July 28, 2008
New Search Engine Generates Buzz Among Librarians
Some former Google employees have introduced a new search engine that they hope will overtake Google in popularity. The search engine is called Cuil, (pronounced “cool”) and it has been generating so much interest that its home page could not be opened at various points today.
Tom Costello, a former Stanford University researcher and one of the founders of the search engine, said Cuil culls through 120 billion Web pages, more pages than Google searches, according to an article today in The New York Times. But Google tells the paper it has the largest collection of documents searchable on the Web, and that it welcomes competition.
Cuil displays search results a bit differently from Google. Entries are longer and there are more pictures with the entries.
Bill Drew, a librarian at Tompkins Courtland Community College in New York, writes on his blog today that he was impressed with Cuil results after doing a search on his name. “The search retrieved over 160 hits spread over 19 pages of search results,” he writes “All appear to be very relevant. I was amazed at the depth of the results as well. It included many book reviews I wrote back in the early 1990s.”—Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Monday July 28, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
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I found that the results were definitely different than what I get with Google, so I am trying it out. So far, I like it.
— Rita Kaiser Jul 28, 05:27 PM #
Other than the inclusion of a picture of someone who is no longer at our campus (and is male, besides), I’ve found a lot of new stuff when searching on my own name.
I also found an article about our campus branding project I’d never seen—a copy is now in our history files.
— Leora Kemp Jul 28, 05:37 PM #
Arnold hit it correctly. The article title is absurd. Given the article just came out about it I suspect most “librarians” have no idea it exists!
As for search quality, I searched for a digital collection we recently made available. It’s the first hit in a google search but didn’t show up at all on Cuil. Hmmm?
— GB Jul 28, 08:36 PM #
I am a librarian and have been examining Cuil doing subject searches and have not found it to be any greater/better than existing engines. Try the searches mesopotamia and irrigation. The issue is not the number of sites searched but the quality of those sites. As well, the other issue is that no matter if you are searching for apples or oranges, you are still searching in the same fruitstand. To create an engine that searches like no other, it has to have quality material to choose from and sadly, like that saying about TV, there may be 1 billion webpages out there but there still ain’t anything good to watch!
— Marilyn Jul 28, 10:36 PM #
We’ve been looking at it for a couple of days…before the article came out. I can’t see that the results are better. Google’s advanced techniques create much better lists, and a straight search often provides more relevant hits. Sorry Cuill. Maybe later.
— linda bartnik Jul 29, 08:12 AM #
Searched with Cuil for some hard-to-find documents I had retrieved with Google; there weren’t indexed. So far, nothing interesting vice versa. However Cuil is more likely to place library catalogue entries (if paired with apparently irrelevant photos) on the first page. This might be a good way to locate books, but wouldn’t librarians recommend Worldcat for that instead?
— ET Jul 29, 08:26 AM #
I am a librarian, I teach a module on search engines, and I am less than impressed with this search engine. They cannot even return their own website on the first page of hits. A search for copyright infringement did not return any useful results. The first hit was a wikipedia article as was with Google, but the second hit in Google was the copyright code, not so much in Cuil. By the way, can you hear any saying “did you cuil yourself lately?” as opposed to Google yourself, Ask yourself…this was not thought out well.
— RS Jul 29, 08:26 AM #
Working for Birmingham City Council in the UK, I did a search under “Birmingham UK”. With Google, the Council’s website is the second hit. I couldn’t find it after searching 10 pages of Cuil!
— Steve H Jul 29, 08:35 AM #
I tried a Cuil search for my name Steven S. Clark and got zero hits, whereas a google search results in a couple dozen hits.
That does not generate enthusiasm.
— Steven S. Clark, PhD Jul 29, 08:41 AM #
I agree with #3 that searching for one’s name is hardly “a true measure of the value of a search engine.” However, my name is the name of a major character in a classic film from the 1960s that was recently redone (in 2004): The Manchurian Candidate. There are thousands of websites reviewing the movie(s) — it is a political thriller with relevance to both historical periods in which the two versions were released, and many, many people have discussed that relevance, as well as discussing the movie itself (afterall, the original had Frank Sinatra just acting – no singing – and the remake had Denzel Washington!).
