Page 2 - Ex-Google Employees Coming Up With a SE..

I am just suprised that with $33 million behind it they rolled out such a flawed first impression. They had tons of free press and blew it in my mind.

We just pubbed an article on this today. I saw a post from someone who asked one of the major Cuil guys why the results were so bad. Cuil's setup isn't parallel; they have some machines that specialize in sports, some that specialize in medicine, etc. So when they get hit hard by searchers, it doesn't slow them down...but when the more relevant machines for a particular search drop offline because they're overloaded, less relevant machines pick up the slack. So instead of slowing down due to load, you get worse results. Just in case you were wondering.

Again I am surprised that they would roll out without ability to handle this without machines going down because they are busy.

I agree; the sad thing is that so many companies never quite anticipate the traffic they end up getting, so Cuil is hardly unique in this regard. Should they have known better? That could certainly be argued, since there are ex-Googlers on board.

I'm a little reluctant to ding them too hard for this, because it's such a widespread problem. If they're still returning lousy results in a month, however, after they've had a little time to scale up further and the traffic's gone down a bit from the initial spike, I'll start to wonder.

I was shocked, how come they have the biggest index and still come up with less relevant results to Google.

The bigger the index, the better the results because of more choices available. I think they need to improve how they return relevant results, or else the big index is not efficient.

Actually, Emerson, that's not necessarily true. Just because you have more options to choose from doesn't mean the additional options are more relevant. You could have an algorithm that isn't great at picking out relevant options, in which case more options won't help. Or the additional pages you're indexing could be spammy. Or any one of a number of possibilities.

Size and relevance don't equate, which is one of the reasons the major search engines stopped talking about the size of their indexes.

cuil.com --

The layout isn't terrible, I like the idea of it, just needs some work.

The image idea is pretty cool, but questionable - like EGOL said many won't even read the title or descriptions anymore. - Also where are they grabbing these images from? they are using images for my site and others that are not anywhere to be found on the site and in some cases are completely unrelated to the search or KW.

They have a lot of spam to take care of - for one KW i saw 6 of the same authority domain with multiple spammer profile pages in the top 10.

I also like the tabs they use to suggest other similar searches.

Not sure if its from previous searches in other engines on my browser or not, but they were immediately able to finish 90% of the KW's I searched for before finishing them.

Best thing about them? They are bringing a bit of traffic to my Google BANNED domain from a few years back

It's funny you should mention that last point MadisonSEO. When I did some Cuil-related searches earlier today (in Google, of course), I saw that some writers had made posts about using Cuil as a way to tell how good your SEO is, or as an SEO tool in some other way. I didn't click through to read the articles, but your comment brought that to mind.

I really like Cuil's interface too.

I also noticed in several places that they are using photos from competitor A on competitor B's listing. I would think that opens them up for a lawsuit. What are they thinking?

I would be very pi**ed off if my copyrighted photos were used to promote a competitor!

My listing by the way shows my own photo, but I'll be watching for misuse.

UPDATE: Just did more searches using less popular terms for my site. One listing for my site has a photo that is not mine!
What? What? Get the lawyers!

UPDATE #2: Just found an instance where one of my original copyrighted photos is used on another sites listing!

Ed

This is a big problem. I would never accept my hard designed and or earned images being used to "attract" visits to a competitors site. This is a bug they will have to fix I believe...

...This is a bug they will have to fix

Yep - The first time a listing for chevrolet.com brings up a photo of a Ford, watch the corporate attorney fun begin!

In my case, I sell blue widgets. The listing shown for my site, for a less popular phrase, shows a red widget that is not my photo. That is going to lead to customers emailing asking, "Where do I order the red widget? Or worse yet, not bother visiting my site because the photo is mis-leading.

This is a stupid plan, but easy to fix. If the photo ain't from the site listed - don't show it! They have every right to display a snippet from my site. They don't have a right to mis-represent my company and its products. And they don't have a right to use copyrighted photos to promote a competitor.

Not ready for Prime Time. My guess is the financial backers insisted on going live before the SE was ready. Too bad, they could have had a great launch. The laughter at Google must be deafening.

Ed

Searches on Cuil for my keywords pull up images from my site that are much less relevant than others. They could fix this by showing a thumbnail screenshot of the page. This way you can tell right away whether you've been there before, whether it looks well built, or whether it's a spammy piece of garbage built in frontpage. If they did that, you may find people forced to build more visually appealing sites.

Seems like their index is about the size the hard drive on my crappy Dell Latitude.

I like the initial presentation when the page first opens, but the results layout needs improvement. It's a bit cluttered and I don't really like the 3-column look.

The results were interesting, but not what I was expecting. I ran a test with a 2-phrase keyword that scores high for one of my sites. Results:

Google: 1st page, 1st listing (Results 1-10 out of 1,540,000)
Cuil: 1st page, center, top (Results out of 59,724,014 results)

Just about every phrase where I score first place on Google reflects more or less the same results for Cuil, but for an astronomical number of result pages.

What do you guys make of this?

I think the results are terrible.

For one I don't show very well, one example for a term I rank first for: 432,000 results on Google, No results in cull (note the spelling)

another is that for a term that I haven't used in a longg time, nearly a year on a domain I haven't used in a year is showing for another result so where are they pulling their results from? if they have been collecting info for over a year now it's time to check what they found a year ago...b/c it may not exist anymore!