Javascript heavy. So heavy in fact that it defeats the purpose of using the engine as a whole.

Here is a good review on Cuil and a funny find

http://forfraksake.com/post/43.....ind-itself

“Cuill has told potential investors that their indexing costs will be 1/10th of Google’s, based on new search architectures…”

Looks like a great idea, because you know, Google costs so much for me to use right now.

actually not bad. The way I look at it is - if I get better results compared to Google (for the keyword searched for) , definitely I am happy. From the few of the keywords I have searched for, I see that it definitely is better than Google. However for the few of the keywords (like design patterns) it did not return results, however that is of trivial at the moment where this company i.e. it has just started. I am betting a lot on this company. Just imagine, in the next few months they hire more people and add all bells and whistles that google currently had, it id going to be great experience searching at Cuil. May be there are some tweeks that they may need to add so all are indexed properly. Idea is it should have fundamentally sound search engine technology, and seems like this company has it. This is the first search startup that is looking really dangerous for Google (not by the press it has got, but by the quality of results it shows).

@rob - get some education.

Um the below is too risque (NSFW) for TechCruch?

Chulalongkorn University Language Institute CULI - http://www.culi.chula.ac.th/

I keep testing the search and all I get is that the servers are too busy and can’t process my request. Is anyone else having the same problem? I’m in Dubai, but I don’t think that should matter. Did all the press nuke their servers?

No results because of high load…

Due to excessive load, our servers didn’t return results. Please try your search again.

…that’s embarassing

velioncho
Get a life the thing is garbage…

If you type cul.com, you’ll have a nice surprise too.

So how is this tech news? Is Techcrunch getting paid to write about Cuil?

I like how searching for ‘cuil’ on cuil’s search engine returns nothing relevant about the company..

Guys,
don’t be too rash on this company. too early.
Google evolved over the time to where it is now. You give enough time to this company and see. My point is that these guys show better results for some of the keywords I have used, - that makes me believe that they have better algorithms/engine but that they still have to do lot of improvements. Definitely there are some good brains behind this. Most of you who simply say you did not get results for a specific search, you have no clues what goes behind. If you are looking to compare all results side by side to Google, then do it after six months are so. However some of the results I saw from Cuil, they are way way better than Google, that makes me believe these guys have laid a good foundation and now they can build on top of it. Today’s press coverage is definitely help them to pull more smart folks from the search world, to improve on the product.

cuil can’t even find itself… enter cuil in the search bar and everything else pops up…

It doesn’t matter how many results pages are displayed for Keyword Searches on either Google or Cuil. What matters to the end User is finding the relevant information and the right link on the First Page.

Does any end User really care about finding 1,000,000 results for their chosen keyword search.
If Cuil really wants to eat into Google Search Marketplace, it needs to work really hard in the area of presenting a results First Page.
Google is still really naff in that area. Whenever I do a search there for cnet, it never shows cnet.com in the top four results.

I wish Cuil all the best in their quest to be a Search player, but I must make Two important points about their new website.
Firstly the homepage looks so dark and bleak. Compare Ask to Cuil.
A Search Engine Homepage should look more bright and inviting.

Secondly the name is so bad. Even though the name is suppose to be pronounced ‘cool’ - as a word of mouth brand name, how many people are going to spell the word ‘cuil’ on a search engine site like Google, of course.

This is pretty funny. When you type ‘cuil’ cuil.com doesn’t give you any relevant results! Google does, though…

I found this interesting article
New Search Engine, Cuil, Finally Ready to Compete With Google.

Yikes, what’s the story with the images that are shown with the search results? Seems to be the same images returned for different sites which really confuses me when I’m looking at the results. The images may have a meaning - and I kind of like the columnar view - but right now it just makes my head spin

(and on a self-important note our site shows up on page 7 which is kind of annoying ).

I agree that we shouldn’t necessarily make snap judgments about a new service, and websites need time to grow into their own and work out their kinks. I have found the same to definitely be true with my own site, and it’s really a never ending process. But if you’re going to send out a press release claiming to have one upped Google, you had better be prepared to go head to head lest that press release accomplishes its purpose.

In the case of cuil.com, not only did they get press here, but they were one of the top headlines on cnn.com claiming to be “bigger than Google” before their servers couldn’t handle the search load. The fact is, there aren’t really 120 billion web pages that matter (there aren’t 40 billion that matter), what’s important is that you have relevant and up-to-date info on the ones that do matter. Google does, Cuil doesn’t. I run one of the largest sites in the Middle East, all of the major search engines index our pages daily, Cuil hasn’t been there for at least 2 weeks. Many of the (random and not necessarily relevant) pages of ours that they’ve indexed no longer exist. The comments above about searching cuil on google vs. searching it on cuil ironically proves that very point.

The headlines will forget about cuil tomorrow (if not today), and they will probably have to dethrone one of the top three search engines before any major media risks giving them any press again. What’s worse, however, is that they had a shot with a few million customers expecting to see something un-imaginable, something better than Google! And I’d be surprised if even one of those users walked away feeling that their expectations had been met. Cuil may have a great idea, a great product, and the perfect algorithm, but they hatched a preemie and instantly made their job a whole lot harder, if not impossible.

I think I like the Idea of a challenger to Google, It favors the users. The layout is impressive and all that. But Cuil failed my first test. CUIL CANNOT FIND ITSELF!

In Spanish CULO means ASS.

@Qubo
In Spanish it is common to tell a girl “me gusta tu culo” which means “I like your ass.”

Huge amounts of traffic already! Picking out a black surfboard. Where are the video results?
-Realview TV

Well, I must say that the launching of Cuil is good news for investors. 1/10 of Google’s huh…Well, that’s a big saving of bucks!