www.cuil.com = pile of sh*t!

smartypants

played around with www.cuil.com this morning, got nothing i was looking for on the first page. I hate the layout, i prefer things listed top to bottom. What do you guys make of it?

DonkeyStyle \o/

Yeah total shít IMO.
There's a thread already running on it here.

laters

thelordofcheese

smartypants wrote: »

played around with www.cuil.com this morning, got nothing i was looking for on the first page. I hate the layout, i prefer things listed top to bottom. What do you guys make of it?

I think it's got great potential, give it time, i mean google wasn't exactly great when it first lauched.

aidan_walsh

Maybe its just your general inability to search?

The layout is much nicer IMO, I like having more information up front rather than just a few short lines to see how relevant it might be and the ability to catagorise without having to dive into advanced functions. Once it becomes a bit more relevant with time I might find myself using it more.

Thomas_S_Hunterson

Yea I think they were stupid and went and released it before it was good and ready. At the moment it's a stinking pile of crap

seamus

This could possibly be the worst search engine I've ever encountered.

Is it using some kind of fancy new syntax or is it trying to do something else.

Cuil -v- Google searching for the very generic "Atom Bomb".

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=Atom+Bomb

http://www.google.ie/search?q=Atom+Bomb

Am I missing something here?

EDIT: Seeing as everyone is no doubt baffled by my post, attached is a screenshot of what I got the very first time I tried to search.

I like the "explore by category" bit, but that wikipedia isn't the first result pretty much says it all for me.

Looks like they're totally unprepared.

aidan_walsh

Sean_K wrote: »

Yea I think they were stupid and went and released it before it was good and ready. At the moment it's a stinking pile of crap

No, the best way to find problems with an advanced system is to open it to a wider audience who will not act in the same way as you or your testing. They were not stupid to open, just to hype it like they seem to have (not sure if its them driving the hype or everyone else).

The Bollox

thelordofcheese wrote: »

I think it's got great potential, give it time, i mean google wasn't exactly great when it first lauched.

I think so too, but time will tell

thelordofcheese

Sean_K wrote: »

Yea I think they were stupid and went and released it before it was good and ready. At the moment it's a stinking pile of crap

Because the content of the internet always remains static......

Ungh, this is going to be one of those threads that gets my blood angry.

AARRRGH

Their technology may be a bit crap, but their PR team deserve a medal!

I've never seen so much free publicity before.

RTE, BBC, etc.

smartypants

i miss the spelling advisor that you have in google. if your looking for well known generic things its ok but if your looking for more niche or local information its not great

jester77

I tried to play with it yesterday but their server was down. When it did work I wasn't too impressed. They have a search by category which looks good but most of the links were dead or didn't work.

I think they jumped the gun a little too quick which could harm them... first impressions and all that!!

Ruu_Old

Needs background midi music.

ScumLord

Never heard of it. They seriously need to improve it the results it brings up are bizarre and each page seems to have the same stuff on it.

cornbb

They made a pretty bad gaffe here, according to The Register: NSFW

Will be interesting to see if they are any good. Would be good for people to get into the habit of using more than one search engine.

JIZZLORD

searching for lee evans didnt have any reference to people wanting to beat him do death. Shame on you cuil

Nuttzz

seamus wrote: »

I like the "explore by category" bit, but that wikipedia isn't the first result pretty much says it all for me.

that sounds like a good thing to me...

AARRRGH

cornbb wrote: »

They made a pretty bad gaffe here, according to The Register: NSFW

Will be interesting to see if they are any good. Would be good for people to get into the habit of using more than one search engine.

Haha that's messed up...

Mossy Monk

That is ****.

That happened to another journalist. He shares the same name as a porn star. So when he searched for himself on Cuil, the image of the porn star came up beside his details and vice versa.

cornbb

Deleted User wrote: »

That happened to another journalist. He shares the same name as a porn star. So when he searched for himself on Cuil, the image of the porn star came up beside his details and vice versa.

It seems 90% of the images on the internet must be smut (searching for almost anything on Google with SafeSearch turned off can bring up some freaky things!). But maybe Cuil should improve their safesearch technology before embedding images in search results :pac:

cornbb

cornbb wrote: »

It seems 90% of the images on the internet must be smut (searching for almost anything on Google with SafeSearch turned off can bring up some freaky things!). But maybe Cuil should improve their safesearch technology before embedding images in search results :pac:

Can you imagine his poor mammy trying to Cuil (it just doesn't have the same sound as "Google") her son?

aidan_walsh

cornbb wrote: »

They made a pretty bad gaffe here, according to The Register: NSFW

Will be interesting to see if they are any good. Would be good for people to get into the habit of using more than one search engine.

Meh. IIRC Google had similar issues soon after Google News started. The price you pay for removing the human factor.

youcancallmeal

Did one search for 'firefox' got no results. Won't be back again I'm afraid.

smartypants

youcancallme>al wrote: »

Did one search for 'firefox' got no results. Won't be back again I'm afraid.

