

Ex-Google engineers debut 'Cuil' way to search - snewe
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080728/ap_on_hi_te/google_challenger;_ylt=AvjnSUtzgetWYNEdZ16bP4es0NUE
And now TechCrunch:<p>http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/27/google-beats-cuil-hands-down-in-size-and-relevance-but-that-isnt-the-whole-story/
======
kleevr
At least Cuil has some respect for privacy:

"We do not keep logs of our users’ search activity."

"We analyze the Web, not our users. Read our Privacy Policy for details. It’s
short."

<http://www.cuil.com/info/privacy/>

~~~
gaius
But Jo(e) User doesn't really care about that, he or she cares about search
results. If (and admittedly this is unproven) Google can deliver better search
results by logging and analyzing search activity to personalize results, then
Cuil is already at a disadvantage.

~~~
marcus
How can you call it unproven? When I google for Python I get stuff related to
programming because of my search history, when a zoologist looks for Pythons
he'll see stuff related to snakes.

~~~
gaius
Because I don't know what algorithms Cuil are using, I can't say at this stage
if they are able to deliver better search results than Google without
personalization. Perhaps they're better at contextualization for example, and
don't need to know what you did last time.

I'm a Python programmer too and the first link I get from Google for 'python'
is a Wikipedia article on the Delphic Oracle... Admittedly I have often
searched for content relating to Oracle databases!

~~~
marcus
Context is always helpful and obviously should be used in addition to personal
history and even override it, but if the query has little context, the only
context you can get is from the users historical data.

Personalization doesn't guarantee better results but it obviously improves
results.

~~~
mattjung
Historical data may as well be misleading because the profile of a user is not
"static", simply because there's a human being behind it (and sometimes even
more than one, but that's another story). His personal and professional
environment, his wishes and necessities, the context of his life may change
from one day to the other. The assumption that the past queries of a user will
improve the results of his current queries is at least questionable
(especially for former programmers that start selling reptiles...)

------
jharrison
Definitely not ready for prime time.

I did several searches that said there were multiple pages of results but
clicking the link to the second page brought up "no results".

I'm also not sure how fresh their index is. I went to a page from the results
that didn't have the content the search said it did. Normally there would be
several reasons for this but I happen to have enough knowledge of the target
site to know they just have a very old version of it indexed.

------
neilk
Trying to like this but failing. It didn't get even decent results for any of
the queries I fed it.

I wonder if competing head-on with Google is a wise strategy. It's really hard
to beat them without years of effort, and until then no one wants to use your
site. There must be some other way.

~~~
vegashacker
Same for me. I tried two test queries and had none of the results that I
wanted to see (which I do see on Google).

~~~
akd
My name gets 2,290 hits on Google and 0 on Cuil, and many of those 2,290 are
on some of the biggest domains on the Web. I'm having trouble believing Cuil's
claim of indexing more pages.

------
parenthesis
It seems to me that a way to potentially creep up on google would be to make a
specialist search engine. Some topic area that google is not so useful for
searching on. Make a search system that 'understands' the domain in question,
allowing it to index and search it really effectively.

As a random example, say, a movies search engine. If it could be consistently
more useful than google for finding out information about movies, directors,
actors, the movie industry etc., then it could become the 'go to' tool for
movie search. Potentially, this success could then be leveraged to move into
other areas of search.

~~~
pg
What you should make is a specialist search engine for hackers. They're the
early adopters in search engines, so if you get them you have the quickest
path to getting everyone else.

Imagine how alarmed Google would be if there were a different search engine
the top 10k hackers all used, even if they had everyone else. And rightly so.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/apply> ...

~~~
bOR_
Heh. I'm not amongst the top 10k, but I've been cursing yesterday, trying to
use search to find out in what version / gem of ruby {| _[_ ]| _} is a valid
block (with_ just being random variable names). And a week before that the
same problem when trying to find out what &@/ ment in a mathematica script.

Search engines tend to ignore symbols in normal search, and while you can
search for symbols in google's code search, that doesn't include any
documentation or pages where they explain a particular syntax.

