I Am Not As Cuil As Formerly

A new search engine has taken the stage to challenge Google.  Cuil is, we are told, the old Irish world for knowledge, but I am wedded to my theory that it is a play on "Cool", as in the Kewl Kids (hmm, I could try to diagram that if an even more detailed explanation is necessary...).

Anyway, the launch was glitchy, for technical reasons that are somewhat interesting:

Google challenger Cuil launched last night in blaze of glory. And it went down in a ball of flames. Immediately after launch, the criticism started to pile on: Results were incomplete, weird, and missing.

...

Which brings us to issue two: "We've only been live for twelve hours," [Cuil VP of communications] Sollitto said, and traffic has spiked beyond their expectations. In other Web 2.0 launches, a traffic spike would slow down or crash the service, but in Cuil's architecture, the spike affected results, not speed. (Cuil did also crash briefly last night.)

This is because Cuil isn't set up as a massively parallel search network the way, say, Google is. Tom Costello had explained this to me a bit when we talked last week. Each of Cuil's search appliances is specialized to a particular subcategory of results. There are machines that understand and index sports, other than are experts on medicine, etc. Sollitto said that as these search machines get overloaded, they drop off-line for some queries, and the machines left online return less-than-relevant results that then appear at the top of users' pages.

Whatever.  All I know is that I long ago achieved one of my few goals with this blog by nailing down the top spot on the Google search for "Tom Maguire" (my chief competition was a dead Irish socialist but I buried him).

But on Cuil, although I am lurking on the front page I lack pride of place.  Troubling.

Comments

[Danube of Thought]

Just remember, the title "O Calcutta" was a play on the phrase, "O, quelle cul t'as," meaning something very close to "O, what an ass you have."

[Danube of Thought]

OK, after all these years I occasionally get my genders wrong. It's "quel," not "quelle." Who would ever have thought it would be masculine?

[kim]

Amusing. I clicked on your last link just now and got a message that the servers are temporarily down.

I'm awfully glad there is an alternative to Google. I've been using Yahoo lately at least partly because I've been made suspicious by some of the rankings at Google.
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[cathyf]

I use "goodsearch" ( http://www.goodsearch.com ) It uses the yahoo search engine, which is adequate most of the time. The gimmick is that you chose a charity, and each time you do a search that charity gets a donation. It's a fraction of a penny per search. Not much, but my kids' school gets $50-$75 per year, which is certainly more than zero. Not giving money to google is worth even more, of course...

Have I mentioned how much I hate black backgrounds with white/green/etc. text? There is a reason why this once-ubiquitous form died with dos.

[Sara]

I just stick to good ol' Dogpile that gives me a multiple engine search tool.

[SlimGuy]

Major warning here

Make sure you are real careful how you spell the site as CUIL.

The site reversing the last two letters to CULI is very much NSFW.

[cathyf]

I looked at the search engine this morning when clarice first linked to it, which was after the NYT featured it, among other MSM sites. I got in just fine, ran a couple of searches. Now that TM has Maguire-lanched the site, it is unreachable. Coincidence? Or Causation? Hmmmm....

[clarice]

N.B. On some references there to me there's a pic of a very attractive woman in a green suit., I have no idea who she is, but it is not I.

[Danube of Thought]

I tried it earlier today after seeing a mention on Lucianne, and I couldn't get anything to open.

I'm signing off now and checking out CULI immediately, in hopes of being able to deduce what NSFW means.

[Danube of Thought]

Never mind--don't do it.

[cathyf]

Have a good time, DOT, but do make sure that you don't have any children around within eyeshot. ;-)

[clarice]

Not suitable for work,DoT.

[cathyf]

The brain's filing system is a strange thing. I always parse "NSFW" first as "New South F***ing Wales" followed by a, "no, no, of course that's not right..."

[Sara]

NSFW, not safe for work. I asked on another blog a couple of years ago, what does NSFW mean. I was attacked for asking as being one of those angry lesbians just there to make trouble and then banned.

[Publius]

Cathy:

Funny you should mention how much you hate black backgrounds with white text. I've just received in the mail John McCain's latest contributionn request with such a bumper sticker enclosed. My immediate reaction was, OMG how morose. I was further depressed when I read the text of the accompanying letter where he says;

"I'm hoping I can count on you to display your sticker right away as part of our effort to build momentum and excitement all across America". (sorry, I don't know how to do italics)

Is this guy kidding? Is his campaign so clueless as to not recognize his sticker brings about as much momentum and excitement as one would expect from a funeral? Or as I am increasingly becoming suspicious, has he achieved his goal in obtaining the GOP nomination, and is throwing this election with the intent of finger-sticking the Repulican party, and conservatives in particular, one more time for ole time sake? After all, this seems to be Mr. Maverick's real obsession and main claim to fame in his political life.

