

Yuil vs. Cuil - The hack wins hands down... - mspeiser
http://laserlike.com/2008/07/30/yuil-vs-cuil/

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unalone
Compared to Cuil, yes. But I still like the layout of Yahoo!'s normal search.
Whose idea was it that stacked results didn't work for conveying amounts of
information?

~~~
joao
Stacked results are what work best. But Cuil had to make themselves look
visually inovative, just to be considered 'diferent' from Google. If not
journalists would say that they were equal to Google/Yahoo - no matter how
better, or worse, the technology and search results.

Even, as it is the case, the UI doesn't help the user.

~~~
unalone
I think the moral, then, is not "innovate visually for no reason." It's "don't
pretend like you've got something that can compete with Google."

:-)

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IsaacSchlueter
Nice, but the link should point to <http://sampullara.appspot.com/yuil/> not
<http://laserlike.com/2008/07/30/yuil-vs-cuil/>

From <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

_Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they
found on another site, submit the latter._

~~~
beatty
I submitted <http://sampullara.appspot.com/yuil/> earlier today, but HN seems
to have deleted it (see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=262081>).

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d0mine
Showing relevant images is hard
<http://sampullara.appspot.com/yuil/search?q=cuil>

~~~
unalone
Cuil isn't a pulp fantasy hero? But it sounds SO much like one.

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spencerfry
Wow! The results are 1,000 times better.

Nice work, Sam.

~~~
j2d2
Ahem...

Nice work, Yahoo!

~~~
spencerfry
Fair enough. :)

I can't wait to see more...

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redorb
this kinda stuff has to embarrass cuil, the results are better (yahoo) but
still perhaps an engine like goog, Y! or MSN will by their indexing technology
(that is supposedly cheaper)

~~~
KirinDave
No, it doesn't. Cuill, like Powerset, is a new search engine still doing
relevance and query reformulation tuning. It's a lot of work to get results as
good as Google and Yahoo! deliver, and a large part of it is a massive body of
training data to work with.

People who think this should embarrass Cuill are profoundly missing the point.
It's a technology demo to show, "Yes we can make a functional search engine
and our technology is not smoke and rainbows".

Powerset faced the same absurd criticism, and it was frustrating because
people were so caught up in the search wars that they didn't see the product
as its own entity.

~~~
asif
It's not very difficult to make a functional search engine. With the amount of
resources cuil had, all you would have to do is provision a few thousand
servers and deploy a nutch cluster on them.

Then you pair random images with random search results. Voila, you have cuil.

The criticism is duly applied as Cuil made the claim that they would be better
than Google at the same game. Powerset never made such a claim. The people who
criticized it didn't have an understanding about what it was actually trying
to do.

~~~
KirinDave
> It's not very difficult to make a functional search engine. With the amount
> of resources cuil had, all you would have to do is provision a few thousand
> servers and deploy a nutch cluster on them.

This is incredibly wrong. What Cuil has done is neither easy (in terms of
effort) or trivial (in terms of overall accomplishment). Most people simply
don't understand the incredible amount of infrastructure that goes into a
search engine. Certainly I did not until being part of what Powerset did, and
I was shocked.

> Then you pair random images with random search results. Voila, you have
> cuil.

I confess I am confused why they don't just turn the feature off. It's
certainly not baked yet.

> The criticism is duly applied as Cuil made the claim that they would be
> better than Google at the same game.

They can be better than Google at the same game _at some point in the future_.
Right now all they have is a faster index generator, which is obviously what
they feel they need to pursue funding or acquisition.

> Powerset never made such a claim. The people who criticized it didn't have
> an understanding about what it was actually trying to do.

I am watching the same series of events I lived through with Powerset unfold
for Cuill, and it is no more tolerable from the outside than the inside.

~~~
bluelu
Cuil is much more worth than powerset is. PowerSet was searching through about
5 million pages? No need for a huge cluster farm!

No offense meant, but I bet if Powerset wouldn't have been sold, you probably
would be workless as they would have run out of money very very soon. You
can't make money searching through wikipedia, and the technology was nothing
more like phrase detection (with verbs, nouns, etc) and simple dictionary
lookup. The interface was nice though. I bet the technology wouldn't work with
foreign languages too... ;).

What I think powerset has is the skills to run large clusters, to deploy
software on a large scale, and to scale things up. These are things that are
interesting, but I think the Microsoft guys can do this as well without buying
powerset.

If Microsoft would have spend the 100 Million they gave out for buying
powerset on 100 google engineers and give each of them 1/3 million each year
(so they leave google and I bet many would!), at the end of 2 years, they
would have had a much better product at a far better price!

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vaksel
Cuil made the mistake of telling the user they found 0 results. Instead they
should have used Cuil for main results, and then if nothing was found should
have displayed Google or Yahoo results(probably Yahoo because of the whole
Boss thing).

That way at least half of your results would be relevant.

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mdemare
Searching for my name returns my linked in profile as the first hit ... with a
picture of Charles Nutter.

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dominik
Yuil's been taken down? Why?

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bartman
Except for the semantic part...

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geuis
I'm liking Yuil. It definitely passes my vanity search test that I commented
on here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=258828>

