Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

The new search engine: I’m not convinced

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It’s all over the news today: some refugees from Google have decided that their new search engine is better than Google.

In my extremely limited experience (I tried a couple of searches), not so much.  First problem: it’s called “Cuil.”  What is that about?  I mean, “google” didn’t used to mean much either, but at least you can pronounce it correctly when you see it spelled out.  And why would you choose a name which, when announced on the radio (as it was this morning’s newscast), is likely to lead to spelling mistakes?

Anyway, more important is the fact that, at least so far, the search engine turns up odd results.  I googled searched my name.  The first entry?  Wikipedia’s entry for Slate editor Jacob Weisberg.  I thought that was odd, so I went there to see why it turned up.  A BMG post that I wrote is mentioned in the footnotes.  That’s it.  Even stranger is the link to a page that is indeed about me — but that Cuil accompanies with a picture of some dude I’ve never seen before.  (Many Cuil search results include an image.)  So … that image selector might need a few kinks ironed out.  Finally, Cuil’s results pages seem to load pretty slowly, in contrast to Google’s almost instantaneous page loads.

And all this after $33 million in venture capital!  So far, I don’t see any reason why the Google gang should be breaking a sweat over the upstart.

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    • that porn site is one of those really annoying ones with no free tour, no good pictures or videos, and new windows that pop open when you try to close them, and it caused Firefox to crash (which I would have had to do anyway).

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      p>And cuil sucks too.

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      p>Better just delete this whole diary and save us all some trouble.

  3. i cuil-ed my name and got no results.  google has about 4 pages with me in there, including message board stuff from waaaay back last century.  if i want info on a non-entity like myslef, cuil is apparently not the place to go.

    • among other queries.  I either got 0 results or got some weird results for everything I searched.  The only nice feature seemed to the be the related subjects widget.

      • a tool to relate subjects turned up in nonsensical search results.  i can almost see the utility of it.  if we relate everything that doesn’t make sense, we’ll be left with The Truth?

  4. will at least buy you some good PR, it seems.

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    p>Although their servers can’t handle the load at the moment… not great for their big debut.

      • The SoapBlox search tool had its weaknesses, but I can’t say that the Google one is any better. At least in the old one, you could sort by date. If I wanted to see the latest on Deval Patrick, I could search for “Deval” and then sort by date. I can’t seem to do that with Google. The top of the list is the editors’ endorsement.
         

  9. Back in the day (the 90s) most folks who left the once-small now-big tech companies would come up with something that would hit a new market or target an unfulfilled or anticipated need, not just do yet another version of the same thing. And putting it in columns doesn’t qualify. I would have thought the VCs would have smartened up after the tech bubble burst. I guess not.

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    p>My couple of test searches also left me saying, “huh?”.

    • ever heard of product saturation?  think of how many varieties of cigarettes are on the market, and you see what i mean.  a lot of money can apparently be sopped up by glomming onto someone elses great idea.  if, that is, you do at least a decent job of meeting the standards already set.  clearly cuil has not (yet?) done that.

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