It is remarkable that during the primary season he was 'Maverick McCain' to the MSM. Now he is Bush's lapdog and can't buy a headline. If conservatives are frustrated, as I am that we don't have a dog in this hunt, it is because we let the liberal media pick the candidates for both parties. Has anyone else has similar thoughts?

[Thomas Collins]

TM, maybe you reached the Google summit because a lot of people were searching for Time's man of the year. Perhaps there is not as much searching for conversations that don't help one's kids. But I have a suggestion. Why don't you replace your current phrase moniker with "All Rielle, All the Time." :-)))

[GMax]

Dogpile has been my aggregator for search engines for awhile now. No google for me, not for about 4 years or so.

[Publius]

Sorry for the interruption folks. I posted my above rant before seeing the Kristol thread.

[clarice]

Cathyf--I hope you don't think that disclosure will encourage me to share the contents of my cluttered brain.

[Charlie (Colorado)]

The site reversing the last two letters to CULI is very much NSFW.

Worse, it's a pay site.

[Charlie (Colorado)]

Cathy, everyone knows it should be amber text on black.

Hmmm...
Like this.

[Charlie (Colorado)]

Damn, it didn't work.

[cathyf]

Oh, yeah, did I mention I also hate the 2-column and 3-column output? I hate having to drag the scroll bar up and down to read (as if my carpel tunnel were not bad enough already!) And I hate having to move my attention all around the freaking page. Especially if I click on a link, read it, and come back to the search page 10, 15, 20 minutes later trying to remember which parts of the chaotic disaster of a page I have already processed, and which parts I haven't gotten to yet. Single column only, please!

[cathyf]

Oh, and I just realized another thing. I use opera, at 150% magnification. When I pull the scroll bar all the way to the bottom of the scrolling region, the bottom 15.5 lines of text are still further down hidden under the bottom of the screen.

And, Charlie, I remember how awesomely cool it was when I bought my first batch of amber monitors, which were low-priced clones of real DEC monitors. They were $400 apiece, rather than the $1100 real VT220 terminals that were green on black. We bought 10 of them, and within 2 years all of them lost their magic smoke. They used the 20-cent capacitor rather than the 50-cent capacitor...

[Cap'n Spackle]

OT: Novak has a brain tumor Good luck to him.

[Cap'n Spackle]

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=novak+%22brain+tumor%22

Cuil comes up real short vs. Google here.
No newswire.

[Bob Andersen]

They probably have a long road to hoe getting anywhere near Google. I have heard of the legendary server farms behind Google located in Atlanta (and elsewhere no doubt).

A result from a simple vanity search:

"No results because of high load...
Due to excessive load, our servers didn't return results. Please try your search again.

About Cuil | Your Privacy"

Tried it a few times, same result.

Without the scalability they are doomed.

[Sara]

Fox has been talking about Cuil all day, so my suggestion is to let the first day hoopla calm down and then look again.

[clarice]

It's quite good when it works..actually..

[Rick Ballard]

I still haven't had a problem with it.

Are you guys doing the right Google curse prior to opening Cuil? You know - 'May the ravenous hounds of hell pursue Google throughout eternity.'

It's the same one that's used for the New York Times. Seems to work pretty well.

[Seixon]

Same here, Tom. On Google I'm the first result for my name, and fill out a good portion of the hits on the first results page as well. On Cuil, I'm apparently not so important...

[kim]

If its meningioma he'll be alright; if not, not.
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[clarice]

Hi, Seixon--Hope you're okay. Miss you. Afraid you'd o.d'd on lutefisk or gjetost.

[Danube of Thought]

Google CEO is on the Obama economics advisory team.

[clarice]

Well, kim I had a nephew diagnosed several years ago with aggressive brain cancer--three or four years later there's no trace of it and he suffered no neurological damage in the surgery, radiation or chemo..We are getting some incredible results on brain cancer treatment.

[anduril]

I think Cuil is just a link to the "I feel lucky" button on Google.

[kim]

Hi G. Hey, Dale in Atlanta was just here the other day. I'm wasting my essence on DotEarth lately.
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[mockmook]

The word is COOL

[M. Simon]

I own "M. Simon" and "Power and Control" with or without quotes.

So there.

I'm also quite popular with "Mr. Fusion".

BTW blogging on obscure topics gives you a higher rating.

I think Google also gives extra points for blogspot blogs.

[M. Simon]

Another ranking trick: post something every day.

Comment a lot elsewhere.