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Cuil vs. Google


Liontamer
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Okay, so I have noticed one neat little thing about cuil. When I typed in my name next to overclocked remix, it posted a bunch of my posts here. The neat thing is, it displayed my post rank I had at the time. I saw Megaman and Goomba. But when I clicked on the link, it had my present name, Kraid.

It's not really that important, but it was kinda neat.

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Has anyone else found Cuil to be horribly slow?

I'm willing to give any other search engine a test-drive and the benefit of the doubt at first. I mean, I've liked Google since almost the beginning (shortly after snap.com I think), and it's just gotten better; so another search engine might do it. Not to mention that it's still free to use any search engine you want.

But, searching Cuil was ridiculously slow for me. I just tried a couple of words here and there and, besides the results not being as useful as what Google would give, it took 10 times as long for any individual search to go through. Maybe I'll try it again, but for now I'll stick with Google.

I agree, the name is kind of a loser from a marketing standpoint. When you have to explain how to pronounce it you lose steam imho. I really don't like the layout either - it looks like a wall of advertisements to me. I will say though that the predictive text is nice as well as having the option to click to the next page without having to scroll all the way to the bottom.

Now that you mention it, that's probably why the layout irritates me so much. The layout was original, I'll grant that. But when you make results look like advertisements, people will tend to treat them like advertisements--i.e., they'll ignore them. KF

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All it needs is a jazzy marketing campaign and site will be golden. Mark my words.

Just like what Google did!

Google is everyone's friend -- some people will go against it just for the sake of being different. You put a good marketing strategy behind that, and you could settle in quite nicely.

...or you could read their mission statement. They have to have some reason for going against Google. Personally, I like what they aim to achieve. On paper, anyway.

As for the site itself, the search engine needs a fuckton of work, but I do enjoy the format in which searches are returned. Simple. Straightforward. Not too much unrelated text. Making use of the widescreen. It looks nice.

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But Cuil pulls up images it's obtained from God knows where in order to spice up the results, and the images frequently have jack to do with anything and aren't obtained from the resulting site in the first place.

I entered 'Destructoid' and the last result on the first page had a picture of a blowjob sitting next to it. I didn't click on that result to find out what the relevance was, but I did notice that destructoid.com was nowhere on the menu.

These guys are really pushing the envelope outside the box.

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So why bother releasing this to the public when it still needs so much work? It's not like they were on some strict deadline for a release date, were they?

Free beta testing from the general public, then the developers maybe troll popular web forums (like this one) where they're mentioned, see what we think about them and secretly work on a way to improve based on our inadverdent feedback, I assume.

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Why is the media and everyone so interested in this? I've been seeing stories and threads and articles about this everywhere. So it's just another crappy search engine. There's a million other crappy search engines too. Why is this one suddenly such a hot media item with all this speculation about whether or not it will dethrone google? It's new so all the attention can't be based on popularity - and according to you guys, it's not the quality either.

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Why is the media and everyone so interested in this?

Because it's ex-Google workers trying to one-up their old bosses. Thereby, an insurrection within the company could harm shares. And now, with Google being instated to dictionaries worldwide meaning "to search for something on the internet", surely it means Google's ultimately won and should have hoovered up all other search engines at this stage,

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Free beta testing from the general public, then the developers maybe troll popular web forums (like this one) where they're mentioned, see what we think about them and secretly work on a way to improve based on our inadverdent feedback, I assume.

That sounds like the only reasonable basis for doing this. It gives a pretty good corpus of more realistic searches. If that's the case, the first kinds of results they'll work on improving will be results for things people search for the most often.

That might explain Asaudan's unexpected blowjob result. KF

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Actually, from what I can tell, cuil is improving rather quickly, I'm sure it checks what people are searching for and then will look for things relating to some of the more searched things. I actually like the layout and the category narrowing, and the type suggestions. All of the things you've said that don't work, worked fine for me, it must be learning fast. It does seem to have a problem with spaces and punctuation, I searched for thasauce and found it fine, tha sauce didn't find anything relavent. Same with vgmix and vg mix.

It has potential, they're probably waiting to advertise a lot until it's been beta'd by the public and is sufficient enough to make a good impression, although I hope they make it very clear how it is pronounced, its useless to have a 'cool' (haha, a pun) name if everyone is too scared to talk about it for fear of pronouncing it wrong. I'll be keeping an eye on it.

Also, did someone say there was an image search? Because I can't find it, and searching for it yields nothing.

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Aight, so for anyone that's not seen yet, new search engine hotness Cuil ("cool") officially launched yesterday, founded by some ex-Googlers.

Did some searches on it though, and, at least right now, it sucks.

From their info page:

Let's take VG composer Tim Follin for example. I guess I shouldn't complain, since OCR is the first result...and the sixth...and the tenth. :lol: But Cuil pulls up images it's obtained from God knows where in order to spice up the results, and the images frequently have jack to do with anything and aren't obtained from the resulting site in the first place.

Half the time, it doesn't even pull up useful stuff. It ends up giving top results from a lot of shitty, out-of-date sites that just spider Wikipedia.

I'm sure they're going to work on improving the search results, but I gotta say, if it's gonna stay like this vs. Google's "reliance on superficial popularity metrics", give me the superficial popularity metrics any day.

"Sucks" doesn't even begin to cover it. I ran the same search, and saw results for things not even remotely associated with Tim Follin. They need to find some other way to spend their time.

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