Comments on: Cuil.com Gets Better

By: Ernesto

Ernesto — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 18:03:46 +0000

Its the end of a good search engine.

By: Karl

Karl — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:26:54 +0000

I found another niche search engine…. Gezzmo Search

By: Warming Up To Cuil | The Noisy Channel

Warming Up To Cuil | The Noisy Channel — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:57:18 +0000

[...] of the world–ignored it. And, just the other day, Stephen Arnold wrote a post entitled “Cuil.com Gets Better” that inspired me to take another look, even before seeing today’s post on Search [...]

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 04:13:53 +0000

Scale was never their problem–when they launched last July, they (including Dr. Patterson) claimed a Google-scale index but had terrible recall:

http://thenoisychannel.com/2008/07/28/not-as-cuil-as-i-expected/

Clearly they’ve used the intervening time to focus on improve the site rather than hyping it, and I’d say it now offers an experience that is at least competitive with Kosmix.

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=beyond+search
http://www.kosmix.com/topic/beyond_search

From an architecture point of view, it may not be fair to compare Cuil, which does its own crawling and indexing, with Kosmix, which federates results from other services. But they seem to be aiming for similar experiences, which is all that users care about. Though one advantage Cuil has is that, because it uses its own index, it is much faster than Kosmix.

In any case, I’m happy to see more attention going to exploratory search, and glad that a few companies are bold enough to try to make it work on the web. These are early efforts, but they are promising.

By: Stephen E. Arnold

Stephen E. Arnold — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:43:27 +0000

Daniel Tunkelang,

Perhaps Dr. Patterson has solved part of the problem. My information suggests that the Cuil.com index is Google scale.

Stephen Arnold, March 30, 2009

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:04:18 +0000

Thanks for getting me to take a look at Cuil again; I’ll admit that their over-hyped / under-delivered launch made me think I’d never try it again. They’ve definitely stepped up their game. But now I’d say the bar has gone up too. I’d say that they should be compared to Kosmix as their closest comparable in terms of interface goals. Both have warts; I’ll need to play with both for a while to decide which I like better.

As for the comparison with Endeca, I’d say it’s apples and oranges. The web is pretty different from the enterprise. Still, I commend them for trying to offer an Endeca-like experience on the open web–that’s ambitious. Or, as the folks at Microsoft would put it, “challenging”.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/sdumais/HCIR08-TeevanEtAl-Final.pdf