Cuil not a Google killer – yet

cuil is quite funny. im from chennai, india. i ran a search for “chennai” on cuil and it showed me an image of google, speaks volumes, the search is not ready yet, will take atleast another 2 years to get tuned fully to the industry, definitely not a google killer

In my view, there is no search engines that can be as good as Google. I agree that Cuil has to find its own niche and grow from there.

They really spent $33 million on this site? Umbelivible! But they will probabely work on it. It probabely will be better…

Cuil isn’t completed yet. It doesn’t work yet as a real Search Engine. As a Russian, I tried to search for a known Russian company on the Cuil and it didn’t bring it up. So, it shows me that the site isn’t completed and it needs more work.

Cuil has bigger problems than no ad revenue – it DOESN’T WORK AS A SEARCH ENGINE. ‘Scuse my shouting but it’s a rather fundamental point for a…search engine.

The privacy policy is excellent and will or would gain them a great deal of goodwill. But I just can’t find anything using the site. There is also no FAQ with their search syntax. Common + – quotes etc lead to zero results.

Cuil is headed in the right direction. What they need is a tab bar up top or preferences on the home search page whereby the search results get skewed according to the 5 E’s of INTENT:

Education
Entertainment
Environment
EGovernment
ECommerce

Or a similar scheme. This is just a trivial e.g.

They REALLY need to suss out the INTENT of the search without being too complicated or too prying. Then they can ask for top dollar for targeted advertising without collecting information about the searcher and archiving that data the way Google does. Google, clearly violating the constitution and you…

It is blunt to ask that kind of information but asking that information avoids the bald-faced lie that is Google.

Cuil should listen to what we customers say.

We customers say:

1) build us a search engine in which we state the intent of the search.

2) Customers 1st. Then customers stay so advertisers stay. Simple formula most businesses know nothing about. You can charge a much higher rate then google because with intent keywords, e.g. intent::buy, all your advertisers will know that the customer is looking for a deal, to learn, to be entertained, to socialize,…

3) Have you ever heard of a search that resulted in an ad being placed? That is very easily done with a keyword intent::sell. An advertisement is then created and placed on a network of open ad slots on sites saying they’ll accept ads of type sell::furniture::couch::USA::Illinios::Chicago::60609 for example. Or greenly speaking, donate::furniture::couch:Chicago::LI::60609. After an initial seller’s registration, everytime the customer/searcher wanted to put something up for sale it’s a matter of performing a search on a search engine. Much more tightly targeted advertising. Who ever heard of the users of a search engine using the search engine to place ads?! Talk about directed advertising. Key point though is Cuil should require ads of this type be local in nature to avoid the stupid kind of ‘get rich quick ads’ that permeate Google’s ad space and repulse Google search users such as those yellow teeth ads, political ads, theological ads, obesity and drug ads…google greed grosses out.

Google will be eaten alive. There is alot of rumbling against Google and their two-faced betrayal.

Google tries to be cute and read our minds by collecting everthing it can about us and search this supposed ‘inside’ view to advertisers.

We say, be blunt, we’ll tell you our intent if you promise not to keep that information past this one search. Because, truthfully, the next time my intent could be something entirely different. Or Google ‘mid reading’ could be as inept as the FBI & CIA (e.g. Rich Jewell, Waco, TX, Osama bin Laden)

Who will advertisers believe? Searcher’s/Customer’s own words or Google privacy invading ‘mind reading’?

SIMPLE and MATURE way to treat customer and advertiser with respect. Google you loose.

Listen.

Google & other businesses that listened to me nearly 2 years ago when I told them they should use electronic copies of screenplays combined with text/speech recognition to screen out pirated video clips and other content are now bringing my ideal into use in public. Listening to customers such as myself brings great rewards.

Yes, Google, you’re welcome.

I agree with the comment that Cuil isn’t ready yet. I searched for a company which I can find in Google and Yahoo on the first search and Cuil didn’t bring it up. Not even on when the entire address was entered

The layout is really clean but the search is not as powerful as Google. I tried searching 1 keyword. No Results with Cuil and 3 accurate results with Google. Seems like Cuil needs to improve its platform.

Cuil.com is differnet experience to othe search engine but, the need to add more features (Image search, Vedio,, Etc..)

any way all the best for the new search engine.

