July 28, 2008

• I'm not impressed so far.
• Me neither. Took too long to load, and we are not even on the page for "otter bile" and "cockpunch".
• No results for "Leonard Cohen"? Umm...
• Of course I 'cuiled' my own site. No mention. A loss to the world.
• Yeah Kit.. I wonder how many folks – like us – immediately tried it out with our own names.
• And obviously its Teh Broken, since it didn't find me either. Google-usurpation FAIL
• About Cuil --> 404 Not Found Kind of expect that any new search engine launch will have an incomplete index, but not checking to make sure the company info page is even live? FAIL
• doubleFAIL mofi FAIL
• I don't think Google has much to worry about yet. Cuil's algorithm needs some major work. A search for "electric car" on Google does exactly what I'd expect: the first hit is for Wikipedia, then Chevrolet.com, then Zapworld, and a bunch of news sites. On Cuil it gets you a movie trailer site first, several small electric car companies that are not leaders in the field, and and some links to a PBS documentary. The Wiki and news entries are conspicuously absent. There's a similar problem search for my last name (which is a rather unusual one.) Google finds my personal and professional sites, some blog comments, and incidental links to some of my less connected relatives. Cuil's first result is to a exchange on BoingBoing in which I was discussing my sexual preferences with Xeni. (I wonder if I should tell potential "friends" to Cuil me instead of Googling? It might save some time!) The second Cuil result is a single line in an obscure genealogy database that lists my late father. A search for "hicinbaby" returns a half dozen Monkeylinks as expected (there should be about 100.) The listed results are linked to pictures that have nothing to do with the Monkeytopic. The really weird thing is, it also returns a few Middle Eastern sites where my nick doesn't apear at all. All in all, I'd say "not quite ready for prime time."
• 4600 Google results for my nick, 0 for cuil. Anna Patterson doesn't understand my internet importance.
• Is this thing on?
• At least when you do a google search for "google", the first result is their own page (obviously so). Do the same with cuil, their page doesn't even appear in the first page of results (for all I know, their own page doesn't even show in any of the results - but the hell if I'm going to click through pages of that crap)! Go figure.
• We didn’t find any results for “monkeyfilter” Some reasons might be... a typo. Please check your spelling. your search includes a term that is very rare. Try to find a more common substitute. too many search terms. Please try fewer terms. Finally, try to think of different words to describe your search.
• Finally! A search engine that doesn't work! Just in case we were nostalgic for the days of AltaVista and Web Crawler?
• Umm...I think she is proving her own article to be true.
• It's got my dead blog! What a brilliant search engine. Obviously sorts the wheat from the chaff *cough* kit mct *cough* too!
• OK, after browsing through some cuil comments on /., I did come across one positive for cuil, their privacy policy. Privacy is a hot topic these days, and we want you to feel totally comfortable using our service, so our privacy policy is very simple: when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on this later). Your search history is your business, not ours. Granted, until they sort this thing out, it's not going to make a hill 'o beans difference to me. Also, many reports of slight typos sending traffic to adult websites (i.e., culo, cuilo). Reminds me of the old days when 'hotbot' typo entered as 'hotbat' had me red-in-the-face in the middle of the computer lab at school.
• yeah, privacy's great for sure, but means nothing with crap search results. i am not sure what the point of cuil is- it's not doing anything better than (or even as well, so far as) previous search engines. but the engineer behind it got her name in lights all over the web today, so maybe that's the point?
• What a terrible name - cuil. It reminds me of "huile", French for oil. And the weird thing is that, in this font, "cuil" actually looks like "oil".
• Information Week talks up the privacy angle.
• Yeah, this looks pretty good to me. It's got a ton of references to my site, ha!
• “Ah Ha! NOW I GET IT!”