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=firefox

youcancallmeal

smartypants wrote: »

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=firefox

Well it wasn't today that I searched for it, was yesterday, point is if you launch a website and its buggy it will drive a lot of users away.

smartypants

youcancallme>al wrote: »

Well it wasn't today that I searched for it, was yesterday, point is if you launch a website and its buggy it will drive a lot of users away.

agreed! sure search cuil...didnt even return their own site in the first page

smartypants

smartypants wrote: »

agreed! sure search cuil...didnt even return their own site in the first page

Is the word "dictionary" in the dictionary?

kowloon

Ruu wrote: »

Needs background midi music.

That would be perfect.

smartypants

Deleted User wrote: »

Is the word "dictionary" in the dictionary?

cornbb

youcancallme>al wrote: »

Did one search for 'firefox' got no results. Won't be back again I'm afraid.

I got plenty of good results, including this nice one http://www.cuilimg.com/imgsrv?i=020105:1393633995324492

I've added it to my little search bar in Firefox, I'll try using it for a few days. Might be nice to (shock horror!) wean myself off Google for awhile.

thelordofcheese

ITT: people don't know how a search engine works and demonstrate they have the memory span of a goldfish.

Krieg

In light of legal proceedings issued by Cuil.com, we have been advised that there is to be no further discussion of cuil.com or events hosted by cuil.com.

cornbb

Krieg wrote: »

In light of legal proceedings issued by Cuil.com, we have been advised that there is to be no further discussion of cuil.com or events hosted by cuil.com.

lol

Krieg

Krieg wrote: »

In light of legal proceedings issued by Cuil.com, we have been advised that there is to be no further discussion of cuil.com or events hosted by cuil.com.

All 45 million of them.

Dord

I don't like these little pictures they put beside the links. For one of the websites I run it shows a picture of a gravestone, entirely unrelated to it and the picture is contained nowhere on the pages of the site or ever has been.

faceman

I tried it a few times yesterday and on each occasion it returned no search results. Tis crap!

Blisterman

I cuiled my name, and got some results google didn't have, so that's a plus.

Flukey

I was not that impressed. It's cool, but not very hot.:cool:

kerry4sam

never been any good of a site being honest

Tha Gopher

Why in this day and age set up a rival for Google?

I was shocked that "only" 60% of net searches are via google. Honestly, who the fcuk uses Yahoo, Lycos or Jeeves these days? Not sure Ive touched any of them since about 2001.

In truth Google is probably the most important tech advancement since the mobile phone.

marco murphy

I like it actually. But ''cuil'' isn't ideal for word of mouth.

0utshined

Doesn't live up to the hype.

Search on google for site:boards.ie "www.cuil.com" and you get a page of results, this thread being one.

Try the same search on Cuil.com and nada.

Try "your name" +hometown and I get 0 results on Cuil and a page or more on google.

I dunno about the rest of ye but I try and restrict my search terms as much as possible to get relevant results and Cuil isn't giving me anything when I do that.

It's always good to have another alternative but I would like to know how much testing they have done for things like that before release. Like it or not straight search isn't enough anymore. There are now conventions that I would expect any search engine to have before I started using it and if it doesn't have them I don't want to use it for my own ease o use.

I read in the paper today they had €33m of VC funding plus whatever the founders put in. I wonder what the burn rate is, maybe that's why they released it to such fanfare?

dionsiseire

apparently the other day most of their servers went down under the pressure and only a few % of the actual available results were available to people searching. hence the lack of results

searching my name does not reveal my .com address which is the same as my name

and searching for goldenplec does not reveal the website goldenplec.com that i run

thats pretty poor.

apparently this is their attempt to provide a semantic solution to searching on the web (i.e. providing literal meaning to words as opposed to text searching) so that for jaguar results would be split into the car manufacturer, the animal, the operating system etc etc

AlmightyCushion

dionsiseire wrote: »

apparently this is their attempt to provide a semantic solution to searching on the web (i.e. providing literal meaning to words as opposed to text searching) so that for jaguar results would be split into the car manufacturer, the animal, the operating system etc etc

And probably throw back half a billion boards polls.

dade

i put in mustang GT on it the results came back fine but when i clicked on the link it gave it opened porn, now I'm off to explain myself to the boss

Ziggurat

Seem to be quite a few people saying that this was well reported. Am I the only one who never heard of it until this thread?

pickarooney

First result for 'pickarooney' links to Fortycoats. In almost 10 years, Google has never made the association.

It's not all bad.

thelordofcheese

Tha Gopher wrote: »

Why in this day and age set up a rival for Google?

because competition is a good thing.

cornbb

thelordofcheese wrote: »

because competition is a good thing.

Indeed. Google are very good at what they do, but its wrong for the whole world to rely on just the one search engine. Whenever you google something, the results you get are just google's interpretation of what you're looking for (if you know what I mean). No matter how good a search engine is it will always have a sort of bias built in.

Google wasn't in itself a major technological advancement by the way (IMO). There were search engines around years before Google, Google just happen to do it particularly well. I still remember when Yahoo! was king!

unnameduser

i for one hope that it challenges google. Give this S.E. some time and lets see what it can do.