Cuil vs Google

[JaJae]

Google just received its latest competitor this morning. Cuil.com has officially launched.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Anna Patterson's last Internet search engine was so impressive that industry leader Google Inc. bought the technology in 2004 to upgrade its own system.

She believes her latest invention is even more valuable—only this time it's not for sale.

Patterson instead intends to upstage Google, which she quit in 2006 to develop a more comprehensive and efficient way to scour the Internet.

The end result is Cuil, pronounced "cool." Backed by $33 million in venture capital, the search engine plans to begin processing requests for the first time Monday.

Cuil had kept a low profile while Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers—Russell Power and Louis Monier—searched for better ways to search.

Now, it's boasting time.

Rather than trying to mimic Google's method of ranking the quantity and quality of links to Web sites, Patterson says Cuil's technology drills into the actual content of a page. And Cuil's results will be presented in a more magazine-like format instead of just a vertical stack of Web links. Cuil's results are displayed with more photos spread horizontally across the page and include sidebars that can be clicked on to learn more about topics related to the original search request.

Finally, Cuil is hoping to attract traffic by promising not to retain information about its users' search histories or surfing patterns—something that Google does, much to the consternation of privacy watchdogs.

Ex-Google engineers debut 'Cuil' way to search

I played with it a bit, I have to admit I like having a long list of pages like what I get from Google. It is what I'm used to. But I do like being able to click and refine my search. I also like that when I search for "political forums" on Cuil I get mostly LibertyLounge results. I don't know if it's catering the searches to my cookies or what, but I'm not complaining. I like to see that.

[Phantom]

I found cuil very slow compared to google. Is this my setup? Anyone else have similar results?

[JaJae]

Originally Posted by Phantom

I found cuil very slow compared to google. Is this my setup? Anyone else have similar results?

They've been having serious hardware overload issues on their release day. They say the load times will get better as well as their search results. Apparently search results correlate to server load because if servers get overloaded they are ignored for new queues until the load dies down. So they're saying things will only get better, but some people are getting skeptic.

[motivez]

I think it's because we've done a good job with SEO on this site that we rank high for their "relevance" to political forums. I only expect us to go up in Google as well

[WickedLou9]

It's shitty.
A search for:
2008 Ford Mustang: no results.
2009 Honda Fit: No results

[WickedLou9]

I just ran the same searches again and I got results. WTF?

I think they still have some bugs to work out.

[Schrödinger's Cat]

I prefer "a vertical stack of Web links" to that.

[Phantom]

after a few tests, it seems google results are much much better

I think google both better predicts what I'm looking for and finds things that turn up no results on cuil

[WickedLou9]

Originally Posted by Phantom

after a few tests, it seems google results are much much better

I think google both better predicts what I'm looking for and finds things that turn up no results on cuil

Yeah I searched for the company that I work for and the drill down menu was totally unrelated to my company. It was stuff about the Temptations, and 1960's music groups. That's not even similar. We are in the financial services industry.

[motivez]

I'm sure once they get beyond the initial release bump the page will be much more usable. I like the layout, really. Although they had a picture next to one of our links from another political forum, which was a little odd..

[JaJae]

Originally Posted by motivez

I'm sure once they get beyond the initial release bump the page will be much more usable. I like the layout, really. Although they had a picture next to one of our links from another political forum, which was a little odd..

I like the look, but I don't like scanning my eyes side to side when getting search results. That's something I have to get used to.

[Scrum]

I'm too used to reading google. I'm not sure how long it would take me to get used to this.

[Ardentfrost]

I like that you can see all the results on one page, but the picture thing is really weird. And Cuil-ing my name and handle returns crazy results whereas Google does a good job of finding me.

[WickedLou9]

Originally Posted by Ardentfrost

I like that you can see all the results on one page, but the picture thing is really weird. And Cuil-ing my name and handle returns crazy results whereas Google does a good job of finding me.

Most of the blogs seem to say a similar sort of thing. Google works better, the Cuil results are awesome when they are right, but when they are off, they aren't even close, and the site is still buggy. Other people have seen the same thing I did. Run a search and get no results. Run it again an hour later and get results... I think it's clear that they launched way to early and really sold the site as something more than it was. People are peeved because they sold it as the second coming of search engines and it's actually not very good at all.

[Ardentfrost]

Originally Posted by WickedLou9

Most of the blogs seem to say a similar sort of thing. Google works better, the Cuil results are awesome when they are right, but when they are off, they aren't even close, and the site is still buggy. Other people have seen the same thing I did. Run a search and get no results. Run it again an hour later and get results... I think it's clear that they launched way to early and really sold the site as something more than it was. People are peeved because they sold it as the second coming of search engines and it's actually not very good at all.

Well, the real question is "does the interface make any breakthroughs in searching?" Google indexes more stuff that Cuil currently does, and they can change their search heuristics on the back end to make it more useful to us (maybe), but if they're going to beat google, they need to offer something google does not. Google's mantra for searching is all about speed. They have made major code changes to gain milliseconds. Cuil can be a little slower as long as it offers something else that is more useful to us that google's speed.

[WickedLou9]

Those drill down menus seem pretty useless to me.

Cuil... it's not really good for anything other than looking pretty.