3 ms·

I have a personal litmus test for new search engines - a vanity search on myself. I know my own content across the web better than anyone else's. By far, Google

by geuis 18y ago

I have a personal litmus test for new search engines - a vanity search on myself. I know my own content across the web better than anyone else's. By far, Google still rates far and above for returning the fullest and most pertinent set of results than any others. Cuil fails at this. More generally, I compared common searches I do regularly relating to things like "javascript framework" and "css" and the results were poor. Its not only about who has the biggest index. Its about retrieving the most relevant data from that index. To be more crude, its not about the size of your <guess>, its about how you use it.

wheels 18y ago
Same litmus test, got nothing. Tried a couple of other topics I know well, results weren't particularly good. The presentation is moderately interesting though.
- axod 18y ago
  Interesting, yes, but I don't think a column layout works for a list of search results. It's much harder to scan.
  - wheels 18y ago
    I didn't mean the layout so much as that the description of the hit doesn't necessarily come from the text of the page. For instance, the description of kde.org is pulled out of Wikipedia. I'm not sure that approach works, but I think it's an interesting path to flesh out.
davidw 18y ago
They appear to have fiddled with something. I got no results earlier, but now I do, and while they're not great, it's much better than nothing.
babul 18y ago
Google has had a lot of time and resource to index your content. So it is not a fair compariosn yet. Give Cuil time to develop/index and then see the results. On a side note, Cuil takes forever to load compared to Google, and search results aside, that is a major issue they need to address asap.
- TFrancis 18y ago
  I don't think we ought to excuse Cuil and provide them more time before we judge the search engine. They've had all the time they needed and put out a press release saying so.
swombat 18y ago
Here's an epic fail for Cuil: http://skitch.com/swombat/t6n6/flex-rails-google-search http://skitch.com/swombat/t6n6/flex-rails-google-search
run4yourlives 18y ago
Hah, I did the same thing, with the same results. I'm also not impressed with the 3 column results page...a quick list of pages is much better for me.

by geuis 18y ago

wheels 18y ago

Same litmus test, got nothing. Tried a couple of other topics I know well, results weren't particularly good. The presentation is moderately interesting though.

axod 18y ago
Interesting, yes, but I don't think a column layout works for a list of search results. It's much harder to scan.
- wheels 18y ago
  I didn't mean the layout so much as that the description of the hit doesn't necessarily come from the text of the page. For instance, the description of kde.org is pulled out of Wikipedia. I'm not sure that approach works, but I think it's an interesting path to flesh out.

davidw 18y ago

They appear to have fiddled with something. I got no results earlier, but now I do, and while they're not great, it's much better than nothing.

babul 18y ago

Google has had a lot of time and resource to index your content. So it is not a fair compariosn yet. Give Cuil time to develop/index and then see the results. On a side note, Cuil takes forever to load compared to Google, and search results aside, that is a major issue they need to address asap.

TFrancis 18y ago
I don't think we ought to excuse Cuil and provide them more time before we judge the search engine. They've had all the time they needed and put out a press release saying so.

swombat 18y ago

Here's an epic fail for Cuil: http://skitch.com/swombat/t6n6/flex-rails-google-search http://skitch.com/swombat/t6n6/flex-rails-google-search

run4yourlives 18y ago

Hah, I did the same thing, with the same results. I'm also not impressed with the 3 column results page...a quick list of pages is much better for me.