I find it interesting how the focus from Coolie has been on the aesthetics and volume rather than functionality. Reminds me of the early marketing campaigns from Microsoft Vista which focused on aero windows and the sidebar.

As a Chinese, I was interested to know if Cuit supports search in Chinese. It turned out it did not.

Google is the best! and Cuil isn’t ready yet.

My thought after when I went to this site yesterday and saw the same poor results that everyone else did, is this is like a car company releasing a car the does not quite drive yet, or breaks down right away. The best comment on here was “How will they explain to their investors that they needed $33 million to build a search engine that can’t even find itself?”

Cuil
We didn’t find any results for “Yashica Electro 35”

Google
Results 1 – 10 of about 103,000 for Yashica Electro 35

(an old camera I was researching)

enough said… it’s not ready

Nothing compares to Google’s $20 billion dollar eigenvector!

All that indexing, they must have forgotten their own site and media coverage. A search on Cuil for “cuil” returns zero hits for their own website. More interestingly, it fails to return a single hit on any of the media coverage extolling Cuil. Doing a similar search for “cuil” on Google yields as its first result: News results for Cuil, followed by Cuil’s homepage. I learned a lot about Cuil and their lofty ambitions thanks, in large part, to Google’s excellent search results.

While talking to my friend. I tired to look for longwood gardens but it gave sometimes and sometimes it did not.

I think it was having usual starting troubles. I also agree with author that its very premature to compare it with google. (I am google fan) I was surprised by the press coverage it got.

I think another opportunity for MS to spend money and try to catch up with Google. Not gonna happen

I’m a American Civil War buff. I tried searching for General John Logan. Cuil didn’t give me any relevant links; Google gave me many relevant ones.

I agree, the search engine could not find my own name while I am getting 3-5 pages of links through Google. So while they are indexing 120+ billion pages, they cannot effective sort through that index to find a relevant content.

By the way, there is a good book on Search by John Battelle. It is actually called “Search”.

Check out the research paper we wrote on Google recently here:
http://sites.google.com/site/suffolkexecmba/Home/blog/Google-Financial-Analysis-and-Forecasting-Paper/Google_Final_Draft.pdf

the webpage really lloks ‘cool’ however the perfomance is still lacking. With time mayb it will find its market and grow, and produce better results…after all its just started. Despite the $33 million i think people expect too much, give it time. As for beating Google…thats a long shot,,,next to impossible.Its like saying Linux destroying Windows.

The only search engines that can stand a chance against Google are the verticals. Google cannot provide relevant results to vertical markets such as legal, finance and medical communities (i.e. nextbio.com). Cuil needs to find its own niche and grow from there.

LOL! It can’t even find itself…tyr searching for CUIL. What a joke!

My company is #1 on Google and Yahoo. It isn’t even found using Cuil. 121,617,892,992 web pages indexed and they missed mine.

Just compared Cuil with another brand new search engine, Scour. I Agree with the concensus that Cuil shouldnt have been rolled out yet but it really seems like Scour is fully up and available and is super fun to use.

I really can’t believe that someone spent $33 million on this site. Whomever was doing PR for Cuil really knows how to hype things up. Too bad the designers of Cuil can’t back up all the hype.

I tried a few different searches and had horrible results. I typed in my hometown expecting to see the town’s website first on the list but instead I got two pages of junk. All the searches gave me nothing but useless junk.

Secondly the format is horrible. The columns are interesting but a little too busy. The pictures are a waste of time because they are small and they rarely have anything to do with the search.

The only thing I do like is the Explore by Category search but a lot of time even the categories really are irrelevant.

I know competition in the market is good but why spend $33 million trying to beat out Google on something it does well? Why not spend that money on developing something unique and new?

So far, the only search that has worked for me on cuil is a search for “google”. Nothing else has resulted in any relevant results… I think this search engine must be a joke.. either that or it is a secret project of Google’s to show how superior they are to anyone else..

It’s hilarious that anyone put up $33 million for this.. How will they explain to their investors that they needed $33 million to build a search engine that can’t even find itself?

Tried Cuil with 10 “difficult” searches, zero relevant results. Same searches on Google returned 4 relevant results.

I tested Cuil yesterday myself and got no results most of the time; whereas with Google, I found exactly what I was looking for and more with the same search. Cuil still has much work to do.

