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Cuil: an old Irish word for knowledge. Apparently!
Anyone who knows me well may have heard my rant on the evils of Google. I loathe and distrust Google. They may well have started out as a nice little fluffy, ethical company – just like Adolf Hitler started out as a landscape painter, but, like Hitler, their status has almost grown into a religion and their power and stranglehold is beyond belief.
And yes – I use Google. It’s become a verb and you almost do it without thinking, the way Catholics genuflect and cross themselves. And yes – like a Nazi salute. You are so used to it that when you want to search the web – you just hit the ubiquitous ‘Google’ button that appears on every browser. But, at the same time, I have tried all the other search engines – and there are an astounding number out there – desperate to find one that stands up to the jolly blue giant.
Enter Cuil. OK – so some of the founders once worked for Google but this could just be the engine to give Google a run for it’s billions. (And yes – I know Google is now more than just a search engine but that’s the part I hate the most!).
You can find out more about Cuil here. I have been using it just for a day and I am already won over. At least give it a try.
Isn’t it funny how we are all so different.
I love Google and bless it’s development just about every day. As soon as I read about Cuil I tried it……being developed by ex Google employees, I thought it had to be better or they’d not have wasted time on it.
Well maybe I didn’t try it long enough or something but I thought it was one of the worst search engines out there.
I put in a search for “the slightly improved movie” which was part of the title of my previous blog post. I put it in quotes to only search for that specific phrase. Cuil didn’t find one single reference, nada, zip. to be fair, maybe it doesn’t use the quotes option, I donno.
Google put my blog as the first 2 results out of 5 and the 5th result referenced my blog too.
I’m happy to stick with Google but there is room for everyone.
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The problem with launching a new search engine in today’s climate is that it takes time to build up data and to profile how people search for what to return meaningful search results, and a lot of people will dismiss a newcomer like this one because their first search or two didn’t get such good results as Google gave them. (I tried ‘double-outlining in Illustrator, which is something I’m going to need to do in the next ten minutes, and Cuil returned zero results; Google gave me many, of which the top hit was exactly what I wanted.)
The other problems is that ‘Cuil’ doesn’t have an obvious prononciation and my word is that a lot of black.
nice find, Andy. I like
This site has made a little stir out here in California so
I gave it a whirl…early days but not bad….as for pronunciation..cool…pretty easy.
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@Silverback: As Jake says – you really do have to give it some time. I recall when Google didn’t index pages for weeks sometimes. This is as much about patience as it is an alternative.
@Jake: pronounced ‘cool’ apparently. And what’s wrong with black? Same colour as my desktop. (And yes – I know it’s not a ‘real’ colour…
@clutch68rs & @Thud: Well that’s three of us!
Such a better presentation than Google too…
been trying it since its launch… mostly irrelevant returns thus far… interesting idea, but still getting better results from google… and I wouldnt mind someone supplanting google…
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I love the look of Cuil, searches are very iffy – but I am a little worried by the constant growth of Google – just the idea that they think they are allowed to take a picture of my house pisses me off, Yahoo and co is crap, so come on Cuil.
It doesn’t work with Inquistor X yet, so I’ll keep using Google, but have already reset my home page to Cuil and will give it a good run.
@Malc: Excellent. It needs users to woprk of course.
What on earth is Inquisitor X…? Unless it’s the soft cushions…
It’s a Spotlight type thingy for Safari (replaced the search box in the top right corner)- http://www.inquistorx.com, just noticed the colours match Cuil !!!!
Can’t spell – http://www.inquisitorx.com/safari/
@Malc: Ah I see. Don’t use Safari. And dislike Spotlight more than I dislike Google…. I have never had any success with it whatsoever. It’s about as frustratingly awful as Automator….
But it isn’t Spotlight, it just looks like Spotlight. – You’re still happy with Camino then ?
@Malc: Camino. Yes. This last week I have needed to use Firefox (for the development extensions) so uograded to 3.1. I have to say it feels faster and so far hasn’t crashed either!
Big Brother aka Google Maps has just photographed my girlfriend’s house, so come on Cuil – get it together.
How do I know – one of these parked up in the road. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7534755.stm
Cuil is definitely going for it, but it’s hard to imagine them doing anything but incremental changes to what Google’s done. And even that would take years of effort.
Me.dium.com has taken a different tack. We have a full web index, but we change the results based on the surfing activity of our user base (now over 2,000,000). It’s in alpha, but I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. http://me.dium.com/search
@Chris: I will look… that’s a promise.
Chris,
me.dium.com is a little lacking for the ’science / engineering / maths’ type searches I do a lot of, but it is superb for the more mainstream “entertainment / media” things, a very capable competitor to google.co.uk – cheers
Just given up on Cuil – it’s no better than it started out at, try searching for “Yellowswordfish” and you get the Scottish Saltire !!!!
@Malc: Wow – of ALL the images on my site it selects THAT one
I thought it a very appropriate example of how a search engine shoudn’t do things !!! Shame really, I kept hoping for a V2 or something, but the search results just don’t seem to improve, I like Cuil’s layout, colour scheme, the way it displays results, trouble is the results suck. I have also watched as the Safari plugin – Inquisitor has been bought by Yahoo!, so here I am back with FF3 and Google UK search!