Chris Linfoot | Ego surfing with Cuil

Tuesday, 29. July 2008

Ego surfing with Cuil

Oh my!

Isn't Volker looking youthful these days?

The hair! The absence of even a single pair of spectacles!

But those ears are, well, a little more sticky out than I remember...

In case you hadn't guessed yet, that is the result of a Cuil search for Volker Weber (1, 2), and the picture isn't Volker at all. It's Random Man.

Volker isn't the only one thus afflicted. Here's Kevin Allman, who has the same issue.

And let's not forget our own Vitor Pereira.

This whole Cuil thing is beginning to bore me.

Yes, they used to work for Google.
Yes, they raised a lot of money to start Cuil.
Yes, they say they have advanced algorithms and yada yada yada.
Yes, they've been in stealth mode (3) for the past few months, putting the finishing touches to... What exactly?

A search engine that often fails to return relevant results and, when it does, fails to do so consistently.

A search engine that was under such heavy load (4) yesterday that it often returned nothing but an apology.

Guys, you need to do a lot better than that, and very quickly, if you are serious about taking on Google.

Am I alone in being so underwhelmed by the whole thing?

Not quite.

Volker sums it up neatly, but our old friend Google Blog Search seems to turn up a fair number of positive, or at least guardedly neutral opinions. Perhaps they all bought stock.

Cuil, please

Fix your image engine, or turn it off.
Add capacity, and quickly.
Cache results, so that users see consistent result sets between one click and the next.
Tweak that relevancy algorithm so that results are, well, relevant.

Now that you've taken the wraps off, you have a very limited amount of time to prove yourselves and you may not get a second chance.

I couldn't search for myself. I told you. Cuil does not index me at my own request.
Don't all follow that link at once. Cuil's servers appear to have capacity issues.
Remember, this is what stealth looks like.
Google probably answers more searches in a single minute than Cuil answered all day yesterday, but maybe Cuil didn't expect any traffic given their coordinated media splash?

Category: Google
Technorati: Cuil Google