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3 Reasons Why Cuil is Not Cool

Posted by Mike Volpe on Mon, Jul 28, 2008 @ 04:32 PM
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Cuil is a new search engine that just launched with lots of buzz in the startup world.  It is supposed to be a "Google Killer."  I don't get it.  I think it sucks.  Here's why:

  1. They lie.  They claim to have the "world's biggest search engine" yet when you search for some simple terms, Google returns a lot more results than they do.  "Search Engine" yields 378 million results in Google and 165 million in Cuil.  "Startup" yields 57 million in Google and only 40 million in Cuil.
  2. They are solving the wrong problem.  I don't need my search engine to crawl more web pages.  I need higher quality, more targeted results.  I need less search engine spam.  I need more personalization.  Cuil does none of this.  Crawling the last 0.1% of webpages Google misses is like including the microscopic dust particles under my bed during a search of my house.  Who cares!!!
  3. Their results suck.  Search for "Cuil" in Cuil and you Search in Google for "Cuil" and you get a bunch of results that make sense, including a news article and Cuil itself.  Search for "Cuil" in Cuil, and you get results like "Properties for Sale in Cuil Mhuine, Ireland", "The Shire of Cuil Choluim" and "Download Chase Around the Windmill".  What a joke.

What do you think?  Is there anything about Cuil that is actually Cool?  Leave a comment...

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COMMENTS

That's the point! A search of cuil on cuil.com returned those because cuil knows/assumes you already know what cuil.com is since you are already using it. Try a search on 'cuil news' and see what you get.

posted @ Monday, July 28, 2008 5:36 PM by ggjeffy


Yea, Cuil seems pretty piss-poor. I like how they think out of the box for search engine results like Mahalo, but the few searches I performed got me nothing I was interested in.

posted @ Monday, July 28, 2008 5:40 PM by Marcel


#4 - misspelling it as Culi.com takes you to a porn site. Great work, Cuil brand team!

posted @ Monday, July 28, 2008 8:10 PM by Matthew Mamet


Considering today is day one of this new search engine, I'll cut them some slack on the search results. I think their user interface design rocks! It's way better than Google or anything else in search. I'll wait and see if they improve search before passing judgement.

posted @ Monday, July 28, 2008 9:34 PM by Bernie Borges


Not a fan of Cuil.com as no matter WHAT keyword I used, they could not find my company's site AND all the results I saw were pretty random and not what I was looking for.

posted @ Tuesday, July 29, 2008 9:40 AM by Victoria


I'm not defending what I think was a terrible launch, but I don't think your points 1 and 2 align very well. For example, you assume that fewer results means that they've indexed fewer pages. However, that's not necessarily the case. I could build you a search engine that indexed more pages and gave you fewer results by lopping off everything below a specified IR score, if I set that threshold to be significantly higher than whatever Google uses to limit its results. Thus, even though I've looked at more pages, I've used a more restrictive score to filter your results. 
 
 
 
p.s. That said, I agree with the comparison of the websites that Google hasn't indexed to the dust under your bed. If it hasn't been indexed by Google, it doubtful that it's worth your time.

posted @ Tuesday, July 29, 2008 10:27 AM by Nimby


I am compelled to point out that Google does not actually have 57 million results for "startup".  
Excluding duplicate pages, it has at most a few thousand. 
 
Cuil excludes duplicate pages from the get go. 
 
Cuil's results still suck. But don't give Google credit where credit isn't due.

posted @ Tuesday, July 29, 2008 10:33 AM by Happy


I did a search for the following: "vue d'esprit tutorial" and it came back saying there were "No Results."  
 
 
 
Granted, d'esprit isn't a common word -- however both Yahoo & Google gave me thousands of relevant results.  
 
 
 
Apparently CUIL got confused by the apostrophe.... That doesn't bode well.

posted @ Tuesday, July 29, 2008 5:53 PM by A.J.


I agree that while "d'esprit" is not the most common of words I think "closet doors" would be a pretty common phrase. Yet, when I did a search yesterday it returned no results. Today it does but if you keep refreshing the page about a third of the time it still returns "no results". When it does give results it gives me the option to explore by categories "Canadian Child Actors". ??????

posted @ Wednesday, July 30, 2008 10:42 AM by Jim Lapic


"culi" is Italian for "bums" -- a fairly obvious internationalisation flaw then in their marketing. Whoops. Other than that, I like their innovative approach. They clearly need to keep refining the site though. My site is not indexed on there! 
 

posted @ Thursday, August 07, 2008 6:14 AM by mookie


Cuil sucks there results suck, no special features like currency exchange spell check and math. Fuck you Cuil.

posted @ Saturday, August 16, 2008 11:18 AM by Cuiltube


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