Cuil Misses Me
I just tried out Cuil, which is supposed to be amazing and better search engine, and what not (that’s what they told Mike Arrington). But it didn’t work for me.
I searched on “Chris Brogan” and found all kinds of relevant info, including random pictures not related to the text results beside the search, and none of them my main URL.
I searched on “chrisbrogan.com” and it couldn’t find my URL.
I searched on “chrisbrogan” and it found a bunch of social networks where I’ve used that username.
Call me egotistical, but if you can’t find yourself in a search engine after a decade of littering the web with your presence, I’m thinking it’s not much of a search engine.
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[…] Cuil Exits Stealth Mode With A Massive Search Engine — Menlo Park based Cuil will launch later this evening with an index of 120 billion web pages, making them arguably the most comprehensive search engine on the web (Google doesn’t disclose the size of their index, although they claim to know about a trillion unique web pages). Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket Discussion: New York Times, Webware.com and chrisbrogan.com […]
Hi Chris,
Although I am not as famous as you or anyone else, I do have a blog that is 4 years old and Cuil misses me too.
On Google and Yahoo, am # 1.
Regards,
SG
[…] appears I’m not the only one seeing issues with Cuil. Chris Brogan can’t find himself in Cuil, despite an established presence online. At the time of writing, Cuil seems to be teetering on fail […]
Cuil is facing a few challenging things (having to use space to say ‘pronounced cool’ is going to be the defacto one): The early crowd is going to be absolutely brutal on this– it’s getting hype that instantly puts it at the top of techmeme and the reports are coming in on how out-of-whack it is. I can forgive a lot of startups more than most people (since beta is the new gold master), but sheesh, the picture next to my blog is SEVEN years old, and not even from the same site.
Being put into the same category as Google (and I swear, TechCrunch set it up for failure accidentally it by hyping the size of the index), is going to amplify the scrutiny.
That, and I’ve already been yelled at by a Googler for saying ‘Google _____ on Cuil…” heh.
Those where the first two queries I did as well and quite disappointed with the results.
I didn’t even get any pictures :-(
Also, I could give a rip about privacy policy. I’m searching for things. Privacy is a variable that people are split over.
Same for me…I typed in Pat McGraw and the most relevant link was to was to a listing on MostPopularWebsites.com. Then I typed in http://www.mcgrawmarketing.com and got a listing on MyBlogLog.com.
Then, for grins, I typed in my employer - “laureate education”. I typed it in lowercase and as the choices popped up, “Laureate Education Inc.” came to the top of the list but I hit “search” and was told:
“We didn’t find any results for “laureate education”
Some reasons might be…
* a typo. Please check your spelling.
* your search includes a term that is very rare. Try to find a more common substitute.
* too many search terms. Please try fewer terms.
Finally, try to think of different words to describe your search.”
Oh well, just what the world needs…another search engine that allows advertisers to spend more money NOT targeting me based on anything more than a random search term.
[…] when blogger like cris brogan search for himself, Cuil missed him and same happened to me, though I am a new Blogger but Chris blog started on March 2004, which is an old […]
This misses me and several of the well established sites I’ve worked on. The name Cuil is a bit web 2.0-y isn’t it, thought things had moved on from the rather overdone mispelling/missing letters type names.
LOL… you are right about that, I went on and searched for my sites NOTHING. I also searched for several things and the results sucked, mostly bizarre random sites that were not very relevant even though I searched in quotes.
I found CUIL while reading your blog feed. I found another interesting thing there - they made the web quantifiable… I have written a post on it:
http://www.oddseo.com/2008/07/cuil-is-not-big-search-engine.html
Here’s my first attempt at a search result:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/financialaidpodcast/2709339009/
FAIL, anyone?
[…] שהגעתי אליו בכלל דרך טוויטר (כפיר ואוריאל) ואז דרך כריס ברוגן. התחברתי מאד כשכריס כתב שהוא לא ממש הצליח למצוא את עצמו […]
It seems to find lots of different people selling my books, but not my own site, nor my blog.