I think in the longrun this will be a better search solution. Why anyone would expect it to out perform google on the first day of going live is beyond me. The reason that I think this search engine is so genius is because it gets back to the basics. Talk about relevant results, nowadays if you have the money to pay for SEO tricks you get at the top of the list. SEO optimization will be the death of google and I can’t believe that people are actually paying big bucks for this solution. I’m not really too happy with google results lately. I enter my search term and I can sometimes get 5 returns, for the same company, with different domains that all lead you back to the same place. It’s crap! Then you look at the sidebar and you are being marketed to as google uses your search term as the subject no matter what you enter in the search field. So at times I could see an ad for pimples available in Houston, TX. It insults my intelligence! When you actually do fall for one of these ads you click on it to find totally irrelevant information. I have started to boycott the first results page of a google search because of this. SEO will be the death of the reliable search engine and Cuil is on the cutting edge of cutting back to a more user focused search tool.

Bravo Cuil!!

I like the idea! It may be great for the future. But now it doesn’t work write. It has to be faster and better than Google. However, in a comparison with Google, Cuil comes with fewer results and most of the results are irrelevant.

Same as Sachendra. I searched my business of three years and it didn’t show up. Google has it all over the place. I’m sure in a few months you’ll never hear of it again.

“Cuil” seems rather ridicule …

I tried it, and the first three searches I put in were very generic terms, but I got a message stating that no results were found. Then I entered terms for a very small website that is visted by less than a few hundred people. Cuil listed a bunch of irrelevant websites, while google put the site I was looking for at the top of its list. So long Cuil, you definitely don’t deserve the media hype you got.

In my view, the site of Cuil isn’t completed yet. I tested the site and I was disappointed. The images aren’t clear and the searches aren’t so fast…

Right now Cuil’s search results are near worthless and comparing it to Google is laughable. They’ve done themselves a huge disservice by going live with such a poor product.

Wow! I heard that Cuil is able to index more than three times as many Web pages as Google does.

Buggy and not satisfying. Won’t be using it again, probably. Search results were redundant and pictures were inaccurate.

Try this search:
“search engine”

- Several results are repeated on subsequent pages.
- This image (http://www.cuilimg.com/imgsrv?i=021009:1221560981550501) appears on many of the results and seems to have little to do with the result.

I have the same experience with whatever I searched. Poorly done.

Just did a search on Cuil for St. Louis Cardinals. No results found. WTF?

I love Cuil.. When I search on Google, I always get exactly what I’m looking for. How boring is that? Cuil never bores me with something I actually want to know, it makes me learn things that I would never care or think to search for on my own. It is very educational if people would just stop being so picky about what they’re looking for and take the time to read the irrelevant results that Cuil provides!

There’s no image search in cuil. I thought that was a pretty cool feature in google. And like many others have pointed out, the results aren’t relevant in most searches.

When I used Google the first few times, the search results were so much more relevant compared to other engines of the time such as Lycos and Yahoo, that I havent gone back to any other search engine in the last several years. Had the results on Google been the same as Lycos, I wouldnt have gone back to Google. Cuil needed to do that to it’s users – hook them on from the word go. It has not achieved that. On the contrary, it has turned people away.

And what’s with the name? Cuil doesn’t sound cool. Until some articles pointed out that it’s pronounced cool, I had no idea.

Used it in over 20 searches yesterday right alongside google. Cuil results were irrelevant every time whereas google got it every time…do the editors at CNN ever check out a site before reporting on it? Unless I’m missing something cuil is a joke…you waste my time once…you don’t get a second chance…

Apparently Cuil can’t handle abbreviations so well? Tried searching some things like “mt. rushmore” or “st. christopher” and got ZERO hits. Deleting the period will get results for both, but even something like “st chris” will return none. Maybe they’ll get the tweaks worked out eventually, but it’s certainly not ready for prime time yet…

I gave it a try yesterday, and along with random pics next to some of the searches, I found little in the way of relevance of what I was searching for. CUIL has got some changing to do, and must realize that it doesn’t matter how many sites you can access, people only care about the most relevant ones.

I searched CUIL on cuil.com and it could not find itself. Great tool. do your homework

Of course the first thing I did is search Cuil on my important keywords for my own long-standing, relevant website. Horrors, my site is nowhere to be found. Even unknown sites that reprint my articles appear before me. Other sites appear three times in their results.

