Sphinn - New Search Engine Cuil Launches But Something is Amiss

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New Search Engine Cuil Launches But Something is Amiss

Went Hot: July 29, 2008 - 12:20 am
Posted By: gyutae 341 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.searchrank.com)
Category: SEO

Menlo Park based Cuil has officially launched with quite a sizable index of 120 billion web pages, making them arguably a comprehensive search engine on the web. Cuil not only claims that they have found a way to massively reduce the costs involved in indexing the web and how they handle search queries (Google spends a billion dollars a year to run the back end infrastructure of it’s search business), they also make the boastful claims to have better search results than Google and others based on how they index websites.

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from thejimgaudet 341 days ago #

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Also I noticed the site is extremely slow. Not a good opening day for them...

~ Jim

from toddmintz 341 days ago #

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Yep...there's a Todd Mintz that's really into photography (not me) and his pics are placed next to articles that I've written.

from kristyann 340 days ago #

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Not sure what is up with the pictures not matching up with the results. That seems...well, odd to say the least.

from searchcommander 340 days ago #

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I noticed the pictures not matching results either - Not to mention that finding company names not always coming up on page either.

huh - site: isn't working "due to load"

the blurb says they claim to be good, "based on how they index websites"... How's that?
I see no reference in log files - Anyone know their bots name?

from davisponch 340 days ago #

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That was the worst search experience Ive ever had. They have alot of work to do....

from robwatts 340 days ago #

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I liked the layout, a reported $33 million dollars VC funding by ex googlers.

Will it fly though? Depends on how much of that 33 million is going to be invested in promoting the thing.

DS made a few searches here

http://searchengineland.com/080728-024035.php

The results it seems aren't good.

Shed loads of search engines have came and gone, none have been google killers or rivals.

It'll take something really really exceptional to grab even a fraction of Googs market share.

Maybe a combined effort promoted by all of the big social players at once that hooks into the social platforms and integrates too. If Digg, FB, SU, BEBO, Myspace, WIKIpedia etc all got behind something on the same day in the same way, then that vital mass take up of the product might just happen and grow wings.

from AlanCh 340 days ago #

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In true narcissistic fashion I just searched on my own name. Couple of points other than that the three-column-no-order-of-listing SERP had my eyes skipping all over the page without seeing my own pages - that were listed - so in a 'real' search I might miss a relevant listing.

1 as others have mentioned above, a listing for one of my books has a picture that is not me [my wife asks if I can get one of George Clooney to be shown instead]

2 there are a lot of listings on the first page for folk with my name that don't show up in the first few pages of Google/Live/Yahoo - which suggests there is a different algorithm at work - not so good for me though, I am #1 on the big three.

'friad it won't be added to my SE bookmark

from CrankyDave 340 days ago #

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You only get 1 chance to make a first impression.

ooooooops!

I have to wonder whose idea it was to go live. The "companies" or the $33M? From what I see, even if you want to try and say it's in Alpha it's an embarassment.

Following DS's suggestion I went through a handful of queries. They were either OK or really bad IMO. No middle ground. Additionally, they really are exact phrase match happy. Singular and plural queries for the same word/phrase produce vastly different results in many instances.

The thumbnails are really bad. Far too many that either don't load (the dreaded "red X"), or simply don't match. Although I can't say i mind terribly that one of my logos shows up for competitors sites despite that logo nat having been used for several months.

Gotta give them an "A" for PR though. Too bad they squandered the opportunity.

Is that smoke I smell? Must have Cuil open in another tab. :)

from qeorge 340 days ago #

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Absolutely terrible results. A search for our company name, which is very obscure, returned 4 sites which have scraped our homepage, but no mention of our homepage at all. Worse, all 4 scraped sites 404'd.

Hands down the worst search experience I have had in the last decade, even without factoring in the servers going down all day.

Their pivacy policy is nice though.

from tambre 340 days ago #

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i'm willing to give it some more time before i write it off totally. i like the structure and organization of it, but the image to result needs some work.

i don't remember well my first experience with google as it was what, 10 or 11 years ago, but they and other search engines have rolled out with things that haven't worked perfectly until they ironed out some kinks.

from MasterofPuppets 340 days ago #

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Absolutely horrible search engine. i tried searching for several All-Star MLB Baseball players and I got zip for results. You think with $33 mil in venture capital these people whould at least wait to release it when it's ready. First impressions are lasting and my first impression of Cuil is I'll never bother with it again.

from sphinndr 340 days ago #

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Well I will play off the narsasistic approach and looked for my name which there are many people on the web with my name - a professional musician, illustrator, religious fanatic, and of course internet guy and nothing for any of us. What is even more laughable is the predictive text feature even suggested my own name and still didn't return a result. Maybe better once they figure out how to write a better algo, I will come back and play later next month if it still around.

from levertmarketing 339 days ago #

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I have to agree with most people...terrible results, slow indexing process, hard to read layout, images not matching results, etc...

Thanks for the effort.

from UncleChumley 339 days ago #

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Another vote for horribly-gone-awry. Search for "formula one". You'll get an error message every time. One of the most popular sports in the world, the first search I tried on cuil, and it crapped out - and has continued to crap out. Other searches brought me spam pages, attack sites ("Your computer may be infected! Do you want to install our software?") and dozens of redirects to non existent pages and servers. Many of the pages that it managed to find were not in English. Both the pictures and the accompanying text were often misleading, wrong, or unhelpful.

from yojpotter2 339 days ago #

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This one looks promising..but I just hope they will improve their SERPs page soon..^^

from danlew 328 days ago #

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Anything but black, please, the idea of search results ins't bad, but it aint that great either, what will be their algorithms based on? Links, Keywords? All of the above?