VentureBeat - Latest Comments in Review: Out of the gate, Cuil is ambitious but flawed

Re: Review: Out of the gate, Cuil is ambitious but flawed

Guest — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 02:13:31 -0000

British law student sues Abercrombie-Fitch for disability discrimination.
http://www.abercrombieonsal...

Re: Review: Out of the gate, Cuil is ambitious but flawed

Jack — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 06:08:43 -0000

I tried a typical techie query of ORA-07445 on both google and cuil. Cuil gives me zero results and google gives me 17,500.. Why bother using this engine even if its not universal ?

Re: Review: Out of the gate, Cuil is ambitious but flawed

Saumil — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:51:47 -0000

Oh, I was looking for a Cuil link where I could see it, but now I understand what you mean. Yeah, top level categories, I've seen Clusty do it in the past and there are others who have tried. Its hard to get people to click on tab refinements though!

Re: Review: Out of the gate, Cuil is ambitious but flawed

riazrizvi — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:38:34 -0000

When I search on finance, say, the results come back in groups/clusters in the gray bar e.g. Personal Finance Software, Personal Finance Company. Link? There is a good tutorial on Latent Semantic Indexing at miislita.com , very detailed but still clear:
http://www.miislita.com/inf...

Re: Review: Out of the gate, Cuil is ambitious but flawed

Saumil — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 01:43:05 -0000

Uhhh where did you see clustering? I saw no clustering whatsoever! Can you send link please? Thanks!

Re: Review: Out of the gate, Cuil is ambitious but flawed

Saumil — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 01:42:09 -0000

VelvetBlues,

Relevance of results will be ongoing; you can't expect ANYONE to come out of the gate and match any of the majors, let alone Google.

I do agree with you that the images that are pulled up are frequently irrelevant. Worse still, beyond "anchoring" the page I have NO idea what value they serve to the user.

I do think though that people tend to be overly critical and evaluate search products along irrelevant angles (looking at the number of results per SERP across search engines, for example, which is a pretty lame way to approach the comparison).

Re: Review: Out of the gate, Cuil is ambitious but flawed

Wing Yu — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 23:51:57 -0000

I did a search for "financial content", the industry that I'm in. The first result was a description for TickerTech.com next to an image of our ad for FinancialContent.com which linked to TickerTech.com.

So Cuil freely mixes text and images from different sources. I suppose more permutations would mean more results...

Re: Review: Out of the gate, Cuil is ambitious but flawed

VelvetBlues — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 23:32:07 -0000

I'm not impressed. When I loaded the website early this morning, I had high hopes. But throughout the course of the day, my high expectations have soured into disappointment.

First, the results are not relevant at all. It never retrieves what I am looking for, in the way that Google can.

Two, the images are not necessarily associated with a website. I looked up my website 'Velvet Blues'. And instead of a logo or screen shot, I found an image with Spanish text on it, which came from God knows where! There's nothing about Cuba on my website.

Three, you've ignored the downtime. Somehow, this search engine which was made to serve users, didn't adequately prepare for traffic.

All in all, they made a poor showing, which I blame on a last minute scramble to reach their deadline... If you take a look at Digg or NYT, you'll find that over 90% of the comments are negative. In less than 24 hours of their launch, they've only been successful at one thing: alienating a good portion of their audience.

Re: Review: Out of the gate, Cuil is ambitious but flawed

riazrizvi — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:47:16 -0000

Clustered search results, but more readable than Kartoo. I like it.

Re: Review: Out of the gate, Cuil is ambitious but flawed

Saumil — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 21:51:37 -0000

@Lar: Yeah, foreign language filtering is another thing that search engines need to handle correctly. I didn't even want to get into it in the main post since spam filtering is more critical by any means :)

Re: Review: Out of the gate, Cuil is ambitious but flawed

Machefsky — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 19:12:15 -0000

I give it a failing grade all around. Try a simple search that is most relevant to Cuil (or whatever its name is).

"size of the world wide web"

The results are total nonsense. Hence, an "F".

This thing needs lots of work.

/Ira

Re: Review: Out of the gate, Cuil is ambitious but flawed

Lar — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 18:03:40 -0000

I was trying to find a website to help me identify the song a melody comes from, so I tried "hum a few bars". Live Search and Google both pointed me to an O'Reilly blog that talked about musipedia.org. Cuil only returned 10 pages, most of them in Danish (or some other foreign language).