Now my site is unspammy, useful and real, so has no real reason to be banned or penalised by Cuil. Except for possibly the fact it uses Google’s Adsense for a major part of it’s revenue stream. But is also appears Adwords clients do well in the Cuils SERP’s.

So, question is – is Cuil penalising Adsense advertisers and rewarding Adwords publishers (to possibly win them over)? I’m sure some former, possibly disgruntled, Google employees wouldn’t want to inadvertently help fill Google’s bulging coffers.

I searched my name and a picture of the guy that shot up NIU came up.

All I have to say about Cuil is that its “not cool”. Bigger is not always better, Its how you use it. And they clearly do not use it well. Pictures that don’t correlate with sites, inconclusive searches. If your going to be a search engine you think you should be included in the search engine. I type Cuil into the search and it didnt even post themselves as a search. Kind of pathetic. Maybe these people were fired from Google for lack of knowledge because obviously they missed the mark completely.

Cuil may be cool, but Local.com already has a jump start and their advertising revenue is doubling in 2008. With many patents that the big 3 may want, if people want to speculate on a buyout search engine candidate, Local.com is the best play. Go use it and you will see, Local.com is more user-friendly.

It is another search engine. It is unexciting, ugly, and does not offer anything new that Google already has.

The first thing I tried searching for using Cuil was ‘ Cuil’.

Its results were totally irrelevant.

It cant put a dent in Google.

Google Rules !

Did work for me either folks. The searches were totally irrelevant. I had high hopes, but will probably never hit it ever again unless someone figured out away to drum up more buzz to get me interested…that being AFTER they work the bugs out.

As “Cuil” as it looks, it is not giving very relevant search results. IT also seems that the pages of result basically show the same thing over and over again…just laid out differently.

It could be interesting, but it needs more work.

I have a several popular blogs and I googled myself. Nothing came relevant came up. Did you also notice that images provided often had nothing to do with the web site? I did a search on “Rome” and got a link to a BBC article on Rome with a picture of Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen next to it from their movie that took place in Rome.

I even did some searches for less specific things and got even weirder results. Cuil may search more and have a larger database than Google, but throwing up useless results isn’t going to do much good.

Their ABOUT page wouldn’t load yesterday either. I was disappointed in Cuil.

No Matter what others say I like CUIL really Bored with Google always Change is good and Better. Let’s Give Chance to Others Too.

It’s better to have Competitors’ then only Consumer will be Happy otherwise it will be Like Google Monopoly in web Search

This is the WORST search engine I have ever tried. If you put in more than one word you usually get nothing. When you do put in just one word, you don’t get what you were looking for. Microsoft, Yahoo and Google all found what this thing DID NOT FIND.

Search for “Cuil” in both google and cuil Search Engines. You will know the difference…. Google is googol times cool than cuil….

I searched my name and the most relevant results like my blog or my linkedin profile were nowhere to be seen, instead it threw up not-so-relevant results like comments I had posted somewhere and a bookmarking site I used for a week and quit posting to 6 months ago.

Google become a phenomenon because it gave relevant results. I don’t understand why these ex-googlers are missing this simple point by miles?

As a software developer, I decided put Cuil to a simple test. I had already googled “asp.net free ajax treeview” and was going through the results, so I decided to “Cuil” the same thing :

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=asp.net%20free%20ajax%20treeview&sl=long

We didn’t find any results for “asp.net free ajax treeview”

pity!

With a name like “Cuil” it has to be better. Why, I’m going to come up with a revolutionary product by cleverly leaving out some vowels, or altering them all together. And to be at the forefront of Web 2.0 I’m going to introduce it right here, in this very comment box. Alrighty, ready? Here it comes… “BRMU” – it’s a broom! Yes I do know the “U” is at the end, but we’re hip company, and thus are allowed to name as we please. And schools are blamed for the degredation of our feeble youth’s minds. What’s next, man did not evolve from a monkey?

After reading the announcement of CUIL yesterday, I used the search engine for most of the day. The results did not meet my expectations and I did not find what I was looking for on a single occasion, although I nearly always find what I am looking for with Google instantly. Given the lack of performance, I will not switch to CUIL any time soon. The only effect I can imagine Cuil will have on Google is that Google will diversify the page view set up options to include one similar to Cuil.

