A Cuil Search Engine is Born - Relevance Matters
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Now for the bad news: Cuil's results are uneven at best, and truly awful at worst. In my initial search on Washington, DC tourism, the web site for the Washington DC embassy of Turkmenistan came up. Now I have nothing against Turkmenistan, but its embassy in DC is probably near the bottom of the list of places I plan to visit on my fall vacation.
Danny Sullivan tested Cuil's relevancy in some detail and also found it wanting, especially when compared to Google's results. But that's not the only problem. Cuil presented other peculiarities that turned up even in the few searches I did.
For example, when I clicked through to “Washingon Monument” as a category suggested by Cuil on one of my searches, I got a page that said “We didn't find any results for “washington dc tourism Washington Monument.” That's ridiculous on the face of it – but also, if Cuil didn't have any results for that, why did it direct me there? Another time I tried clicking through a category, Cuil said it found a few thousand results – but only showed me one, which wasn't actually relevant.
The issue of relevance haunts Cuil in other ways. I have seen comments around the web that many of the images Cuil uses in results aren't relevant to those results, and don't even appear on the page with which Cuil associates them. The most egregious example of this was reported by The Register, when one of their readers, a quantum researcher named Dr. Jonathan Grattage, did an ego search. The results that turned up, though apparently leading to information about the good doctor, included images of American soldiers and other males that (one assumes) looked nothing like him.
What is going on here? Cuil, since it is new, is getting slammed with lots of searches – more than its founders expected this early in the game. But it is returning results quickly. Rafe Needleman, in reviewing the issue in his blog, explained what was going on. The way Cuil is set up, a traffic spike won't slow it down, but it will make its results less accurate. “This is because Cuil isn't set up as a massively parallel search network the way, say, Google is...Each of Cuil's search appliances is specialized to a particular subcategory of results. There are machines that understand and index sports; other are experts on medicine...As these search machines get overloaded...they drop offline for some queries, and the machines left online return less-than-relevant results that then appear at the top of users' pages.”
This probably isn't going to win Cuil many friends or fans. Some observers said the search engine launched too soon. That's entirely possible, though it had to launch sometime, and obviously the founders believed it was ready. Remember, though, that it is literally a brand-new search engine. How accurate was Google when it first came out, when compared to today? Cuil needs a little time to get its feet under it. Whether it will get that time in this highly competitive field is another question. I wish them luck.
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