A cuil new google?

http://www.cuil.com/

Im gonna start using this for a bit instead for a bit of a change, it seems to be quite good and i like the way it lays out the results. There also (appears) to be less adverts but cant say for def because i have not used it enough.

History:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7528503.stm

PS: Ive just worked out how to add it to firefox3's search bar tool. Just visit the page, click on the dropdown menu (probably with google's "G") and choose to "add cuil". Lol i spent ages looking for an option to add a search tool. You just have to visit the page first! Well, ya learn sommit new every day dontcha :P

I searched for "Blitz basic" and it returned nothing, not a good start

Lol give it a chance to spider, its only just been started. It seems to have found everything ive been after so far.

Anyway, try blitzbasic or blitz3d ;)

IT looks good, but it seems to take forever to make a search...

I dunno, I think google is so established by now, it won't go away and nothing could be a serious competition to it, ever. It's like Microsoft, somewhat.. :P

Hehe could be all the media attention its getting. Everyone is trying it at once.
I bet their servers are moaning. It was really fast this morning before the UK woke up.

According to their "blurb" they have the worlds largest index :/

Time will tell, gonna give them TBOTD anyway and see.

Searched for Blitz Basic and it came up with the correct links, but several incorrect images (like EasyTOK logo for blitzbasic.com).

The site is black, and its got a stupid name.

I'll give it six months, tops.

I like it. Anything is better than Google.

Google buy their serach tech and incorporate it. 2 months, tops. This is probably what the founders were hoping for.

I don't like it. Maybe I'm too used to Google now...

Doesn't exactly inspire confidence...

They're just waiting for the server to cuil down... :/

Not gonna happen. According to a recent (as of today) Yahoo! article, cuil has been created by two ex-Google programmers!!! They broke off from the company. I smell a rat here; I think Google's great, personally, but they've gotten so big that other corporations are starting to feel threatened. The $4 billion starting bid that Google put in for the 700Mhz analog airwave range doesn't exactly help, either. Unless they watch themselves, they could really get pummeled.



XD

Seriously, what idiot thought that "Cuil" could POSSIBLY be pronounced "KOOL?" I thought it was "KYOO-wil" or something when I first saw it. XP

I'll stick with Google but thanks for the heads-up.

My thoughts: it's black (not good) and it's slow (also not good) and it's not a guid name (sic).

First search I tried came back with nothing, after that it seemed to freeze, back to google for me...

It has been extremely fast for me. :/ They probably have some first-day issues to get fixed. I am sure they have got more visitors today than expected.

I'll stick with Clusty.

+

Slow..and...Slow.

Google has never, ever failed to give me results faster than a heartbeat. Even a 1-2 second delay between VERY simple searches is discouraging from those two sites.

Sorry, but i'll shop at wal-mart if they have something cheaper. This reminds me of a linux debate or something to go against big corporations..=/

Everybody likes stuff until it becomes mainstream.

Its like there's some overwhelming desire to use something that's different to what everybody else uses, regardless of whether its any better or not.

I have a feeling some of the people reporting it as slow are using FireFox.

Either that or they don't have enough BAUDs. ;)

...

I don't normally use FireFox, but I just fired up version 3 and Cuil was slower than Opera 9.51 (which Cuil is almost instantaneous in).

So far I really like Cuil. It is nice to search without being innundated with all of the google ads.

So, can you actually search for images with Cuil?

http://www.fool.com/investing/high-growth/2008/07/28/will-cuil-kill-google.aspx

Interesting opinions. I actually like the black, its different and easy on the eyes. I actually set my ide's to black/darker when coding and use a dark theme on my GUI.

Google has ground to a halt on a few occasions especially in the early days, and has been ddosed once or twice. Dont forget this is a new site with possibly a fraction of the servers google has. The news releases around the world have probably steared more traffic than they can handle.

There is. Why be a sheep? If all men started wearing make up because others were doing it and it was better for your skin, doesn't mean i would. Even if some giant makeup corporation insisted i should.

Mindlessly doing the opposite of everyone else is just as sheeplike as mindlessly doing the same as everyone else. It just makes you a black sheep.