I love the way Cuils engine presents its search results, but don’t count on the pictures tying up with text! I searched employers name, Kell Systems, and the pictures tied in perfectly with the text. I then searched my late fathers name, Dennis Walsh, an English astronomer. The text was correct, but the picture was someone completely unknown to me!

I just tried it with some programming terms. Every result was completely irrelevant. Not so Good

I did some testing yesterday. The site was overwhelmed by users most of the time. The images almost never had anything to do with the search result. They weren’t even from the same web pages cited. In a comparison with Google, the searches I tried always came up with fewer and more irrelevant results. With all the publicity, cuil got, it certainly is unprepared for competing against MS or Yahoo, much less Google.

I tried Cuil yesterday and found it very difficult to understand. The column thing is not too easy and requires one to read through it, so it takes longer to determine if that’s the page you want. Not exactly a threat to Google.

http://digg.com/tech_news/Cuil_Doesent_show_its_own_name_when_searched

Cuil doesent show its own name when searched Talk about indexing!

Very convenience GUI, really good results..

If google had played the OS game with Microsoft, it would never have challenged the giant … disruptive technology meeting a latent need is of prime importance in killing an existing monolith. It is not going to be easy un-seating google without bringing to table what google does not … ‘doing it better’ is easily copy-able and will cease to be a differentiator in short term itself … one will need to come up with something that google cannot or does not have … envision the next leap in the web and lead there … find its own use … search giant is already there … do something else

I tried this new ‘cuil’ search engine, although it excels at regular search terms, it failed to list any results for 90% of the more specific search terms I regularly use in google/yahoo/microsoft serch engines which yeild perfect results. In all, I highly doubt it indexes the amount it claims if it can’t find thousands of results.

Not only is it not a google killer its not even working. I tried searching and the system was down. Not a good first day for me.

“But one of the biggest advantages of Google has over its competitors is that it can provide better search results because it has its massive advertising platform supporting it.”

The last few show the lack of knowledge (and understanding) of the author about the search engine & online advertising business. Attributing Google’s better search results to its massive advertising platform is plain humorous, at the very least.

The cuil guys still have a long long way to go. I have stried many tricky searches which have failed with cuil but not with google. The other thing is that google has even developed a syntaxes which make it better to search right to the point. Until cuil could do so, too. It remains inferior. Try this with cuil then try it with google: search for “parliament site:*.za” (whithout quotes). Cuil should also have specific searches like for videos, pictures and other media just like google. Anyway the search engine has to be better than google.

A significant problem is that images served up by Cuil do not appear to come from corresponding web pages. In one test I noted just one image out of about nine actually originated with the page where it was placed. This is quite a serious issue.

As of today morning 4 am(IST) I have been getting an error message that their server is overloaded and would be put back in time.

I saw the article on Cuil referenced at http://www.SubliminalMessages.Com and checked it out. Very nice! How in the world was a husband/wife team able to recreate what took Big G 10 years, hundreds of millions in hardware and 20,000 employees to accomplish?

How do I invest in this?

Just try searching for “cuil” on both google and cuil and you will get the answer of who provides the more accurate searches currently.

Cuil is the biggest piece of crap I’ve attempted to use in a long time.

I’m not sure I’d hold my breath waiting for it to be a Google killer, but then, nobody ever thought Yahoo would fall from the top. They have a very long way to go before Google has anything to worry about, but it’s a good idea they have. They just need to build up and become more fully-featured, then they might have something to talk about.

cuil in my opinion IS NOT COOL At all.. made some normal searches and the results were a JOKE and the layout of a search result IS poor at best – hope they still have stock in their old company.

Cuil is no where near Google, infact its no where near to Microsoft’s search.
Some searches dont even come with one result where Google has 141,000 results.
Long way to go Cuil

As soon as i read this article and tried few searches, google scored by miles over cuil! Sorry to say investors, cuil has lost at least one visitor..

I did some common searches that I have used Google for recently. Cuil did not have nearly the same amount of results. The results from Cuil were inadequate in each search compared to Google.

I haven’t any intention of leaving Google if THAT is the “competition”.

My results with using Cuil were not impressive.

