So I saw the article on cnn.com about cuil. I read the article and said, Hmm… lets take a look. The first annoying thing is that they are using the word, cuil, for their search engine. The word means nothing to me. I don’t know how to spell it, OR pronounce it. So the people from cuil say to pronounce it as “cool.” Thanks for the tip, but let me tell you, now you just chopped off a crap-load of potential customers. If you are gonna make-up a word for your business, you should have it sound like it spells. In this case people will not be able to guess the url after hearing people talk about the site.
Now that I’m done ranting about the name of the company/site, let me get to the actual site, itself. Searching with cuil is miserably painful. The speed at which it returns results almost makes the site unusable. I’m literally able to type this post as fast cuil serves results.
Yes, this has been harsh and negative, but if you are competing against Google the bar is high and cuil doesn’t come anywhere near the bar. I’ll try them again a few more times before being done with them, but I’m not expecting much.
UPDATE:
Cuil is down. They have this very generic page up trying to kindly apologize for them not being able to do capacity planning.
I agree with you. However, maybe they just have to work out the bugs first. Find a website/searchsite that is interesting.
Ditto. Not such a cuil site after all..Did I spel that wright?
Cuil is awful! I “cuiled” my university homepage, with the university name, and got nothing. On Google it comes up #1 with the same terms. A colleague “cuiled” something and began looking through the sites cuil returned and he saild almost every site starting trying to send him viruses and spyware. Do NOT use Cuil! They are not Cool!
The message from Cuil…
We’ll be back soon…
Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity.
Thanks for your patience.
Running ‘hot’? Try crappy. No, I don’t have any patience.
Cuil really does suck. Worthless searches, they have a long way to go.
When I first read about cuil this morning, I hopped on over like I’m sure everyone did (and now they are trying to make that sound like they’re “hot” with that servers-are-down disclaimer.) Anyway, the PR made it sound like they would blow google away. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that antiquated AltaVista is like a NASCAR race compared to Cuil.
More likely they are hiding in shame, and that’s why their servers are down. Mark this is one of the biggest tech-premier gaffes of all times!
I did a search for “cuil sucks” in cuil, yahoo, and google.
Google was the winner.
search for “cuil” http://tinyurl.com/5m6n4e vs. http://tinyurl.com/6b9akz 😉
search for cuil http://tinyurl.com/5m6n4e vs. http://tinyurl.com/6b9akz
😉 hehe
You’re right about Cuil Erik. It’s bad enough that Google and Yahoo try to second guess a search word without an intelligent method or, perhaps, some kind of bais method. Now Cuil comes along and it doesn’t even list the appropriate sites.
Try these: Type in “snoopy” or “grinsbee” and you will see what I mean. Am I wrong? Shouldn’t http://www.snoopy.com and http://www.grinsbee.com be the first listings simply because it’s the name of the site?
…and what happened to Furnitures the Great Brown Oaf? I guess Cuil should find at least three more pages and change that number to 121,617,892,995.
Jay,
Good and funny point…. I guess your research shows Google is showing Cuil more respect then they show themselves. 🙂
Honestly, your research shows that Google is a better search engine then Cuil because they know what Cuil is (or is trying to be) and Cuil doesn’t know.
THANKS to all the new readers that stumbled by my blog via the Cuil post. Do me a favor and subscribe to my feed and see if I have anything interesting to say. 🙂
Here is a laugh – type in cuil in the search engine and guess what? They don’t even come back with themselves as the top result.
I also don’t see a did you mean? feature which is great on google as I don’t type well and that lets me type crappy but just click “yeah I meant….”
cuil is not cool. I searched for my organization. There were a number of tertiary sites but not the main site. Google produces the main site immediately. No delay, no server overloaded message. Cuil is a joke. Google rules! cuil should die a quick death soon.
I suppose I’m used to things working – like…my garage door opener…my lawnmower…the sun…
Cuil just didn’t come out of the starting gates quite right…it just kind of stood there.
Sure, I saw the eleventy billion pages it’s cached or whatever. But when I type in something like ‘M9250F’ it SHOULD come back with the results of a computer manufactured by HP.
What I got was; “your search includes a term that is very rare. Try to find a more common substitute.”
Hey, Google found 54,500 related pages…you could have at least found one or two.
A “Very rare” search would be asking it to find a page on (;lkjasdf092uroinvo8W*#$T*) +pillows -bed sheets & fire engines.
This doesn’t look “Cuil” to your investors. They might ask for their 33 million dollars back…but you probably won’t be able to find that page…will you.
Regarding Phil’s comment right before mine, I’m absolutely baffled that a “new, exciting search engine” would discourage one from doing “rare term” searches! Really, what amazes me most about the Internet, Google (and any other successful search engine) is just that–the ability to find information about rare fleeting thoughts that you’d never possibly expect to elaborate on before the Internet existed. And now cuil wants to suck us right back into the dark ages (perhaps that explains the black backdrop!)
Good stuff Phil… I agree and it’s funny. You need to try your search again a few more times to see if Cuil finds your computer.
– @ Erik Weibust –
M9250F… Nope – still can’t find it.
If a product fails the first day out, chances are not many people will return again to see if it works correctly at a later date.
When I buy something…(power tools coffee makers…whatever) and it doesn’t work, it gets returned. Either I get my money back or buy something else comparable that does work.
In my opinion, Google works. So do other sites like Yahoo and Excite. I’ve used Google for years, I know how to use it and I can find nearly anything I look for – no matter how random it is.
If I marketed myself as a highly knowledgeable person with 20 plus years of experience in computers, data center and network design – then showed up at a customer’s site and didn’t know how to do anything word would spread that this guy doesn’t know jack and my company would flop.
There’s an old saying, “you couldn’t find your ass with both hands†– well, Cuil – that pretty much sums your search engine up.
Cuil is a total flop. I’m going back to Guigle.
I went out to the Cuil site expecting to be totally wowed. Claiming to best Google is a tall order indeed. So, I figured hey a few tech savvy folks might have just come up with something astonishing. Wrong!
After test driving Cuil for all of 10 minutes – it returned absolutely nothing I was looking for – I having formulated the following two hypothesis:
1)Cuil is actually the runner up prize winner of some Midwest high school science fair.
Or
2)Cuil is actually a sophisticated scam perpetrated by con artists masquerading as legitimate tech entrepreneurs.
Whichever case turns out to be true, I only got three words for those poor investors who have been bilked out of 33 million:
hook, line, & sinker.
I just remembered what I heard during the news cast when I heard about Cuil.
“It’s not for sale.”
At this point – who would buy it?
Folks at Google have to be laughing their butts off. Maybe that was the intent from the beginning. Make everyone at Google laugh till they die, therefore making them “the Google killers”.