Like everyone else I watched the frenzy over the launch of Cuil, a new search engine founded by several ex-Googlers.
After using it a bit, there is definitely something nice and elegant about Cuil, and I noticed that Matt was going to use it for a few days to get a better sense of it as well.
As I’m sure 99% of people do, I typed in my own name to see what results would come back, and was shocked by the results 🙂
On the one hand, it correctly identifies me as a multi-dimensional athlete – baseball, basketball, and boxing ( thai kick boxing in my case ).
On the other hand, it appears that Matt has taken over my “look & feel” UI aspects, as it clearly shows his head-shot on my blog.
So why is Cuil showing these results ? How does Cuil have the confidence and “chutzpah” to make these associations ? Ouriel may have stumbled on the answer based on his recent post to twitter:
“CUIL in French is like “Balls” (the dirty meaning)”
Ahh ! Now it all makes sense 🙂
But seriously — it’s good to see another search engine play – and hope we see some great innovation and search improvements overall.
Raanan Bar-Cohen 
They should have gone with http://www.Coil.com/ instead of Cuil.com
Coil.com is:
– Easy to pronounce
– Easy to spell
– Catchy
– Short
– Memorable
The should have also done a private Alpha and Beta launch to work out some of the bugs before launching their search engine to the public. 10 years ago, this launch would have been ok because the quality of search engines were lower. Today, most people have used Google for many years and in order to be a “Google Killer”, new search engines have to surpass Google’s high standard. The privacy policy is nice but just doesn’t produce the “wow” factor.
LOL!
As part of my deal with blogging about them they agreed to put my headshot (taken by Dries of Drupal) on everybody’s search results. See also:
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=lorelle&sl=long
Haha, “cuil” is Irish for “back” as in “cuil an ti” is “back of the house”. Never heard of it being the Irish for knowledge, but ancient Irish is practically a different language.
Looks like it’s improved in the last 2 days. Typing “donncha” brings up several different options including my name which is good for the ol’ ego. Unfortunately it doesn’t show ocaoimh.ie at all for some reason.
I have two reports that cuil.com gets confused by the auto generated robots.txt in some WordPress installs. For some reason WP redirects to robots.txt/ like this one. That doesn’t happen on ocaoimh.ie but it still doesn’t show for a “donncha” search. Strange.
I was also curious and tried CUIL out. It was a total disappointment for me. I did a simple search on “olympic beijing taipei” with Google and got 1,260,000 hits, while with Cuil only received 19 hits. If you compare it with Google, you will immediately notice there are so many features missing with Cuil, such as doing a search using Boolean operators and searching webpage based on a specific timeline (i.e. in the last 24 hour). Cuil is a total disappointment and a waste of time.