In my searches, most of what returned were aggregator pages, eBay results, or multiple listings of the same site.

Google’s search results have become poorer and poorer over the past year, so I’d love to see a search engine that really did return relevant results.

Part of the problem is that there are so many crap web pages out there that need to be sorted out of the results. That may not be doable.

I’ll continue to check out Cuil over the next few weeks, but find the results to be underwhelming thusfar.

I cross-checked some standard searches that I do for quality analysis:

* it returns 0/18 on a name search that I commonly use
* for broader search terms, it hits 3/365
* strangely, it does well against a search for my name, though it misses 700 pages

But even more importantly, the site has been Farked for most of the day, while Google standards require delivering a page within 0.2 seconds.

/ stick a fork in Cuil
// don’t sell GOOG short
/// maybe Cuil servers will figure out what a “fork” is in a couple of months

sure they have 3 columns of results with images…but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or google engineer) to note that the images being displayed with a listing do not belong to the site listed. Can you say “copyright infringement”?

I visited Cuil and tried about a dozen queries. The results were the worst I’ve ever seen with search engine, downright terrible in terms of relevance. Most of the top twenty listings are pure spam sites serving Google ads with no redeeming content. Also, the photos that are shown next to each listing don’t even come from the website featured in the listing but from some entirely different site. That’s crazy.

The significant factor at the moment would seem to be that it’s an utterly terrible search engine. Results are padded with lots of irrelevant hits, and random images are displayed alongside results despite the fact that they are completely unrelated.

Its crap. My blog which is ever so popular doesn’t find a place in its listings. I have a huge web presence and hardly anything is listed. Even the sites of some very prominent organizations are not listed.

Wonder what exactly is it that they claim when they say they have the largest index of web pages.

If a squad of low-life, uneducated but very creative criminals can figure out how to crack Alcatraz, Ballmer’s minions should be able crack Google upside the head. They need more creativity at Microsoft, and company meetings that look more like an internal expo for cross-pollination, and less like some damn circus. Google is a one-trick pony, and when it falls, and it will, it’s going to fall hard.

I’ve found the results on Cuil to be middling at best. If I search for specific sites I get generally relevant results, but often there is a picture next to each item which is wholly unrelated. When I search for a company name the search engine is giving back pages within the site rather than highlighting the home page.

Google seems much better at placing the page I actually want to visit toward the top of the search results. This was, after all, the reason why we all gravitated toward Google in the first place. There was nothing seriously wrong with Yahoo!, AltaVista, Excite, etc. It was just that Google gave better results.

I have to comment on the name as well. I think it’s terrible. I thought it was CULL after I read the first article about the site this morning. I don’t know how to pronounce Cuil and it’s liable to be misspelled as either QUILL, COIL, or COOL depending on how you do pronounce it.

cuil does not work. four out of five tries it fails to find anything.

Read the article and tried it. Search was very slow compared to Google. My follow up search gave me a response that it could not return results because the server(s) were overloaded. Google killer? Maybe but they better stop the bleeding first.

My personal opinion—I went to Cuil.com today to check it out. Nice layout but on the first page of my search, there were several responses but most of them were from one site. I did not particularly think this site was relevant AT ALL to my search. And it was ridiculous how in the first 2 pages, this particular site was over 60% of the results. Google would NEVER do that.

Go Google. Definitely the smartest search engine around.

All show and no go – Cuil site doesn’t even work. Threat to Google my arse. Didn’t Cuil know the little word called “testing”?

Just like the writer of the article didn’t do much proofreading…

This search engine is terrible. The pictures are not necessarily from the search results shown, it’s slow, and it shows the same results over and over along with the same pics. The top sites for my search query were mostly affiliate links to ebay.

After reading the article I went to try it out and the site was down due to server overload. They’ll have to do better than that to beat google.

All I can say is that I tried performing a simple search on Cuil today. Try searching for “ca angels” and you will get everything but results related to “ca angels”. This is nothing but PR spin…which I will give them a lot of credit for.

Wow, results in three columns. That could “change everything” . I tried the site out and other than putting some seemingly random images along with the search results + the vaunted three columns, I didn’t see anything to distinguish it. Frankly, the random images didn’t seem to add much to my experience.

I tried it with no success. I guess CUIL stands for: “Can’t Use the Internet Lately!!!!”