Having a strong interest in search engines, I woke up this morning and promptly took a look at cuill, the new search engine at www.cuill.com. I'm sure you can find 100 news articles on it if you want.
The first thing I always look for, naturally, is myself. One of the blessings of having a near-unique name is that searching for oneself is quite easy. Indeed, I'm sure that in the future everyone will be trying to have an essentially unique name, if only so they can register their name as a domain on the Internet without conflict. (Hey, I just looked up Mike Smith -- currently Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard -- and he shows up 3rd on Google for me. I'm impressed -- for such a common first-last name combo, that's pretty high up!)
Color me unimpressed with Cuill. They did put my homepage up first, with the nice picture of the cover of my book. After that, a lot of stuff from citeseer and such -- so you can quickly get titles/descriptions of some my papers, but it doesn't seem the best use of the real estate on the page. As a comparison, Cuill suggests it has 22,992 results for Mitzenmacher. Google suggests it has 63,700. While not perfect, Google will pretty quickly get you to my home page, my publications page, my blog, my book (on Amazon), my DBLP entry, and a few of my papers, which seems a better set of results than what Cuill currently gives.
A few other tests suggested what I expected (since every once in a while a new search engine pops up, and the story is often the same). It's good, but not great. It seems a little slow, but perhaps that will get better (it might be getting hit overmuch by a lot of curious people like me). But your mileage may vary, and it's always interesting when a new search engine opens up to the world.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Just to nitpick: although 'cuill.com' does redirect, it actually is 'cuil.com', just one l. We will have to wait and watch, if cuil can do something cuil..
As an aside, isn't it interesting how so many people search for their names? I wonder if these search engines analyze logs of their first few days of operation, and are able to effectively associate a person's identity with his/her IP address.
I read this entire blog post and wrote this comment in the time it took for cuil to return a list of results for a search on (of course) my name. And it's still searching...
I'd be interested to read what you have to say about plans for your kids elementary education.
Some time ago, one of my sites received a ton of traffic from a relatively new spider. After researching the source it turned out to be cuill's spider crawling the web for content at an unacceptable speed.
In my research I found thousands of webmasters who experienced the same hyperactive spider robbing bandwidth/resources.
As a result of Cuill's spider's activity, thousands of sites requested to be removed from their spidering. Cuill obliged, possibly to the detriment of their SERPs.
1. Will these same webmasters want to be indexed by Cuill's spider now? Doubtful.
2. Will this have an adverse affect on Cuill's results? Absolutely.
3. Will Cuill remove the requested bans in order to improve their search results to keep their investors happy? It's hard to say.
Post a Comment