Cuil?

[sitetruth]

So what's the thinking on Cuil?

[mcanerin]

It's not a bad little search engine, especially if you are looking for hard-to-find information.

What's different is that they don't look at links or keywords, per se, they look at semantically understanding the page the keywords are on and judging the content from there.

They also claim to have the largest number of pages indexed, more than Google, MSN, etc.

By sheer coincidence, I just finished adding them to my robots.txt generator (I won't link to it here, but those keywords will find it pretty fast) and was checking them out in depth tonight as a result.

Of course, I used to love Ask, too. The problem with Ask was no traffic, and of course that's the problem here, too. Until webmasters see traffic from Cuil showing up to their site in significant amounts, I think it will be off the SEO radar for a while, at least. Which is too bad, as I'm interested in the challenge of optimizing for them.

Ian

[AussieWebmaster]

interesting offering from more Stanford grads

[Misscj]

I don't see it doing any contextual search, which is what it claims to do. I like the layout and the options on the right. How big is Google's index? I didn't think they disclosed that information. Mind you, being Google ex-employees they might know anyway. Cuil definitely have the skills and expertise to do a way better job than this, I'm a bit surprised actually. It has come up with some pretty weird things for a finished product. There's been reports of it displaying porn in safe mode, not respecting robots.txt, showing up irrelevant images, etc...I haven't tested this myself though. I have tested contextual search though and I can't see it working very well at all.

I feel like it looks like an alpha really. They don't collect user info, but this doesn't mean that they can't carry out HCI experiments. This would be sensible seeing as they're trying out a new kind of layout. Well not entirely new, but different.

It's not fair imho to measure against Google results because this assumes Google results are what you're looking for everytime, whereas cuil could give very different but better results. Ok, it doesn't, but it might one day.

[jimbeetle]

Just by pure coincidence, Google on Friday said that it was aware of 1 trillion unique URLs, not all indexed, of course.

As for Cuil, when I dug around in it yesterday the results for some key searches were very, very disappointing, not near the relevancy of Ask, my usual standard.

Today's results for the same group of searches are much better, overall right on for relevancy. Kind of strange how that happened overnight. I have a suspicion that they were hand-tweaked as a related search was cited by Danny in his write up as returning basically no results.

They still have a way to go on usability. I was looking at tabs for three searches: [this city widgets], the abbreviated [tc widgets], and [widgets tickets]. The results for each were the same or very similar sites, not enough to have a user click. The very worst part is that there's really no way to control the tabs. It appears that relevant tabs are generated at the exact moment of each click; tabs you saw earlier might not be the same as the ones that appear now. Very disconcerting.

[Discovery]

I always like to see a new SE come in and try to compete.
I also like when people deviate from the norm..but only if it makes sense.

My first attempt to go to CUIL the site was down.

Today I viewed it for the first time. My first thought was.
BLACK? I like new, different, but BLACK? Its a terrible first impression. Its a terrible choice.

I searched on terms I have followed for years. I didn't want to see the same results as the other bigs, but expected to see a few popular ones mixed in with new listings. NOT.

Basically I saw either total mismatches, or ugly SEO spamming sites. For example virtually all listings for "debt negotiation" come up with results like this:

debt negotiation lead plus better Free Downline _ ...
Debt Leads National LeadsDebt Leads: NationalLeads is a leader in Debt Lead generation, Debt Negotiation Leads, Debt Consolidation Leads, and Debt Reduction Leads.. Many debt management companies purchase our Debt Leads .. .. Welcome! Debt Lead generation is our passion! If you are looking for Debt Leads, you have...

This was hidden text on the site as well as in a huge list of links at the bottom of the webpage. Yuk.

Randomization is a beautiful thing.
I have this internal debate, on one hand features like tabs, drill downs and suggestions offered by CUIL can be very helpful. On the other hand one of the beautiful things about the Internet is finding the unexpected. I believe there needs to be a good balance between suggesting a specific place and discovering a hidden place.

The newspaper style layout is interesting.

The location of the search box after initial search is too high.
How many search boxes does the average user have within the top 2 inches of the screen?

The number of pages indexed is less important than the quality of the pages and the type of information that is being indexed. Indexing audio and video with accuracy - now that is news. Indexing more webpages than Google, neat, but ah if their like the example above, who cares?

Discovery

[Rajat Garg]

I just like the fact that they are giving more information (instead of 1-2 line meta description) before you click through. It is great for customers but sucks for websites who own that content.


Although I still prefer Google for being functional and love Ask for its layout and innovation.

[sitetruth]

Update on Cuil: Alexa reach peaked at 0.2%. Screaming dive on Alexa traffic graph. Now down to 0.005% reach and falling. Marketing director quit. Toast.