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Crashing right after launch is, apparently, a startup rite of passage. If, however, you’ve touted your new search engine as a Google killer, you might want to make sure crashes can’t happen. Google never goes down, and quite simply, can’t be killed with overloaded servers.
After Powerset’s sudden sale to Microsoft, the blogosphere needed a new contender. A former Google search architect and her Stanford professor husband, along with other former Googlers operating under the protective wing of the anti-noncompete laws of California (a law, ironically, Google likes to leverage when it can), thought for sure they could provide that new challenger.
And then all went blank at Cuil (cool), which was touted to have thrice the index of Google, scanning 121 billion web pages. Servers today couldn’t keep up with demand, illustrating what Powerset foresaw as their biggest hurdle: scalability. Microsoft provided that, along with enough cash to see it through. Even if you could get a query to return something today, though, reviews of the results have been mixed.
The results are supposed to be an alternative to Google’s ranking system, which is often criticized for being more of a popularity contest (among a myriad other criticisms) in the search results. Hence all the Wikipedia and YouTube returns.
Cuil is said to operate differently from Google’s distributed server, load-balancing concept—which incidently handles about a trillion URLs several times daily and manages to stay online—and has its servers divided according to category. If one searches for a sports-related query, for example, there are designated sports servers to handle that. One issue, as we’re seeing today: If a spike in sports queries knocks the sports servers offline, other non-specialized servers specializing in, say, cooking, will handle the results instead.
In that event, you get either no results or bad ones, which is likely the cause of all the subsequent, to put it lightly, disappointment following initial launch hype. I thought an ego-search would be sufficiently simple for it—there couldn’t be that many sources to pull from. After a few minutes, Cuil did bring back several instances where my articles have appeared on TechMeme, and once from the New York Times’ Blogrunner. A few images accompany the results, none of which are of me, one of which appears to be a female.
There’s an interesting "Explore by Category" section currently (more than a few minutes later) unclickable to see where they lead, categorizing me, interestingly, under Critics of Scientology, Investigative Journalists, American Bloggers, Scottish Premiere League Players, Villages in Illinois, and Black and White Films.
Yes, there are other Jason Lee Millers, several of them, one of them an up-and-coming young actor, who is noticeably absent from Cuil’s results. But he did change his name to Jason L. Miller noticing, I imagine, how I dominated Google under that name. Also noticeably absent from Cuil: any result from WebProNews, which would seem the most relevant.
Cuil criticism is catching on. Fark, to put it mildly, was unimpressed along with scores of other bloggers. Someone zapped me this image from Photobucket, which appears to be a Wikipedia entry popping up at some point during the day before being edited back to the more positively-spun version. Is it or isn’t it? Doesn’t matter. It expresses a rising viewpoint on the Web today, as evidenced even on Google Hot Trends, where the phrase "cuil sucks" just made the number 2 biggest gainer spot.
So far, Cuil the Google Killer is a colossal flop. Could it recover? Maybe, but it’ll probably be really hard to get all the people on board this morning to give it another shot.
From using cuil for the first time i found it a breath of fresh air to use and god it was nice to use something different that gave me easy to understand search results in nice tabs. Ok it crashed but sureley it could mean people are happy to change from the long in need of an update google to something different.
You means to say different…means..no relevance of what are you looking for.
Cuil is going no where when i searched for the word PLAYSTATION 3 on Cuil i got 3,200,000 look at my other results.
1. Yahoo 440,000,000
2. MSN 152,000,000
3. Google 109,000,000
4. AOL 17,400,000
5. Ask 16,120,000
6. Cuil 3,200,000
Do you really WANT 440 million hits?
Wouldn’t 1 or 2 hits with the correct information be plenty? I am sure I’m not going to look through 440 million or even 3 million pages to find whatever I have googled on.
Says how much it’s used when a brand name becomes a verb. Not even McDonalds have that honour.
What’s the point of that – did you read all 109,000,000 from Google? Make some meaningful comparisons
Are you directly paid by Google? what a display of unprofessional and poorly written journalism, really biased, harsh and even more, showing a complete ignorance on the topic (not that I’m an expert, but I do not pressume of being so as the author)… Shame on the editor and obviously the columnist for such a poor demostration of parciality and blogging abuse…
If you are going to go around buying posts from places like Fark and Slashdot extolling the virtures of your Google killer and then your servers crash, your results SUCK and your about page CANNOT BE FOUND, you deserve all the editorial beatdowns you receive.
Or, we could be like you and let our hatred for Google cloud the fact that Cuil or Cool or Kool or COUOIUOUOIL (however you spell it) is a horrible, horrible offering.
Jason was spot-on with his article.
Ok, so a lot of nerds like me that went there on day 1 had poor results… but what is most significant is that people are looking for alternatives to Google’s "click through to page 8 before I actually find what I’m looking for" results. I know that doesn’t scare Google now, but what it means is that if Cuil can pull it off and deliver better results, Google’s standing will drop faster than Netscape’s when MS started bundling IE.
Having a bad first day only means that a small handful of people who actually read technology press releases are disappointed. If they do a good job with the rest of the 500,000,000 computer users in world, they’ll do fine.
I’ll be checking their site (and other so-called contenders) regularly, hoping that eventually one will provide more accurate (fewer + more relevant) results.
The important thing about Cuil is their privacy policy. Unlike Google they keep no records of IP addresses or search queries.
Is it just me or is this author uneducated? Dude, do you work for google or you just love to kiss as$? This article is so biased it makes you look like a danger to society. I advice this author to go back to school and redo english and ethics.
It’s you. Perhaps you are uneducated.
"advice"?? uneducated lol.
