07.28.08
Cuil
Well folks I am back home and my little Silicon Valley project is out of stealth.
At 9pm PST, 5am our time, Cuil was unleashed upon the world. So now when you are going mad rephrasing search queries on Google, you can try Cuil instead.
It has a huge index, 120 billion pages; it ranks based on content; it displays results magazine style in columns and with images so you can see more and my favourite; it offers you up categories and subject drilldown to help you explore a topic especially when you don’t know much about a topic and don’t know the “right query” to enter. Try searching for Ireland as an example and check out the tabs on the top and then the “drilldown” on the right. Then go to the bottom of the page and click “add to firefox”!!
And for privacy advocates – Cuil doesn’t log users’ search activities. Your search history is safe.
One note: this blog, I discovered, had a redirect on its robot.txt files which made it tricky to crawl. If your blog is not showing up it might have the same issue. So either stop any robot redirects (if that makes sense!) or email crawler@cuil.com and ask Jim to make sure you are crawled.
Some early coverage
Tom N said,
July 28, 2008 at 9:50 am
No No No. Tried a few simple searches including my own name. Much prefer google.
kaa said,
July 28, 2008 at 2:47 pm
not very good reviews on reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/comments/6trj2/former_google_employees_prepare_rival_search/
B said,
July 28, 2008 at 3:33 pm
Its slow as tar. Its nowhere near as useful as Google.
Looks like a rival to Mahalo and Mahalo stinks.
There was no buzz and no reason to change to it. I think that the ex-googlers left the bit that is the essence of Googleness back at Google.
Electron said,
July 28, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Sarah, it’s up against strong competition, but the fact that it ranks results by relevance instead of popularity will make it a big hit with small businesses – google needs some serious competition – it may be fine for surfers, but it’s certainly not, for advertisers – ultimately, its future will be determined by advertiser revenues.
On Denis (you’ve remover the comment box) he has put history to work in a positive way – I heard him say ,on some interview, that the fact that he studied history has helped him with his strategic planning and what a spectacular strategist he is. It’s a brilliant Irish success story.
namelessguy said,
July 28, 2008 at 3:54 pm
I would love to see some good old fashioned competition for Google (no chance Microsoft will fit that bill), but Cuil has a tough challenge. The search industry is (as you mention) 10 years old and worth billions. This is not something that you can just pop into with a basic search index and a shinny new layout. You have to have a new game.
This would be like me suddenly deciding that I’m going to go up against Walmart as the low cost retailer of choice. No change – I don’t have the infrastructure, capital, experience, etc. There is no way I could ever beat Walmart at their own game, I would need to change the game.
Personally, I think Cuil is making a huge (probably fatal) mistake. Their search service is obviously not ready to play with the big boys and they should not be live. The early adopters are going to take one look at this and say “fail!” never to give them a second look. These are the guys who lead the computer usage trends. These are the guys who help the rest of the world set their default home page to their favorite search engine. If you can’t get the computer geeks and IT admins to use your search, you are already dead. It is only a matter of time before the funding runs out and you close up shop.
Eamon said,
July 28, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Hope it goes well – it will take a few years as google have so much more to offer at the moment (gmail, google earth etc) got it hard to find the most important site of them all! sarahcarey.ie
Andrew said,
July 28, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Hope cuil goes well – everyone writes as if nobody uses more than one search engine, but most people think Google isn’t the only game in town.
And since Electron overrode your disabling of comments on Denis, I’ll do the same to support Joseph’s point that more than one person may use a computer – to my knowledge at least 3 different people have used this very keyboard to post comments on your blog!
Sarah said,
July 28, 2008 at 4:42 pm
yeah yeah within a few minutes..Trust me – it was someone with an agenda.
Cuil knows it has a tough challenge ahead, but if no one ever tried to challenge a dominant player we’d all still be using Telecom Eireann, Internet Explorer and driving Model T Fords.
Anyway, interesting times ahead!
Conor said,
July 28, 2008 at 6:41 pm
Tried it, it couldn’t even find my company webiste. Enter “marcon computations” in cuil and then try google. More reinventing the wheel? Is EI involved? Because I haven’t had any responses to email or phone calls I have made to the EI office in Palo Alto? Are they busy with this launch? On the other subject, I thought all tax dodgers were equal….
Joe. H. said,
July 28, 2008 at 8:39 pm
Whats the deal with the name?