~~~
bayareaguy
Indeed. Good luck finding out information for the common shell <<END feature
if you don't know that's called a "here document".

------
mynameishere
I searched for one of my own websites and was extremely pissed to find that it
found a bunch of more popular sites that link to it, but not the site itself.
Eff that. I'm 100 percent in favor of google competitors, but that's just
invalid...

------
tss
Three major problems that I see right off the bat:

1.) Quality of Search-- In order to be successful, the quality of their search
must be at least as good as Google (obviously it much more helpful if it's
better). As many have noted, this clearly is not the case right now, and
slightly complex queries such as "Linux search and remove multiple files"
return zero results.

2.) Revenue Stream-- As noted above, it is going to be difficult for Cuil to
break into the search market because they have to achieve such a high quality
of search. But even if they are successful breaking into the market, how are
they going to generate revenue? An Adsense like program? That's just another
thing that they would have to do better then Google, and I just don't see both
things happening.

3.) Overcoming Inertia-- Even if Cuil addresses 1 and 2, the moment of inertia
of an average Google user is very high. Google has the best web mail available
on the market, and along with all the other services Google provides, people
will be reluctant to switch their searching to Cuil because everything else
that they do will still be through Google.

I don't mean to be negative, and more power to these guys for taking on an
area of the web that most people are afraid to even look at. But I guess I
would say that if I were to plan a startup, I would probably pick a more
advantageous slice of the market (probably one that doesn't exist at the time
of planning). At the same time, you have to play your strengths as a
programmer, and it seems like thats what the Cuil team is doing.

~~~
danielrhodes
One big part of quality of search is figuring out which sites people click on
when they search for something and making that result more relevant. I can't
imagine Cuil not doing that, and over time their results will probably get a
lot better. Considering they started off with no data like this, not bad so
far.

------
azharcs
Anything that can compete with Google is a good thing. I have already added
them as my default search in Firefox and hoping they get better. Results are
not yet perfect yet, but at least they are doing things differently. Best of
Luck Cuill.

------
beaudeal
first things first...am i the only person who wants to keep saying "kweel" and
not "cool"??

in terms of the site itself, i am sort of liking the design / layout of the
search, although like agotterer said, it still needs a lot of work -- from
what i can tell, popular search terms have pretty darn good results but
unpopular search terms return sub-par results (see his example haha)... in
terms of a threat to google?? id have to say its not, at least in this stage
of the game, but only time will tell i suppose...

~~~
jmtame
The team is impressive, they've been involved in AltaVista, Google, and Ebay.
And Anna seems pretty confident that Google isn't going to change, although
one of the lead Google engineers came to speak at our school last semester and
said that they change the algorithms hundreds of times each year. He said it's
not uncommon that they tweak it several times a week. Maybe it's not going
through drastic changes, and maybe it doesn't look like a Yahoo portal, but
they do continue to improve their algorithms.

It's really cool to see someone branching off and trying something like
search, and I actually support Patterson's efforts. But there is a lot more to
Google than just their search algorithm technology. They're running with the
momentum of the brand, not to mention the massive collection of apps that
people loyally follow.

Can you build a better search algorithm than Google that runs faster, with
fewer computers, and containing more indeces? Possibly. I happen to know a lot
of people who can cook a better cheeseburger than McDonald's, but that doesn't
really get you "all the way." Google has criticisms, such as the search
logging, which could be used for leverage and could make for easy user
acquisitions. However, when you have HappyCamper1 who is (UsingGoogleSearch &&
UsingGmail), they'll most likely need a better reason to switch search engines
because they're already using an e-mail service by the same company.

The important thing is that she gets into this space and attacks it
vigorously. No king rules forever. May the best win.

~~~
iamelgringo
They don't have to beat Google, they just have to be good enough to get picked
up by Microsoft.

------
HendrikR
Looks as though as it's closed temporarily: "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."

~~~
snorkel
Now it's not responding at all. Don't sell your Google stock just yet.

~~~
iamelgringo
They did just launch. I'm sure they still have a few bugs to work out.

