posted on July 28, 2008 08:48:41 AM new
Completely brain-dead and certainly not the Anti-Google. Goliath could be slain but not by these people. Based on some random searches it looks like they're making their money by prominently featuring shopping sites and making them look like valid search results rather than ads.
I guess it's "cool" if you think a single search box on an all-black page is something hip and revolutionary. Seems to me that someone else has a single search box on an all-white page...and has had for over 10 years now.
On a search for "jody coyote earrings" it gave me category suggestions for American actors.
posted on July 28, 2008 09:48:48 AM new
I tried a common search I use now and then cuil.com said there were 14000+ hits. 45 seconds later it had not shown me even one. Typed the same search into google it had found 280,000 possible hits and showed them to me in less than 2 seconds. I'm not ready to switch just yet.
posted on July 28, 2008 09:54:12 AM new
Not trying to sell the site...but you have to also check settings...SAFE settings limit the searches greatly.
It is just good to see someone stand up against the corporate BS that this country is at. As sellers you are in the same boat as on eBay....not in the top 5,000 or so...you get the defective life-preserver, never even get a chance to see the lifeboats.
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.
Google now faces its first rival launch by former employees in the form of Cuil.
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. What do you think of the new Cuil search engine?
For starters, Cuil's search index spans 120 billion Web pages.
Patterson believes that's at least three times the size of Google's index, although there is no way to know for certain. Google stopped publicly quantifying its index's breadth nearly three years ago when the catalog spanned 8.2 billion Web pages.
Cuil won't divulge the formula it has developed to cover a wider swath of the Web with far fewer computers than Google. And Google isn't ceding the point: Spokeswoman Katie Watson said her company still believes its index is the largest.
After getting inquiries about Cuil, Google asserted on its blog Friday that it regularly scans through 1 trillion unique Web links. But Google said it doesn't index them all because they either point to similar content or would diminish the quality of its search results in some other way. The posting didn't quantify the size of Google's index.
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.
Even after investing hundreds of millions of dollars on search, both Microsoft and Yahoo Inc. have been losing ground to Google. Through May, Google held a 62 percent share of the U.S. search market followed by Yahoo at 21 percent and Microsoft at 8.5 percent, according to comScore Inc.
Google has become so synonymous with Internet search that it may no longer matter how good Cuil or any other challenger is, said Gartner Inc. analyst Allen Weiner.
"Search has become as much about branding as anything else," Weiner said. "I doubt (Cuil) will be keeping anyone at Google awake at night."
Google welcomed Cuil to the fray with its usual mantra about its rivals. "Having great competitors is a huge benefit to us and everyone in the search space," Watson said. "It makes us all work harder, and at the end of the day our users benefit from that."
But this will be the first time that Google has battled a general-purpose search engine created by its own alumni. It probably won't be the last time, given that Google now has nearly 20,000 employees.
Patterson joined Google in 2004 after she built and sold Recall, a search index that probed old Web sites for the Internet Archive. She and Power worked on the same team at Google.
Although he also worked for Google for a short time, Monier is best known as the former chief technology officer of AltaVista, which was considered the best search engine before Google came along in 1998. Monier also helped build the search engine on eBay's online auction site.
The trio of former Googlers are teaming up with Patterson's husband, Costello, who built a once-promising search engine called Xift in the late 1990s. He later joined IBM Corp., where he worked on an "analytic engine" called WebFountain.
Costello's Irish heritage inspired Cuil's odd name. It was derived from a character named Finn McCuill in Celtic folklore.
Patterson enjoyed her time at Google, but became disenchanted with the company's approach to search. "Google has looked pretty much the same for 10 years now," she said, "and I can guarantee it will look the same a year from now."
posted on July 28, 2008 01:33:43 PM new
Is this the finished product? If so I can see nothing to recommend it. Ran some of the searches that I do all the time and got multiple duplicates. I also notice that when one of my sites come up the pictures beside it are not always from my site. What's with that? Unless there is more "coming soon" I'll stick with Google.
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“The illiterate of the future will be the person ignorant of the use of the camera as well as of the pen.”
Maholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 1947
posted on July 28, 2008 02:25:06 PM newThe 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.
Some of that $33 million went to a public relations firm, which is why today's news is wallpapered with this non-event.
I wonder if Cuil will start processing requests correctly some time today or if we have to wait a few months for that feature.
posted on July 29, 2008 09:30:31 AM new
I give this site 1.5 stars of 5. Nice layout gets the 1.5. Content gets a 0.
First, I should mention, I don't pay for Google business services, so this is a fair comparison between the two websites.
I just did a keyword search for our business using two words, "Shag Portland".
Google:
Our store website is the top listing. Google map references our store address and contact info above the listings. 7 of 10 on the first page reference our store including a review by apartment therapy, citysearch, yelp, etc.
Cuil:
No link to our business website on the first page or the first five pages for that matter. You get 4 references to our store, but 2 of the 4 listings are for a horrid website that uses thumbnails that are not related to our business, and mention our store with our old address that is now over 3 years old. Who's the old dude in the thumbnail??? Citysearch and Apartment Therapy are the other two mentions. My shag vendio store shows up on the second page.
Smack down for Google??? Don't think so... Cuil should ask Jeeves.
posted on July 29, 2008 10:41:43 AM new
Okay, so here's a challenge for you all.
Let's say Tom Costello (CEO) and Anna Patterson (President) have been shown the door for orchestrating the worst search engine product launch in history.
YOU have been selected as the new CEO and your first job is to put the company back on track and this shameful episode behind it.