I saw it quoted that it means knowledge or hazel in Gaelic (Irish)
As opposed to cuil meaning “goal” or “corner” like in placenames.
And that it was once cuill, with a second l
As a PR issue, I presume your views were solicited in advance?
Sarah said,
July 28, 2008 at 8:53 pm
As Anna says “we had a minute’s silence for the second l”.
Strictly speaking it should have two l’s (as in Finn McCuill – hazelnuts, fountain of wisdom, salmon of knowledge and all that) but everyone pronounced it Quill and complained bitterly. The accuracy of Gaelic etymology took second place to pronouncability. Oh well, Google is a spelling mistake (shoulda been googol) so I don’t think it’ll be a factor.
It’s Day 1. It took Google 10 years to get to where they are now, so this is a long haul.
EI aren’t involved. It’s a US company funded on VC money.
B said,
July 29, 2008 at 1:06 am
Surely its April 1 today?
B said,
July 29, 2008 at 9:17 am
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2326643,00.asp
Electron said,
July 29, 2008 at 11:05 am
I think that it’ll require some tweaking – an obvious glitch is that images of my American competitors products or logos appears alongside search results for my products – I don’t know if it’s a good or bad feature – I doubt, however, if they’ll be pleased.
Matthew said,
July 29, 2008 at 12:04 pm
As long as the system is safe and free from hackers, I wish Cuil good luck.
Dan Sullivan said,
July 29, 2008 at 1:29 pm
A small world indeed, Sarah, if I’d know you were over with Cuill I’d have asked you to say Hi to Anna.
http://dansullivan.blogspot.com/2008/07/cuil-launches-drops-l-plate-too.html
I must admit to rather liking the searchme.com UI, though I can see that being really slow.
Darren J. Prior said,
July 29, 2008 at 1:43 pm
There’s an article in the Examiner today on Cuil.
“The internet search engine that trades under an Irish name – Cuil.com”
If if is an Irish word they should spell it with the fada.
http://www.gaelport.com/index.php?page=clippings&id=3689&viewby=date
B said,
July 29, 2008 at 1:49 pm
In fairness Darren! If Irish people can’t find the fada how are Yanks or anyone else gonna?
If its going to be pronounced Cool then it should be spelt Cuul or Cool and definitely 100% not Culi.
http://www.mevio.com/shows/?mode=detail&episode_id=120222
Darren J. Prior said,
July 29, 2008 at 2:26 pm
It’s spelt cuil-cúil and most keyboards can do a fada (press Alt-Gr beside the spacebar and the letter). If it was spelt cúil then people would still be able to find it if they typed it into google without the fada.
B said,
July 29, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Wow. Thanks Darren. I learned something new. I never knew that. áéÃóú
Maith an fear.
Sarah said,
July 29, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Dan – wow! that IS a small world. I will pass on the regards.
Matthew, Eamon, John – thank you! And everyone else who wished good luck. Its amazing how the world is dividing into two. Those who say “Wish you the best!” and those who say “oh its crap and what’s the point anyway?”
I’ll REMEMBER
Electron, send me your website. I’ll make them fix it!!!
Joseph D said,
July 29, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Please try to make one that has more going for it than a silly name and cheap, misleading PR.
Joseph D said,
July 29, 2008 at 8:05 pm
When people believe their own PR we get things like Cuil
Savannah said,
July 29, 2008 at 8:28 pm
Could I second Joseph’s emotions on Denis O’Brien. I know it’s your blog Sarah but it gets boring for those of us reading it if you censor comments.
Sarah said,
July 29, 2008 at 8:51 pm
Well it gets tricky for me if I get sued or if my friends get pissed off with me because I allow completely unfair nasty lies to be spread about them on my website.
I linked to an entertaining article in Forbes which wasn’t at all boring. Denis bashing is boring.
Gingerale said,
July 30, 2008 at 6:12 am
From the privacy policy: “We do not keep logs of our users’ search activity.” Thank you for honoring the right to be left alone!!
Leon said,
July 30, 2008 at 9:15 am
It doesn’t matter if it gets boring for the readers/ participants. Sarah has a total blind spot when it comes to Denis O’Brien and the viewers /readers /participants have to accept that.
Not allowing your blog to be used to slag off your friends is totally understandable and not allowing it to be used to slag off a billionaire friend is just self preservation.