People typically live in groups, and thus adapt to whatever anyone else is doing. If not, you're either eccentric, an artist or dumb. :-) So yea, ppl will continue using google I guess.., besides, googling is kinda like a verb or expression already, can't say that yahoo'ing (etc.) is a known verb or expression. I think that once something has settled in society, such as google being the de facto search machine, there's no way you can really change that.

In the early years I used Yahoo mainly. Then switched to google for reasons I can not remember.

This cuil is awful, not because of the server issues at the moment but because it's output does not flow. The two / three column view is not as easy as scanning down a straight line list. Too much eye work is involved (especially on wide screen monitors) looking across, then down, then bypassing the large site blurb to read the next site title.

Even the columns are not formatted correctly, the titles in each column should be inline with each other to make it easier to scan read.

I hope they improve it and give some option to view results in a more traditional easier to read style.

Going against the grain isnt mindless at all and certainly not sheep like, its called independent thinking.
A lot of times it leads to something better, other times not. If you don't try you will never know, and if nobody did it we would still all be living in caves, cooking on open fires and thinking the horizon was the big drop-off.

I do agree with qube though, the output seems a bit weird results wise, but i do like the formatting. Maybe its not a breath of fresh air at all, time will tell i guess.

Going against the grain is neither automatically mindless nor automatically intelligent. If you do it without thinking, which was what you indicated, that is - by definition - mindless.

What you describe isn't independent thinking at all, it's completely dependant upon what everyone else does, and no thinking is involved.

People who think for themselves will at least sometimes do what the mainstream does because they don't care and may not even know what the mainstream is doing.

Going against the grain IS mindless if it's just for the sake of going against the grain. Cuil is shit. Using it because everyone else is using Google is dumb.

Much you have to learn.

Meehhhh.

No results because of high load...

Due to excessive load, our servers didn't return results. Please try your search again.

I searched for "Blitzmax" and the first pic I see is "Fairway Solitaire"... I doubt we'll see GreyAlien complaining about this new engine ;-)

It seems to work nicely.

It will never catch on due to one unfixable problem, the name. No one will ever remember the spelling. If I were them I would do whatever it takes to secure cool.com. You would think these ex google employees would know better. In the mean time, with the word spreading around about a new "cool" search engine, guess which domain name should cash in on the extra traffic thrown at them? ;)

But ya, it's slow right now, results are vague, I typed in several relevant terms only to get nada. They have a long way to go, but that domain name is horrid. No generic user will ever get the spelling in their head. cuil? cull? ciuel? jeesh....

For a place that claims to have a multitude of Google's # of indexed sites, I find it to perform rather poorly -- several of the word I entered show 0 returns, or significantly less (like ~20% or so) than google does.

For example: xlsior -> 0 in cuil, 3,680 in google.

While the results page looks nice-ish, I agree with JGOware: their name will be a big hindrance. Noone will know how to spell it, which is a deathblow in a market where everything revolves around brand recognition.

Cuil will never beat Google. Google is more then just search, it is blogger, page creator, maps, code, email, news (iGoogle), shopping, video.. and has special searching capabilities, like images and books.

Just like Google will never beat Yahoo. Right? Because you know, Yahoo is more than just search.

:)

My views...

Some people may struggle to remember how to spell a four letter word, but that really isn't an issue as once you have it bookmarked, all you have to do is click. People said Nintendo was nuts for choosing the name Wii, but the Wii has dethroned the competition. Heck, I still have never actually seen a Wii in a store so I can buy one (seen plenty of PS3s and 360s though).

As a whole, people have become lazy when it comes to using proper search criteria because of Google's ability to produce tens of thousands of irrelevant results for any searched criteria. I appreciate being shown results for what I am searching for instead of endless links that have nothing to do with what I am looking for. As a bonus, Cuil's Drilldown is pure genious IMHO.

Cuil is made by the people who helped make Google one of the best search engines before it focused all its creative efforts into ad marketing and online business apps. Cuil is designed by the same gal who deisgned the previous largest search engine Recall. Cuil is a search engine and that is all it does and all it should do.

How did i indicate that?
Sounds to me you are just trolling for an argument and anyway i agree with you. Unless the 'grain' is doing it a worse way than the other way offers. You don't know until you try something properly and do some proper independent thinking, which was blatantly my point.
Obviously if there was a volcanic eruption id probably run in the same direction as everyone else :)

Erm, Im not, what gave you that idea? Im using google as well.