Frankly, I’d rather people start with my free content, and only buy the books once they’ve decided they can put up with my style :-)
I had just tried Cuil this morning for my personal blog (been around at the same domain since 2000) and several of my client sites. Found two out of 8 clients but nothing else. Was wondering where best to vent my frustration about this overhyped new “search engine” and then came across your post. Thanks ;-)
I had essentially the same whacked results. Cuil does have my site, blog, Twitter and an article I wrote for adobe.com in the top results… But right there on the same page are several spam sites that had picked up my rss feed and were redistributing my content.
Billions and Billions of pages don’t help anyone if X% of them are spam sites or ‘parking’ pages (which mine were).
Also, the images are horrible. I searched for my employer a major media company, and the images weren’t even close, wouldn’t you target the header image or something like that? This is completely random.
[…] Brogan has already stated on his blog that he has had difficulty finding his own site on Cuil. I myself also had difficulty finding […]
Ooooohhhh SNAP !!!
Give them a little time to tweak the algorithm.
Google wasn’t perfect out the gates either. What is innovative is the results display format — which I was keen to get your view on (Whether or not the pictures are contextually relevant…. yet)
You can always tweak an algorithm.
Missed me too. Came up with an article written by someone else nearly 2 yrs ago. Verrrrry slow as well.
Was glad they made an effort, but in this biz you get one chance .. they blew it. Back to Google.
bz.
[…] that page.”. Somehow that was a little discouraging… As Chris Brogan says on his “Cuil Misses Me” post, it can’t even find my domain name if I type it in full. And boy was it slow as […]
Cuil misses basic marks for me.
Cuil is a new challenger to Google and when I read about it Monday AM I checked it out. I liked the clean first page at http://www.cuil.com but that went away with the first search results. The search results are show in 3 column format which I find very hard to read. I based on my experience with my clients and how they prefer files and folders to be shown list or detail view Windows Explorer they have missed the mark. Second is on their pages describing product they use 10 point font. What is it with web designers today do they think everyone has perfect vision? Or every viewer of the web under 30? I can work with the small font but until the search results page gives me the option to view in list format I will not be using this service.
I noticed very odd results for my moniker as well. When searching under my common Online Persona I got results for an ancient abandoned Blog, and dozens of results that read”No Tag for {misc} on {social Blog).
I have noticed heavy traffic from a crawler from http://www.metadatalabs.com/ lately on most of my server logs. Does anyone know what service this is related to?
[…] reading Chris Brogan’s blog he says that Cuil doesn’t find his blog. Many others has commented that Cuil doesn’t find them, and, of course, Cuil doesn’t […]
Cuil can’t even find its own name. Try searching Cuil, you dont get a single thing related to the “largest search engine ever”.
When you read their “about us” page, it talks about their key differentiator being a “larger index”. I think they are solving the wrong problem. The problem is not that Google’s index is not big enough. It is that the quality of results might be able to be improved and that the personlization of results could be better.
They are solving the wrong problem.
I searched for me (who else) and kept on seeing the same picture - page after page - of Doug Haslam semi-winking, as if he’s in on the joke or something.
Wow! Seems everyone is “not finding” anything, and searching for “Jaguar” brought up nothing, no pages at all!
Brand: Bad choice on brand name. Everyone I spoke with pronounced it “Kwill”. When you have to explain your name, the first rules of branding are broken.
We all shook our heads here at MediaBadger. Some start issues are expected, but this bad? With a claim to be better than Google? Perhaps they’re having a lark with us.
Both Google and Yahoo can find my site (Icon New Media Network) with less than the whole url (iconnewmedianetwork.com). Cuil gives me a list of directories that my site is found in. Cuil is not so Cool I hope this an alpha launch because this thing is worthless. BTW my closest rivals do not even come up.