Anna said,
July 30, 2008 at 10:41 am
Didn’t see you at your friend Denis’ 50th Sarah
Lorna said,
July 30, 2008 at 11:02 am
Haha, I just ‘Cuiled’ Tom Costello and got: We didn’t find any results for “tom costello”. So much for that….
Lorna said,
July 30, 2008 at 11:38 am
Google however produced the goods.
Dan Sullivan said,
July 30, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Lorna, the no result returned is probably due to the traffic being higher than expected. It’s not untypical of new services that undergo sudden growth.
Let’s see how it responds.
Lorna said,
July 30, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Come on Dan, it’s the middle of the freakin night over there, no one’s at work. Zero traffic time.
B said,
July 30, 2008 at 12:52 pm
What I think is that the service was designed to be intellectually stimulating for the founders. the focus is/was internal and not external. The experience was designed from the point of view of the company rather than the point of view of the user.
The attitude that comes across is arrogance. The user has to change they way that they search and what they expect from a search for this one website. Itas as if when you do a search it comes back with other stuff because YOU searched for the wrong things.
I searched for “rollerskating youtube” on google and got a video after one click. On Cuil I got a website called Kung Fu Rodeo.
I don’t hold out much hope for it because they founders think they have all the answers and lack humility and empathy.
If you have a credit card, drive a car or have a mobile phone your privacy is pretty much non-existent anyway.
Cuil seems to be the antonym of google. Its where you go to get confused.
Dan Sullivan said,
July 30, 2008 at 4:08 pm
B, I was reading about and as far as I can tell cuil isn’t set up to search for video. Or images either. Just saying. I actually can’t detect any ‘attitude coming across’ but good luck to you for your empathic powers. Also, you know that google own youtube so who knows what internal linkages there are to find stuff. though there probably isn’t anything.
sarah said,
July 30, 2008 at 4:12 pm
1. On user logs
Maybe you didn’t know it, but Google don’t just rank on number of links, but on user behaviour. They track and keep for 2 years every search you make along with your IUP address so that’s personalised information – every time you click and where you go from their website. The EU has asked them that at the very least not to keep the logs for so long. So far Google have refused to comply and delete their logs. So you can slag off Cuil for respecting your right to be left alone, but Google don’t leave you alone (oh and that’s before you use gmail or gtalk. Ever wonder what happens THOSE logs?)
Tracking and using user behaviour in search also means that popularity becomes self-reinforcing. Popular sites get more popular and unpopular sites haven’t a hope of getting a look in. Cuil wants to do things differently which means there is some disruption to the internet and will piss off some people. It means wikipedia won’t come as No. 1 and hotels.com No. 2 and a youtube video no.4. The internet HAS more information that wikipedia.
Cuil’s idea is that if people want the normal popular results then fine, search on Google. But if you’ve rephrased your query 8 times and still can’t find the information you want, then try Cuil. It will throw up different results and maybe you’ll have some luck.
2. Its taken Google ten years to get to where they are now and they didn’t arrive on day one with a perfect search engine. It took them a few years to get past Alta Vista and Lycos. Where is the arrogance is saying, there is a different way to do things and we’re going to try? Google controls the way people use the Internet. A little bit of competition won’t hurt them. Nothing wrong with giving it a go. Unless you think there IS something wrong with trying something different in which case we would have only monopolies.
B said,
July 30, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Jesus Christ! I am sorry. I will get back in my box.
Dan Sullivan said,
July 30, 2008 at 4:14 pm
B, also it is hard to see what you’re complaining about the result you got gave you a number of sites all related to rollerskating clips. It’s not the name of the site that you’re given that is important when you’re searching it is that you find what you were looking for. You were looking for rollerskating clips and isn’t that what you were shown? If you’re looking for content on youtube specifically don’t you normally go to youtube and search for ‘rollerskating’?
Dan Sullivan said,
July 30, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Bo ,you have a box? In these recession hit times you should count yourself lucky.
sarah said,
July 30, 2008 at 4:16 pm
sigh, lots of typos there. Jet lag jet lag.
sarah said,
July 30, 2008 at 4:17 pm
and THANK YOU DAN.
Conor said,
July 30, 2008 at 4:33 pm
Cuil Day 3…….It still can’t find my compnay website…….
Sarah said,
July 30, 2008 at 4:34 pm
and your company is?
The NYT explains a little http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/29/no-bull-cuil-had-problems/
and a fair review here
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Search/Cuil-Needs-Time-Users-to-Fight-Google/
Conor said,
July 30, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Marcon Computations
Dan Sullivan said,
July 30, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Conor, you don’t seem to be found right enough.
