Ciul is a new search engine launched by some former Google employees and is aiming to take Google on in the search engine world. They just started today, but it doesn’t seem their index hasn’t been built up enough yet.
I searched for Burloak Canoe Club and it couldn’t find a thing. Google and Yahoo had lots of results including the club’s website as the first link. It will be interesting to see if they can gain search share over time.
The top two hits on my own gamertag are some of those ad trap sites, which don’t appear at all in Google’s results. Not impressed.
No, it’s utter quap. I’m not sure why it’s getting linked all over the place, since nobody seems to like it much.
People randomly read digg and slashdot and repost the articles here. I complained about it a couple years ago and got shot down so I just keep quiet about it now.
The reason it’s being linked all over the place is likely because it’s founded by ex-Google employees, and in particular, it seems that Anna Patterson was one of the key people at Google working on their search indexing. So based on that pedigree, there’s interest in how capable CUIL will be.
I hear Hellgate is from the guys that made Diablo!
NPR had a blurb on it this morning. I’m glad to hear that it’s not worth checking out, because I probably wouldn’t have checked it out even if it was awesome. Google is easy and it works.
Sucks with images off…
Google is easy and it works.
I really can’t see that challenging Google at what it does best is a good business plan. I just … can’t.
For my uses, google’s main competitor right now is searchme.com, which looks to me like a much cooler version of cuil.
I would have started a Cuil thread if this one didn’t exist. There was a NYTimes article on it today, and an accompanying blog post that was interesting. Seems like (at this early stage) the search results are not that great, but they managed to do all that indexing with only $7 million and 140 servers. The blog guy speculates that they’ll eventually get bought out for their innovations in cheap crawling. I mean, that why they’d go to the trouble, right? They ain’t gonna take down Google, but getting bought by a big fish would be pretty sweet reward.
“This soup is terrible!”
“But you sure get a lot for the money.”
H.
They are backed with a big chunk of venture capital. Microsoft have been looking to buy out Yahoo for their search engine. Perhaps this is an alternative.
It’s not cuil at all, in fact it’s utter crap. As an SEO myself, we’re basically laughing at it. So they claim to have more indexed pages than Google…so freaking what? Who cares how many pages you have if you can’t find anything relevant, let alone easily?
One of the reasons people like Google so much is their lack of clutter on their results pages. So why add to that? Ugh, I like their chutzpa, but I see this as the next Ask or Lycos, if it even gets that far.
Jon
I can’t stand the format the results come back in. Unusable, honestly.
I read about it in the NYT yesterday and gave it a try with my own name. It was REALLY slow, found few links regardless of quality, and put irrelevant pictures next to each one. So fuck it.
well, I searched Cuil…
and their own website was not even in the list
Humorously enough, if you search for “cuil” on Google, www.cuil.com is the first result. Google wins.
My ego search on myself brought up only books I wrote a long time ago on the front page. Which makes me wonder if the results are spun with a commerce emphasis.