[…] a search engine much to work with. Chris Brogan’s own blog didn’t come up when he cuiled himself. A cuil search for Louis Gray turns up some of his social web profiles with hilarious mismatched […]
Cuil has managed to essentially build and expensive means of data collection and no way of presenting or sorting the data what so ever. The skipped beta should not have been skipped at all and possibly someone at Cuil should have tested their own product…
Terrible start for Cuil, maybe they will improve?
It’s just a start up search engine…………as rightly said by a Google respondent, “Cuil is not gonna keep any one at Google awake at night.” :)
Google Rocks!
Cuiling myself turned up a bizarre result. The search correctly turned up a mention of my name on the about-us page on the Hometown Baghdad site. But it showed a picture of american football. How on earth did that happen?
It is basically unusable - paint dries faster. I got two different search results on my name done within 2 hours.
Did they ever test this thing to see what the results are before they got front page coverage on cnn.com as to how Google needs to be scared of them - it is one thing to call it beta when it has some bugs, but not when the damn thing does not work.
This new mousetrap needs a whole lot of work.
CUIL is just hype right now. It really does not work well. I am still a Google guy and based on what I see will not switch
Several of my above the fold google search terms either return worthless results (fail), or nothing at all (epic fail).
So far the search engine war is long over. The big 3, google, yahoo and microsoft each has their own market. No room for new comers unless google loses their focus. So far not the case apparently.
On the contrary, I think niche/vertical search based sites should do well. I am working on my bilingual Chinese/English website as a hobby project for search based FAQ systems, http://www.JiansNet.com
Ironically, I believe my site should carve out a niche and better than cuil does.
What a waste of money and time for the cuil guys to do something that is completely not so cuil and useless.
The best they get might be a good experiment result that they could take and learn from it.
This has to be a joke - how can anyone put out a product without testing it first - Even the About Us dosen’t work.
I tried “bottom manifold grids” for pool filters and I got
zero hits and was told that I used too many words. Searched the same on Google and received 100’s of sites to visit. No wonder these guys had to leave Google, they turned out to be stupid.
Cuil cannot even find itself….wow!
Do a search for “cuil”, and you don’t even find one article or return link on the first 3 pages. Even more, on page 4, it “times out” with an error message:
We didn’t find any results for “cuil”
Some reasons might be…
*a typo. Please check your spelling.
*your search includes a term that is very rare. Try to find a more common substitute.
*too many search terms. Please try fewer terms.
Finally, try to think of different words to describe your search. Rare indeed about this hyped launch that is making front page press on every wire provider.
Furthermore, hit the only other link on the site, About Cuil, (other than “Preferences”), and the page returns an error message: Oops! We couldn’t find that page.
Please verify that the URL is correct and try again.
Another Wow!
I guess the marketing person who leaked the launch of the site should have told the press that it was definitely in BETA still.
And like the above mentions, Cuil is not finding several sites which I maintain which appear typically in the first page of Google, Yahoo searches. Go figure. What is this search engine trolling anyway?
Absolutely right.
Anybody worth his /her name Should - I beleive -Test a product like that exhaustively before announcing it.
I could not get India!!!!
[…] Cuil misses me, too, ChrisBrogan. Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Search Engine SmackdownGoogleSearch Google with […]
Weird… came up with video clips I had forgotten I had posted on Blip TV.. and nothing else. Definitely still in beta. Definitely a major PR screw up by someone, somewhere…
I agree cuil is def beta — lots of content missing and the site just went down again (7/28/08, 2:30 EST).
Also seems to be lacking functionality, too, especially in terms of search options.
robin
The search phrase Cuil Sucks is currently the 35th most popular search term on Google. That pretty much says it all.
It didn’t work for me. Cuil should have expected traffic blast that i believe crippled their new-born search engine.
Cuil so kewl…
I’m not anywhere near your fame, but I too searched my name which I am #2 on Google and #3 on Yahoo, and I appear nowhere.