~~~
albertcardona
"Release early, release often." Rarely balanced properly for potentially high-
demand, high-load applications, even if just in spikes.

------
jonknee
Searching Cuil for 'cuil' results in a lot of hits, none being their site.
Searching Google for 'cuil' has them up at number one, plus news results from
today's PR bash. That's a big ball of fail.

~~~
mhartl
My search for 'cuil' on Cuil was even worse, leading to zero results, while a
search for 'Cuil' yields lots of results (but, as you noted, not cuil.com
itself). So it looks like Cuil is case-sensitive as well as incomplete.

------
DocSavage
It seems to be putting incorrect pictures with names. I did a simple search of
"Hacker News" and Sam Odio came up on the first search page. I thought, cool,
Cuil managed to put his picture right next to his Hacker News profile. But
then I clicked through to his blog and unless he's really changed over time, I
think they got the picture wrong :)

Take a look: <http://billkatz-test.appspot.com/static/images/cuil.png>

~~~
william42
I did a search for "Terror Island" and although the first link to the webcomic
<http://terrorisland.net> had its title bar correct, the links to individual
strips had unrelated pictures of boats.

------
jessewmc
So how are they planning to monetize this? AdSense?

So far they're vague on this. Ironically Cuil was useless,
[http://www.cuil.com/search?q=cuil%20money&sl=long](http://www.cuil.com/search?q=cuil%20money&sl=long)
[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=cuil+money&btnG...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=cuil+money&btnG=Google+Search)

but with google I found this:

"Eventually, Cuil plans to make money by running ads alongside search results,
she said, but provided no further details."

The design is nice and the layout/features seem promising, though. Pleasant to
use when it works.

------
smhinsey
Whoever does their PR earned their check today.

------
attack
Looks good, and has a nice feel.

[http://www.cuil.com/search?q=python%20generators&sl=long](http://www.cuil.com/search?q=python%20generators&sl=long)

But not so good here,

[http://www.cuil.com/search?q=python%20generator%20examples&#...</a>

~~~
lisper
Or here:

<http://flownet.com/ron/cuil.gif>

(They seem to have fixed this.)

------
bootload
Interesting. I ran a few keywords through and ...

with <http://www.cuil.com/search?q=hacker+news> we get an url to this site,
good.

with <http://www.cuil.com/search?q=hackernews> we get a link to pretty what
I've put up: eg: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2710119622/>

with <http://www.cuil.com/search?q=cuil> you get no mention of the site
itself.

with <http://www.cuil.com/search?q=spock> you get a peek of how they cuil are
structuring more complex searches using drop down menus - bad because it's
slower to read & requires a conscious effort to do so.

------
bdr
"Rather than trying to mimic Google's method of ranking the quantity and
quality of links to Web sites, Patterson says Cuill's technology drills into
the actual content of a page."

Fancy presentation can't save you from the fate of altavista. What are they
doing to solve the trust problem?

------
agotterer
This has some serious work still...

A search for my name put me in a porno context with an image of a naked girl.
The name of the video was "dirty movie", and the html title tag was "dirty
movie on vimeo". This was not a pornographic video. Cuil matched a thumbnail
image from movieon.com with a man and a woman having sex. This is something I
dont want my name associated with.

Second, I did a search, then hit search again on the same keyword and it
brought back 0 results. Took about five more clicks to get it to bring up
results again. Another search said it found 8,000 results, but only gave me 3
pages worth of browsing. Last but not least the about page
(<http://www.cuil.com/info/>) is not found.

~~~
azharcs
<http://www.cuil.com/info/>

I can see the info page.. Since lot of people are covering them, they are
seeing a spike in traffic and maybe not able to handle it.

------
trekker7
I'd be interested to know about some of the cooler pages that are indexed by
Cuill, but not Google.

------
johnrob
<http://www.cuil.com/search?q=paul+graham>

Somehow they managed to get a monkey and a basketball scene in the images for
a paul graham search. That doesn't seem right to me...