The article is, almost, unreadable though, thanks, largely, to the insistence on, commas every couple, of words.
Use of "advice" should be "advise"… Perhaps a little English education would help everyone’s writing…
Wow, that wikipedia article was haliarious. I didn’t have any problem with using Cuil, but I did have a problem with feeling even a bit impressed. That being said I don’t understand the criticism against this article, or are there just that many people who hate Google who will look beyond the facts? O.o Cuil does indeed suck, no image search, no video search, and no way to turn off the damn pictures. Not to mention it doesn’t even search well, and that’s all you can even do with it.
Maps? Nope. Shopping? Nope. News? Nope. Those are just the basics for search engines today, and Cuil has none of it.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they hadn’t arrogantly toated this search engine as superior even before they launch, but they did so they deserve all the criticism they can get. After all first impressions are everything, and they blew it. Cuil is soo 20th century.
Wow.. this idiot went out of his way to tell us about some irrelivant crap about how he searched himself and actors with same name and a bag of bs and talking about wikipedia. Does this moron know that wikipedia can be edited by an 8 year old? Wow… this jackass just wasted 5 minutes of my life. Thank you, and thanks to codeproject for emailing this article written by a complete moron.
Did you write this when you were drunk? It’s almost completely unreadable.
Well, a failure right in beginning does not mean end of the road. They should learn from that and rectify the issue.
Most importantly it rock sh*ts… than your crap.
I dont know why….I feel that the the pages which came up after I tried a few keywords where kinda irrelevent. I guess they need more time to get that right…….And I believe that after using google…you are kinda addicted to its interface….i.e simplicity
The thing that surely sucked when I tried ciul – it is absolutely unaware about languages other than English. I tried to find biography articles about Russian writer whose book I am currently reading (providing writer’s name in cyrillic script), but nothing (zilch, nada) was returned. This is not serious.
I tried searching for my own website, which on Google is #1 for "Andy Shellam."
I found some references to it on page 13. The first 12 pages were all posts from archived mailing lists – how can that be more relevant to me than my own website?
Also the pages from my website that it had indexed haven’t been available since November last year.
It’s like they’ve pinched Google’s index when they left the company and not bothered updating it!
Plus Google has 5 times the number of pages Cuil has (5700 vs 1076!)
When I searched my freeware application AndreaMosaic it returned 850 links (Google 38,500) and none of them links to the official home page. Google return my home page as the first link… lol…
A large pier in the UK caught fire yesterday, so I tried looking for "pier fire" on Cuil. I got back a few pages about old piers that have burnt down around the world, but nothing about the one that was in the news yesterday. The same search on Google brought back at least 4 pages of links to different news sites that were covering the story. Don’t think I’ll be using it again.
I want to congrate CUIL "cool" team … they will soon be provideing FAAAAR better search then google I hope so ….
I read about Cuil in the morning newspaper and tried searching for an image compressor….just 12 results as compared to thousands of results which google displayed..
As google recognises a + sign between two searches(For joined search) Cuil has just got an error message for the same…..
Nothing really COOL about Cuil!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Its too cool really i means cool……
i searched for picasa web google
it hasnt shown me picasaweb.google.com anywhere
Wow!!!
is it anti google or its not supposed to shoe google link or what is cuil about this cuil.com
Run a search on Cuil for this
"Cuil Crashes and burns at launch"
and then run it on Google.
Get some perspective people: Even Google needed time, efforts and money to be where it is today. Its very commendable of Cuil engineers and investors to stand up to giants like Google, Yahoo and MSN, and very chilidish and unprofessional of us to start commenting on Cuil so early,
I would give them some time before passing any sort of judgements. And for people who are comparing the number of results, r u telling me that you go through over a 100 million results to get what you want if so mate its about time you change your search engine. Coz even 10 results are good enough for me if it gives me what i am looking for.
So far Google has been quite successfull in that as compared to others but i believe there is room for improvement.
I pefrormed an ego search and also a search to find my blog and web pages. There were no results returned. I was expecting from their claim that index three times more pages than google that almost all pages would be available. I hope they get their search ok so that we can have an alternative big search engine.
I thought this was a search engine?
Claiming they index 3 times the pages as Google, I am amazed how few of my search results they found.
And WHY do they add so many dating profiles on the end of the results? When Cuil only find one or two results for my search, it often put 2 – 3 dating/adult content webs at the end, and these sites have absolutely NONE of the words I searched for…
Nahhh – i dont know – perhaps this is not a search engine after all, perhaps they only wanted some attention and get a lot of "clicks" onto their new "cuil.com" domaine….
Seven seconds is the average length of time you have to make a first impression. If your first impression is not good you won’ t get another chance.
Taken from: The SideRoad
I like the format, could do with better results and an improved safe search. I tried a couple of porn related searches with safe search on and got some pretty explicit pics, even though the hit contents seems to have been filtered nicely (I know the content could mislead the engine).
When I search for something decent the pics doesn’t really make me jump with joy, but oh if someone would give me 5 pages of relevant hits rather than 5000 pages of slightly relevant hits I’d jump ship anyday.
So I’m hopeful that we’ll see something different and that once the servers stabilise we get some decent results. I’ll go back there once a month for a couple of months to see if things improve.
Why Da f**k am I begin redirected?
For a couple of smart people at the top of Cuil, they sure don’t realize that going back and forth between a totally black screen and a totally white screen is a MAJOR STRAIN on the eyes.
It doesn’t even understand what to search for if you enter ".net" !!!
I would not comment anything regarding the search result. But, I would like to bring into the notice that if you open google it will use all the pixels to show the website which is not the case of cuil.
http://www.google.com/intl/en/earthhour/
This will indeed save lots of electric energy of the world.