Lame.
[…] do, not quite sure how this is more relevant than Google’s search result but…ok. Chris Brogan and Louis Gray have the same problem. The index is apparently over 12 billion pages, myself and […]
My results are much the same. Seems like Cuil had a great chance to make a big entrance and blew it big time.
Chalk me up as another “nay.” Fine idea, but poor user experience, and an attempt to solve a problem I don’t have.
I’ve been online since 1995 - and all they found was a linkdin entry that I did on my first and last visit to the site. No other mention of the thousands of articles, web pages or pics I have uploaded. Neither did they have any of my gardening websites that serve 2 million unique visitors/year. Glad to see I’m in such good company.
Doug
[…] I just saw that Chris Brogan did the same thing with his name and discovered the same results. Says Chris, “Call me egotistical, but if you […]
I searched for Addressing Respectful Japan looking for information on addressing someone from Japan in a respectful manner. I got ONE result—on genetic counseling. Yeah, I’m impressed.
I so WANT this to be good since it doesn’t add my every search to its giant database of information, but, pardon me when I say it’s the worse search engine I’ve ever seen.
I think we can all pretty much conclude that Cuil missed the target.
I did a vanity search first off too - because I know what to expect to see on Google, Yahoo, and others to compare it to.
Yeah, I’m nowhere near as present as you Chris, but it couldn’t find any of the prominent suspects either.
Then I tried another search on a random term. oy.
Then it crashed.
So much for that little experiment!
This engine’s claim to fame is the bilions of pages it indexes. Too bad it does not actually get some content from these pages. We design a lot of IP and it does not appear to be able to access the US or UK Patent databases. Type “automated wine cellar’” into google and it’s at the top of the page as a published patent. On cuil you get a mish mash of things to do with wine. It does not return anything for other technology searches. It cannot find my name even though it is listed on patent databases for many countries. It is a very disappointing attempt at a search engine. I suggest they take it down and relaunch when and if it actually works. A company that gets massive publicity for a launch cannot then fallback on th excuse that it is new to explain why it won’t work properly.
[…] Cuil Misses Me: [Via chrisbrogan.com] I just tried out Cuil, which is supposed to be amazing and better search engine, and what not (that’s what they told Mike Arrington). But it didn’t work for me. […]
Same here. Many of my pages are in the top ten on Google, Yahoo, and MSN, some are #1 globally, many are #1 regionally, and yet none of the pages could be found at all on Cuil. I entered in the unique page titles, and yet the pages still were not found. How can a search engine not have a link to a website that is now almost 10 years old and has held the top ten in search engines for over six years? One of my unfinished experimental websites with like a zero search ranking was found though: go figure. I looked for other websites similar to mine, all of which have quality content, but they were missing too. ::sigh:: So I vented on my blog too. ;)
The results are so poor, I’m driven to search (almost said “google”!) more and more queries in morbid fascination to see what new disaster will unfold this time.
I think that’s their business model. It’s so awful, it’s probably going to have more searches than anybody else for the first couple weeks, as we all rubberneck past the wreck.
Cuil misses itself and that’s why it missed a lot of you :). Try searching for Cuil on Cuil and you won’t get a link on first page which will take you to their homepage!
At least they should have thought of this!
[…] Cuil מוצאים רק פחות מ60% ממספר התוצאות של גוגל. כריס ברוגן מתלונן שהוא לא מוצא תוצאות רלוונטיות לגבי עצמו, אם בכלל, במנוע […]
Same here, I searched my name and the most relevant results like my blog or my Linkedin profile were nowhere to be seen, instead it threw up not-so-relevant results like comments I had posted somewhere and a bookmarking site I used for a week and quit posting to 6 months ago.
Google become a phenomenon because it gave relevant results. I don’t understand why these ex-googlers are missing this simple point by miles?