Sarah said,
July 30, 2008 at 5:05 pm
I’ll check it out. I know my site and Gavin’s was giving their crawler trouble as we had “disallow” robot.txt files so we’re working on that.
just check whether you allow robot.txt files.
Sarah said,
July 30, 2008 at 7:13 pm
I asked jim http://www.cuil.com/info/webmaster_info/ about marcon. He’ll get to it! He’s got 5000 other requests.
The problems of a company with 30 employees competing with a company of 16,000 employees. Anyone out there doing a PhD in Comp Sci and want a job?
Electron said,
July 30, 2008 at 7:31 pm
Sarah, it’s giving a vaguely related image today when i type in my url – my American competitors are well served though. Is it primarily aimed at the US user or is it that it will take a week or so, to fully to permeate through the web ? I can give you my url to try, but I don’t think it would be a wise move to have it displayed on this blog.
Sarah said,
July 30, 2008 at 7:58 pm
email it to me. Or if you want to preserve confidentiality email crawler or crawlme@cuil.com. Like I said, there’s a queue! But go for it. Also, try putting the whole http bla bla address into the search box. I think that means they’ll automatically crawl it on the next index.
Geography IS an issue which surprised me.
Further away the site is the longer it takes to index.
One thing though – when we met the journalists we did live Demos for them – and they could choose to put in their own queries. They loved the results, the layout, the drilldown etc and were very forgiving when dodgy images showed up. Their attitude was (and these are cynical guys who’ve spent years wondering why Ask can’t get more market share) that the odd mistake showed it was a real product instead of a canned demo AND that we hadn’t weasled out by putting BETA on the page – like everyone else does (Gtalk STILL has beta – like hello?).
Darren J. Prior said,
July 30, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Seemingly cuil is an old Irish word (spelt cuill) which means knowledge.
If it was an American organisation and I was in charge I would have called it a native American name but I guess that the boss is Irish so why not?
Dan Sullivan said,
July 30, 2008 at 10:28 pm
Sarah, I can pass the word amongst those I know from my own research efforts.
Braz said,
July 30, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Its a nice start and good luck to them. It will take a bit of time for the indexes to get created, trimmed, managed, and optimised so lads take a pill. Hell with the best cloud computing, EC2 or whatever you still end up with the odd hickup (Amazon lots a couple of hours and had god knows how many pissed started ups for their EC2). On a more familiar note, lads – the twitter whale, like c’mon they’re around a bit and they’ve still not got the rails sorted with memcaching to the hilt it still sometimes just takes a bath.
Dan pointed out something, so jobs for PhDs in Comp Sci … how about one with lots of expertise in hci, usability, as well as some bits of programming ? The jobs@cuil.com is a bit vague. I’m sure I could easily pass it along to a bunch of the recent UL Comp Sci PhDs, drop me email with details.
B said,
July 31, 2008 at 1:31 am
Dan,
Cuil isn’t set up to find anything of relevence to the user.
The site isn’t alpha, beta or anything. Its presented as the final result. The company fell in love with the technology and expected the world to rotate the way they want it to. This approcah works in Ireland where people can be bullied into believing that black is white but not in the rest of the world.
Nobody gives a flying French Connection what Cuil means and most can’t spell it. It may as well have been in Klingon.
My dog could find more relevant things. I tried to like it. I wanted to like it but I think that it left out the users.
Dan Sullivan said,
July 31, 2008 at 2:25 am
B, given that you’re either not even blogging or merely hiding who you are I’m content to take your comments about other people leaving out the user with a pinch of salt. You can talk about what it does and doesn’t do but from where do you know that it “isn’t set up to find anything of relevence to the user.” You’re making it up as you go along as the Pythons would say.
I’m quite happy to give cuil some space for me and everyone else work out if it is going to be of any use to me just as I am the other newish search engine I mentioned before. And which Sarah didn’t mod out. And any others that come along. For the record, I’ve worked and done work for IBM and Microsoft amongst others and have no beef with any tech company and will happily pass judgement on the technology itself without seeking divine motives like arrogance in the producers. B, stealing from Roger Moore but it sounds to me like there is a four letter word and you’re both the first letter of it and full of it.
B said,
July 31, 2008 at 8:25 am
Wow. Just say it. I am full of shit. Nothing like a personalised attack first thing in the morning.