• If you google for "not even on the page for otter bile" (in quotes) you will get one hit for this very page. That is less than six hours after the comment was posted. If you google for "Cuil" you get a lot of relevant hits about the search engine. If you cuil for "Cuil" you get a lot of stuff about Irish restaurants. So they may have searched 121 billion pages, but they didn't do it this morning. Also a google for "Don't, ThinksTwice, it's alright" gets you to roryk's genius wit, but Cuil takes you to another, less relevant, page. Another mark against them.
• I cuiled Monkeyfilter and found it annoying that if a page was out of date you couldn't get the cached version. I use that function quite a lot, apparently. It's pretty but useless, imho.
• (Plus "cuiled" sounds funny.)
• > What a terrible name - cuil. > It reminds me of "huile", French for oil. It reminds me of "cul", French for arse :-) I'm surprised they didn't go for "ciall" (Irish for sense/meaning/understanding). I don't know this word "cuil" in Irish - there's "seomra cúil", which is "back room", and "cúl" for "goal" in football, with an adjectival form cúil.
• > It reminds me of "cul", French for arse :-) My first thought too, roryk :) > I'm surprised they didn't go for "ciall" (Irish for sense/meaning/understanding). I think they think they sort of did? Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil. Bad strapline. Bleh. How are you supposed to pronounce it? Cuh-ll? Cah-ll? Cail? Coo-eel?
• I'd go for "cuh-ll" or "cuh-l". It might be Old or Middle Irish.
• Fail
• This is the problem with these mod names. Something goes wrong and everyone does a pile on. Maybe they should have named it in a more self-deprecating fashion. iMayOrMayNotFindYourWebsite.com iBinFiredFromOtherSearchCompanies.com
• very underwhelming. I wouldn't be recommending this to any of our researchers or anyone wanting to find something on the Internet.
• So now I think they were trying to leverage the phonetic similarity between "cool" and "cuil". There's also been some reference to Fionn McCumhaill, a Gaelic sort-of Arthur figure, but again the link is tenuous. I looked up "cuil" in modern and middle Irish dictionaries and found no association with "knowledge". I did find associations with "fly", "gnat", "rear", "evil". I think this is an old Irish word in the same sense "teilifis" (television) is an old Irish word. Less so even, as teilifis is a commonly accepted term. I'm amazed that so much venture capital is available for this project. Granted, Google is not the final word in search engine technology, but it's become a verb. I don't think I'd have funded Gestetner after Xerox became established.
• Cuil has given me something. In what seemed like a seemingly random search, I came across some old goodies from beeswacky! Damn, I MISS HIM! You don't realize what you have until it's gone... So, umm, thanks for that, Cuil.
• I'll bet this site is getting more traffic than usual.
• Much as I'd like to visit Scotland, Ralph, the thing about it for me is that I hate Microsoft so very much, much mucho more (and I don't mean love when I say more in reference to Microsoft, those mean, evil bastards!) yet, having a Toshiba laptop here, and that only here, for my visit to Florida, need I say more? here's the thing about it: this *cuil* site deserves praise, mucho praise, alongside these godawful behemoths. That said, I must admit that my own MonkeyFilter cognomen (damn those bastards, smart as they may awfully and fulsomely be at Microsoft! ((may they rot in a hell of their own making!))), and even though only the most embarrassing comments and posts that I ever did make at MonkeyFilter do come up in a search for Dan Folkus, yet again (damn those bastards ((if only that, even!)) at archfiend Microsoft, damn them all!) yet, and alongside them, or even alongside Google, which I've been told those aforementioned evil bastards want to take over, damn them all again, and thrice may they well be damned, those bastards at Microsoft! And damn this keyboard too! But my point is: now we at least have a *new* search engine. Although *Dogpile* encompasses so much more than Goofle (sic) already. Wonder if any of this rant makes it to Dogpile, but I'll go quietly now.
• Okay...
• Sorry I got off track. The post from SMT is a good find though.
• They say they're sorry.
• Hmmm, the cuil does seem to be returning better results now...
• Hmm. Now 3178 results for my handle. I've got my eye on you, Cuil. I've got my eye on you.
• Now I'm trying one called Yandex, and it works very well. Hopefully not so intrusively as Google.