------
arockwell
I think that this is an interesting approach. I like that they show more info
about each result, but I also have more difficulty scanning through the
results. I'm not sure if that's really a net win.

------
domnit
They're new, so I don't want to dismiss them, but if their selling point is
their larger-than-Google index, I'm not buying. On my sample query, I got a
web proxy in both the first and second pages of results. It's easy to have a
large index if you are showing the same thing in triplicate. Google does a
great job of narrowing their large index to what the user needs to know.
Nothing wrong with some healthy competition, but Google was right to stop
(publicly) counting pages.

------
bbgm
My initial reaction to Cuil was positive, but that's cause I kinda liked the
interface and the first few searches I tried did really well. Lesson learned:
Try at least 20, cause some were just horrendous.

That said, there is some promise, and the "related information" tab, while
currently only semi-useful does show some promise. The challenge is that
people are not going to have the patience for Cuil to be "at least as good as
Google". That just doesn't work, and shouldn't

------
niels_olson
I went to post cuil's comment policy on Edward Tufte's bulletin board thread
"Not spying on users should be a feature: The keep-it-and-lose-it hypothesis".
Searching ET's site in situ is painful, but Google is pretty good at finding
Ask ET threads, so I thought I'd try cuil. Cuil didn't find the thread at all
with "Edward Tufte Not spying feature", which has _got_ to be unique.

Also, didn't the google blog recently mention they had passed the trillion
mark?

------
morbidkk
I cant get the result for my newly registered domain name on cuil whereas I
can see the result on google. Also no blogspot/googlepages result for your
query.

I found the result page lot different compared to google UI. Its paradigm
shift and difficult to comprehend. Our brain and eyes are used to google
search result look and feel.

------
vikram
It doesn't work. Almost none of my searches worked. I think it gives too much
importance to title text.

------
frouaix
Cuil seems to be a company of hackers. Just have a look at the founders page:
Anna Patterson? wrote 2 search engines (Xift and Recall.archive.org) before
the GOOG. Louis Monier? major contributor to at least one search engine (Alta
Vista), and also said to have helped eBay.

------
unalone
Right now? Vastly flawed rankings-wise.

<http://www.cuil.com/search?q=gstepl>

Every response is copying the message from a post I wrote on an inactive blog.
More active results don't appear whatsoever.

------
vizard
hmm slightly weird. I searched for a term and didnt get any results. I
searched for the same term 10 minutes later and i got results? Anyway, some
stuff is not returning any results : "nvidia gtx 280" didnt return any result
:(

------
maxwell
Would cool.com have been better? :)

[http://web.archive.org/web/20061004185947/paulgraham.infogam...](http://web.archive.org/web/20061004185947/paulgraham.infogami.com/blog/)

------
mleonhard
I like how the results layout. They need to work on finding more relevant
thumbnails. The thumbnail shown for my own website is completely unrelated to
me.

------
walle
I think they should have single column search results.

------
demandred
how is it pronounced? their name is not memorable.

~~~
arockwell
According to the article its "cool". I agree that it is not a memorable name.

~~~
akd
With $33m in venture they could have spared a few Gs for a better domain name.

------
prakash
If there are so many people bashing cuil they must be doing something right
(privacy features, UI) we just don't know all of it yet!

~~~
jexe
Could be that we're just jealous of how thoroughly the press covered their
adequate-but-not-earth-shattering startup. ;)

------
tlrobinson
One really annoying thing is that page up / page down / arrow keys don't work
(sometimes). Maddening.

------
aston
Does anybody know what happened to that second el? They used to be Cuill for
the longest...

------
volida
something tells me a search engine that mimics the /search?q= url of Google
isn't so much innovative.

Google results structure is a win. White background is a win.

I think they are solving the wrong problem.

------
bigbang
give it some time folks. google wasnt better than ask.com when it launched.

~~~
paul
Yes it was. Ask Jeeves was a stupid "natural language" thing back then --
basically a giant, hand edited, FAQ.

------
EastSmith
If they add ssl I am sold!