They still left the user out. The technology might be state of the art but if it fails to interact with how the human works what is the point. The technology I am sure is brilliant. Technology alone is not the full answer.
I worked for IBM too so whats the big deal?
Paul Moloney said,
July 31, 2008 at 10:18 am
“The site isn’t alpha, beta or anything. Its presented as the final result. ”
See, that’s the problem. When Google originally launched, there was almost no fanfare; people just gradually discovered a rather boring almost-monochrome website that wasn’t overloaded with widgets and ads and loaded quickly – important especially in pre-broadband days. (It’s still only 16k) They allowed it to gradually catch on and get plaudits and awards and eventually it became a behemoth.
The Cuil hype was extraordinary – a big day 1 launch of a search engine. I can’t remember the last time any search engine – or indeed any web site – got launched with such a press frenzy. So people presumed the product would match the hype. And when it didn’t, they scoffed. Unfortunately, that’s what happens.
P.
Electron said,
July 31, 2008 at 10:44 am
The fact that ranking is not dependent on hit count will break the US monopoly on e-comm. – google is a rip off and is the only game in town at the moment. We’ve given up advertising with them and now advertise our site in the old fashioned way using specialist press. Cuil’s approach may catch a wave from despondent e-commers who are continuously subjected to culling by google’s ranking methods
Braz said,
July 31, 2008 at 10:58 am
Electron – that’s a good point giving that everybody I know who works for Google believes they’re in a marketing company and I don’t know anyone there who isn’t highly technical. Google without AdSense and all the rest would mean that their primary income would disappear. I don’t know how many Google ad campaigns I heard stories about with key word costing going random thru the roof. I suspect its the fault of click monkeys or gold farmers, which are tacitly supported by Google when its not stomped down fast and hard. The stomping rarely happens alas.
B – in fairness, it took both Yahoo and Google quite a long time to realise that they needed usability departments, I doubt that Cuil have got more than a handful of usability engineers, if at all. Usability, done properly takes time. I’ll happily give them the space to get it right. Lots of new start-ups in the last two years don’t get it right, if they don’t they fail so why worry. The Internet Web 2.0 is the Darwinian evolution in action, time will tell.
John Smyth said,
July 31, 2008 at 11:10 am
I’m surprised that Cuil don’t have a blog to communicate with users, particularly to inform them of glitches, forthcoming stuff, cool [or is it cuil] tricks for users to optimize their searches, etc.(your example above, typing your url into the search will tell Cuil to index it the next time around).
Cuil will succeed in one of two ways :- they will get as good as Google really fast or they will be bought up by Microsoft or Yahoo. As for the fact that it took 10 years for Google to get where it is – doesn’t matter. No-one is looking for a state-of-the-art 1998 search engine. Apple didn’t adopt that attitude with the iPhone.
On the plus side, the use interface is very clear and user friendly, and the drop-links seem to be working better today than at launch (due to less traffic, I presume). The images still don’t seem to match the context of the search but that might improve in time.
Hope it works out – competition is good.
Pete said,
August 1, 2008 at 9:30 am
I haven’t yet had time to try out Cuil, so can’t comment on it, but the name just makes me cringe. Hopefully I’m in the minority. I think that most of the world will just see it as a stupid, uncool misspelling of Cool. From a brand-building point of view, “cuiling” doesn’t work very well as a verb, which is one of Google’s big wins.
Search is not a solved problem « Returned Emigrant said,
August 1, 2008 at 6:17 pm
[...] note on their site and I’ve also been following the robust defense being offered on Sarah Carey’s blog. Cuil is offereing something different; the size of their index, suggestions by category, [...]
Paul said,
August 5, 2008 at 10:53 am
Cuil, my arse!, You lot dont even know the meaning of the word ‘knowledge’ yeah right!!!! more rubbish on the internet is just what we need.
Can I suggest Sarah as a ’strategist’ to Cuil, that you divest both your time and money from this venture. Stick to the Sunday Times.
Then again how about Cuil Windows or Cuil Linux??
I’m left thinking ’snowball and hell’
Darren J. Prior said,
August 5, 2008 at 4:26 pm
I don’t understand why when I type my name in on google or cuil or whatever my blog doesn’t come up. Does anyone know why?
Guy Bague said,
September 3, 2008 at 10:29 pm
So tell us then Sarah. What kind of visa do you have to work in my country? H-1B? I, L-1A? Greencard? Citizenship?