It sounds like they launched way too early. They had to know people were going to put it head to head against Google in comparative searches - why didn’t they wait until they were providing better results than Google? Foolish. Now that first impression is ruined and they have a VERY steep uphill battle to fight.
Based on the fact that there’s no fáda over the ‘u’, it should be pronounced the same way as ‘quill’. If it was their intention to have it pronounced ‘cool’ then they should have spelt it ‘cúil’. Then again, how many people outside of Ireland would know that?
I kind of assumed they wanted you to say “cool” when I looked at it but that was more from a marketing mindset than anything else. It made sense. However, it is hard to penetrate from the end users point of view.
Dang, you’re cute.
Cuil probably has little or no intention of existing in current form for more than a year or so. Like Powerset, Cuil secretly planned and plotted in stealth mode, suggesting to insiders they were the next big thing. Then, when they had something that basically worked (or in the case of Powerset worked on a limited basis), they launched to great fanfare. They have improvements on Google’s dated hardware framework and probably have included many of the same features in the Cuil algorithm, coded differently enough to elude legal entanglements.
Now it’s time to shop yourself out to the highest bidder, and in this respect Cuil is looking at some very, very high bids even though they don’t seem to be a very good search engine. Why the big bids? Cuil’s team was from Google and no doubt has a lot of specialized, inside information about how Google works. Due to disclosure and other legal issues I’d guess the Cuil team has been very careful to create something that is new and unique yet includes enough Googley technology to be of concern to Google and of great interest to Microsoft or Yahoo or AOL or Fox or …. ?
The stakes in search are extremely high, and these Google insiders saw a super opportunity to do one of two things: Improve on Google and be the richest people in history OR build a modest quality search engine with some Google technology, hype it, and become super rich. Based on early tests and reviews the first option is out, but the second one is looming large for the lucky Cuil winners. Powerset sold for $100,000,000 and only managed to index Wikipedia (and not very well at that).
Dunno if I buy it, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Their claim for improvement is more context for each of the search results. Each result has more of the context text from the site and an image. It’s arguable whether this is better than the minimalism of Google. But the enhanced results are currently worthless because of the poor relevance of the results, and the bizarre choice of image for each result.
We already have the NSFW example posted earlier. I tried a search for my wife’s site. It isn’t the first result, but at least it was on the first page. But for whatever reason, the image chosen was a small gif of the credit cards accepted for purchase. Strange.
Dunno if I buy it, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Yeah, I’ve read a few theories to that effect and it makes sense. They can’t possibly be serious about it being a viable Google alternative so a quick buy out must be the goal.
They saw Microsoft courting Yahoo and will likely position themselves directly in sight of Microsoft as an alternative.
Note to self: when creating a search engine, be sure to properly index everyone’s blog page for vanity support. Also, hardcode in the URL for the search engine when its name is typed in.
Cuil tells me cuil is the name of some towns/areas in Ireland.
The first day I tried Google beta it was clearly better than Yahoo and Alta Vista, the other engines I used at the time.
Better by a long shot. The search results were far superior from day one, the page design was much cleaner, and the commercial shill impact was greatly reduced.
Cuil has nothing of value that I can see in comparison, being inferior to Google in all respects at present. If they have some cunning plan they are keeping secret, they had better demonstrate something qualitatively superior in their next release.
Where Google is now you have to have Microsoft-level pockets to dream about competing with them. Search algorithms are cheap, but the physical plant and distributed-database tech Google has are not.
A search engine that returns a bunch of spam sites at the top of the results isn’t going to do well, either…
Is it possible that Cuil is a huge joke by people who are making fun of Google Knol, which features almost as dumb a name?
The biggest obstacle to competing with Google is really getting around the fact that they have such a universally recognised brand. A brand that is virtually synonymous with searching, to the extent that ‘Google’ has become a verb in its own right. There’s undoubtedly a thin line to thread there - like ‘hoover’ or ‘sellotape’ in the UK/Ireland or ‘xerox’ in the US, it’s possible for the verb to become divorced from the actual brand from which it derives - but you can’t buy that kind of recognition, no matter how deep your pockets are.