As for Cuil i dunno if its better or not yet, as i said, time will tell. Im not overly impressed at the range of results it returns at the moment. At least i am prepared to give something a chance.

From what i can see so far:
Pros:
-Drilldown is a very good tool.
-They keep no data at all on you.
-The look is good, i like the minimal black and the layout of results is nice
-No ads.
Cons:
-Couldnt find advanced options
-Dont like the the name but who cares.
-Couldnt find an image search
-Results seem a little odd when searching for some things.

How about if you were on one of those islands where the villagers saw the eruption as the act of an angry god and the only way to appease the god was to run and jump into the volcano and spewing lava? Bet you would run the opposite way of everybody else, huh?

LOL... Sorry...

LOL, A perfect example of when going against the grain, fueled by independent thinking (and common sense) applies.

:D

What nice search keywords do they have? You know, like all the crazy stunts you can pull off with google. (site, -, filter by date, etc). Also, I don't see any image search...

oo, I like Clusty Retimer

I wish it were white.

When it comes to searching for stuff on the internet you typically read posts like :

Noob: "I can't find anything about x/y/z on t'internet?"
Regular: "Have you tried googling it?"

That sort of synonymous referal to Google will be hard for any company to break. I cannot imagine people going around saying,

"Hey, I found out details on that formula by Cuiling it(!)"

Google = Search engine. Much like how people say Sellotape instead of sticky tape and Hoover instead of Vacuum cleaner. Both being the actual company name rather than the product in question


> Other contenders include Teoma, Vivisimo, Snap, Mahalo and Powerset

Never heard of them. Enough said!

i tried a search
it found oodles of results
yet only gave me 1 page with 6 links on it ?!?

edit:
i agree with the brand names becoming generic terms
im always telling 'the idiot' to google it when he phones me up and asks me a stupid question that i dont have the time or inclination to answer

that and "im not mistic fing meg"

Very true. I agree, when your brand name becomes a term its a powerful thing.
Although i remember at a few years ago we all used to "yahoo" stuff. (And I have an electrolux but i still 'hoover' the floor :)

@ginger tea, did you see the menu at the top? try clicking on "more" and it allows you to narrow it down really quickly.

It definitely needs more options though (like number of returned results per page) and the menu search seems buggy sometimes. (eg search for "blitz" click more and choose any of them, they all work except "blitz basic" for some odd reason).

I love the way the little images beside the results seem to be (mostly) completely random :-)

It isn't dragging me away from Google yet, but I'll keep an eye on it.

cuilwhack just doesnt sound the same ;)

It's kind of pretty, but that's about it. The results it returned for the searches I tried were not at all what I was looking for, and the pictures they put next to everything had nothing to do with the topic.

I can't see myself ever using it again.

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1827331,00.html?cnn=yes

Quite a chaotic layout... I guess there's a reason why other search engines present the results in a non-chaotic way after all!

I have to scroll down while moving my view from left to right and back across the columns, and the titles aren't vertically aligned so you have to look a bit up and down too, and in addition the results disappear at the right edge so I also have to scroll horizontally and then back again? Maybe it's designed for wide-screen monitors only?

Edit: selecting the 2 columns view fixed the horizontal scrolling.

I tried editing the link to create a 1 column view but it gave an error message that the 1 column view had been disabled.

http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2008/07/29/how-cool-is-cuil/

The black background doesn't do my eyes any favours, with the sharp contasting white search box. I probably won't use anything other than google, unless google fails to find what i need. I don't care about it being a massive company, and they steal your private information

<insert more bad stuff about google>

It suits my purpose :o)

If google fails me and Cuil finds it, than i'll switch over. I think that's what they are up against though...

New update on "CUIL"

Seems like it is a website killer, read the following :

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/01/is-cuil-killing-websites/

Ouch.

I just tried it, seems fast but doesn't find much. No image search which I use extensively. Hardly found anything I searched for, and then out of interest I turned off safe search, and searched for something naughty 'Boobs'. The first hit I got was...

The Ultimate Guide to Man Boobs - Dood Boobs

Bit of a shock that, made me laugh though. I think I'll leave safe mode on in future ;P

Hahaha... a lesson learned, the hard way. >:)