Cuil is a new context-oriented search engine started by former Google employees. Worth a look. Results are displayed in column format rather than a list. Purportedly, they want to rectify Google's errors such as favoring high trafficked sites. Cuil doesn't save user IP address information.
See how it goes. It'd be great if there were many independent and viable search engines, but I suspect they will be bought up by Microsoft, particularly if the Yahoo sale never happens. MSN Search still sucks.
oh, relevant webmastery info: "Twiceler is the name of our robot Web crawler. The user-agent is “twiceler.” We understand that many small sites are bandwidth-limited, so we support the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive."
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3 replies to this topic
#1
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head idiot
#2
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Posted 28 July 2008 - 08:45 PM
searching concatenated terms, like "tigerwoods" or "michaeljordan" got mixed results. My observations are based solely on first page search results (basically the top 10 results returned to the user)
"kanyewest" Cuil returned a good top link plus their helpful "explore by category" box. Google returned the same top link and their top 10 results were better overall.
"tigerwoods" Both returned decent relevant results. I have to say Google was better for the top 10 results overall. Based on the kanye west and tiger woods results, it looks like Google is returning more "interview with..." results than Cuil is presently. And no 'explore by category' box in Cuil for this term.
"michaeljordan" Atrocious in Cuil. Kottke.org? Swampthing.com? No problems in Google.
"stevealbini" returned bad results with both Cuil and Google. (Google at least had "did you mean "Steve Albini"" which returned relevant results...although the wikipedia entry was above Ablini's Electrical Audio site, which is dumb.
So it's not perfect.
"kanyewest" Cuil returned a good top link plus their helpful "explore by category" box. Google returned the same top link and their top 10 results were better overall.
"tigerwoods" Both returned decent relevant results. I have to say Google was better for the top 10 results overall. Based on the kanye west and tiger woods results, it looks like Google is returning more "interview with..." results than Cuil is presently. And no 'explore by category' box in Cuil for this term.
"michaeljordan" Atrocious in Cuil. Kottke.org? Swampthing.com? No problems in Google.
"stevealbini" returned bad results with both Cuil and Google. (Google at least had "did you mean "Steve Albini"" which returned relevant results...although the wikipedia entry was above Ablini's Electrical Audio site, which is dumb.
So it's not perfect.
Maximum Awesome
"Proceed counterinductively." --Paul Feyerabend
"Proceed counterinductively." --Paul Feyerabend
#3
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Thundercat
Posted 29 July 2008 - 01:52 AM
I'll keep trying it periodically . Earlier today there were no results searching on 'Cuil' (their about us page was busted too). Now its a bunch of hits in Ireland (which is nifty in itself - I know what the search engine is if I'm there already). Results seem to be improving fairly rapidly, and I'd expect a few wrinkles as the get it all up to speed.
They're probably hoping for a MS buyout - they'd need a crap load of capital to get a datacenter together to spider everything. If it proves to be as clever an algorithm as they're saying, MS will be quite interested.
I think the name is trying to be far too clever, though.
They're probably hoping for a MS buyout - they'd need a crap load of capital to get a datacenter together to spider everything. If it proves to be as clever an algorithm as they're saying, MS will be quite interested.
I think the name is trying to be far too clever, though.
The sky over the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel.
#4
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Inconsequential
Posted 30 July 2008 - 09:13 AM
Cuil?
Sounds like the way an emo would say cool (if ever anything is cool enough for them. Don't they hate everything?)
Sounds like the way an emo would say cool (if ever anything is cool enough for them. Don't they hate everything?)
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