The Social Networker

by Chris Miller at 01:33:59 PM on Monday, July 28th, 2008
When you see one of the previous engineers from Google search, that also happened to invent a search technology that Google bought, state they went out on their own and made a better one, you jump to try it.   Apparently no one said that when I jumped there was no safety net.  Incredibly disappointing to start.  You cannot make such a large boast, open your doors and have empty shelves in the store

Cuil (pronounced 'cool') is currently, appropriately named.  As it is not hot, nor does it give better results so far.  It just opened today for processing searches.  I get that much.  But I did not expect the disappointment I received after reading this:
For starters, Cuil's search index spans 120 billion Web pages.

Patterson believes that's at least three times the size of Google's index, although there is no way to know for certain. Google stopped publicly quantifying its index's breadth nearly three years ago when the catalog spanned 8.2 billion Web pages.

Cuil won't divulge the formula it has developed to cover a wider swath of the Web with far fewer computers than Google. And Google isn't ceding the point: Spokeswoman Katie Watson said her company still believes its index is the largest.

After getting inquiries about Cuil, Google asserted on its blog Friday that it regularly scans through 1 trillion unique Web links. But Google said it doesn't index them all because they either point to similar content or would diminish the quality of its search results in some other way. The posting didn't quantify the size of Google's index.

While I still have hopes that the results will get strong as they finish cleaning and updating, for now you are still getting better results elsewhere.  This is a hard start for anyone wishing to challenge Google in searching.  I did appreciate the limited filter to attempt to provide a clean filter, mainly when doing demos and such on stage and don't like Google surprises.  While not perfect, it did a decent job.

The suggestions of alternate searches was also very welcome and did pen some doors to sites I might have missed with my query.  It was not clear that is what the site did until I clicked around the top some when I first tried searches.

Image:Suggesting Cuil made me look like a fool (for now)

The results are shown in blocks (much like Alltop and any other widget looking site) instead of one long column.  This leads you to see things a bit easier, yet the actual results were highly scattered or missing.  Simple searches for my own names (TheSocialNetworker and IdoNotes) returned some hits, but not even the pages of the sites themselves.   Give it a shot, since I know you will.

  • 1) Suggesting Cuil made me look like a fool (for now)
    Created by Scott Marchione at 07/28/2008 3:34:49 PM email | website

    Check out the results when you do a search for Lotus Notes, the "Explore by Category" section seems to suggest that most of the listings are from Microsoft... funny, and not so funny at the same time.



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Yes this is a blatant theft of the outline that Jess uses on her page, but I asked permission. Why?? Because I am a hardcore admin and can make ugly tables to make you developers frustrated, but this was too nice to pass up.

Also Known As: Chris Miller (when awake)

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This will take far more time than I have today. I will start with I was born and still live in St. Louis, MO. Even though for a couple years I was never, ever here and always on the road, this is smack in the middle of the US. Everything is just a few hour flight. That part is nice. No beach/ocean/coast isn't the best. But with the travel I make up for it.

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