As a result, finding links that are about me (a real flesh and blood Raymond Shaw, a very kind, warm, gentle guy, if I say so myself) involves weeding through all the sites about the movie.
Google finds “about” 344,000 sites for ‘Raymond Shaw’, Cuil only 68,579. In Google, I found myself in the first 10 hits, and 3 times in the first 100. In Cuil, I’m not to be found.
Google’s hits are on all kinds of Raymond Shaws, Cuil’s are all about the movie(s), pretty much. A useful search engine should provide a lot of variety, rather than just hit after hit on the same topic within the search term’s range of topics.
I did like the pictures that Cuil puts next to each hit. However, in one case that I noticed, the picture on Cuil was from the remake, but the actual website was about the original version (and the picture Cuil used did not appear on the site). In another case, Cuil provided a picture from one of the two movies, but the site was about a real Raymond Shaw, and it had a picture of that real person, and none from either movie.
So the pictures are bogus in at least some instances.
Another thing I found odd was that there were supposed to be 68,579 hits, but I don’t know how I would see all of them, because I went through 253 hits, and then could go no further on Cuil. I don’t get it.
Bottom line is that Cuil doesn’t appear to really work well at all, based on a search for my name (which perhaps does meet #3’s criterion of cultural relevance).
— Raymond Shaw Jul 29, 08:42 AM #
It’s official—GB (#4) is an idiot.
— bigfruitbasket Jul 29, 08:54 AM #
My first (and only) experience with Cuil did not yield any useful results, and, like #11, the ‘hits’ bore no resemblance to the results. And I got no hits at all on a couple searches that didn’t seem all that odd/rare.
— Allison Jul 29, 09:50 AM #
My own name search results:
Cuil = 626 hits
Google = 4, 420 hits
The quality of Cuil’s output displays may be superior, but they’ve got a ways to go to compete with the sheer size of Google’s index.
— Carolyn Jul 29, 09:59 AM #
Raymond Shaw’s comment (#11) could be instructive. If you do an advanced search in Google you can omit “Manchurian” and “movie” from the search criteria, which now retrieves 14,200 references instead of 344,000. Narrow that down a bit more and you may indeed find yourself.
I have not tried Cuil.
— Henry Jul 29, 10:00 AM #
Clusty.com is still my favorite search engine.
— Bob Jul 29, 10:52 AM #
I tried a variety of different searches for videos I produced, awards won, etc. It was extremely weak. I hope they improve it, because right now it seems to be missing 99% of what I already know is out there and comes up in Google with no problem… Thumbs down for now…
— Timothy O'Brien Jul 29, 11:16 AM #
I did a search on my name as well. The thing that strikes me as the oddest are the images attached to the entries. Two photos were men who were not me, and a third was a woman who is not me. Then there was an entry for a page at the Oregon State Library, and the image was the seal for something like the Oregon State Maritime Board.
— Bernie S Jul 29, 04:19 PM #
I don’t like the CUIL displays at all.
It’s almost like CUIL’s business model is: If we make our site look as little like Google as possible, people will think we’re “cool”. Here’s another obvious example of the “not Google” approach. Google’s homepage is mostly white space. CUIL’s homepage is, you guessed it, mostly BLACK space. Maybe they’re trying to be the anti-Google?
— Bernie S Jul 29, 05:13 PM #
Bernie S.‘s observation about images not corresponding to the links matches my experience with this search engine. I did a search on the name Barry Guitar, a faculty member at the University of Vermont who does research on stuttering. The first and third entries (going from left to right) are not about Barry Guitar, but they have pictures that appear to be of him. The second entry is about books by Dr. Guitar, but the picture appears to be of somebody else. By the way, if you search for Barry Guitar on Google, the first entry is for his University of Vermont Web page.
— Charles Jul 29, 05:18 PM #
Given #16 – #!9, and my own experience, maybe they are just trying to do some odd advertising for Google by being really terrible and claiming to be the “anti-Google” ?
— Raymond Shaw Jul 29, 05:57 PM #
Forgot to add something about the images in Cuil…
One of the results when I search my name is a wiki biography about me…I am the subject of this wiki entry…and the accompanying photo is of a half dozen municipal mass-transit-type buses lined up in a parking lot!?!
— Bernie S Jul 29, 06:36 PM #
Is their motto “do no good”?
— K Jul 29, 11:22 PM #