[…] such as “jaguar” turned out nothing. Well-known blogger/social media commentor, Chris Brogan couldn’t look up his name either. In fact, as of 7:30 am Tuesday morning, the site was impossible to access! It could be that it […]
I’m glad to see someone broke the “EGO-ice” for me.
I’ve tried about four searches on topics I know well and got pretty skewed results. Then it occurred to me to google, er — CUIL my own field in which I come up at top of Google: HANDWRITING ANALYSIS SAN FRANCISCO.
It brought up 9 KANSAS handwriting/graphology sites as well as one site for a “spiritual healer,” and this crazy site, osidjfios11df.angelfire.com/handwri…, whose subheadings are all possible misspellings of “handwriting” and MOST IMPORTANTLY, started to INFECT MY COMPUTER WITH THREE VIRUSES, one a “fatal” one! So look out, folks.
And CUIL.com is using the San Francisco Bay Area/Silicon Valley PEDIGREE of their officers as credibility???? Hey fellas, only Dorothy and Toto would send me 9 KS cites when I asked for San Francisco!
When a friend asked today if I’d heard of the new search engine at first I thought it was kind of cute for my purposes as a handwriting expert, cuil = quill? Then I found that it’s pronounced COOL. That’s beyond stupid. With their precious little blue “i” it appears they’re trying to hitch their wagon to Steve Jobs’s iTrain.
Relax Google, and just keep on getting better all the time.
Diana Hall
Chair of the Graphological Socity of SAN FRANCISCO
Just wanted to point out that when you search cuil for cuil it doesn’t show itself in the listing. Which rather sums things up I’d suggest.
Diana: Sounds like Cuil’s going to get a reputation of being a Spam Engine, rather than a search engine!
[…] back results. Searching on crystallyn (Crystal King didn’t give me anything worthwhile), like Chris Brogan, only served me up a handful of social communities where I use that login (mostly ones I […]
We started our business last month but we are indexed in major search engines and come up first or second for some keywords. CUIL didn’t have a clue it did show up one or two relevant links but no links for main url. With all that advertising at least search engine should be able to find us if not the customer :-).
I was very disappointed in Cuil when it didn’t find my company site or blog site, and every other major search engine has zero problems. I started to wonder if it was primarily a shopping search engine, because of the stuff it brought up with my company name “Fresh ID”. When a search engine does not find a .com, .net or .org domain name with the EXACT keywords or phrases you type in the search field as the first listings, I’d say it is not remotely ready for primetime, no matter how pretty it is.
What’s with the many odd images that it brings with some search results? I vanity searched my name, didn’t find the usual suspects like I do on the other big three, and god odd blogging puppies, models and books on Swedish as decoration to links. That was kind of funny.
[…] raises similar questions. Other Internet gurus comment against Cuil’s coolness too: Chris Brogan cannot find the echoes to satisfy his ego (results that actually do show when I search on Cuil, however many […]
It’s pronounced COOL? lmao, not for long unless they do some awesome flaming live ads. I’m pronouncing it “kill” as in “it cuiled all references to me and my business. I couldn’t pull up even one reference that identified what I do, only an old listing from our local Hispanic Chamber website, where I was listed as a contact on an event. On Google I have 3 1/2 pages of results. Current results.
I found a few odd references to some of my work, in a vanity search last night. But what disturbed me was that I found a fraudulent version of my organization, listed with my name. It was all of the content from my org’s site, with just a slight name change..but still taking donations! So thank you to Cuil for alerting me to this fraud, but for crying out loud stop directing people there! (BTW, the real org wasn’t listed in the search results).
I had a similar experience, although I’ve probably only spent 2-3 years “littering the web” with my presence.
That really is not very “Cuil” (sorry, I couldn’t resist).
I had a very similar experience, but there is some major hype there. Amazing what a little Google ‘competition’ will do, if you call them that (link to my awesome Scientology results: http://andrewhyde.net/cuil-please-stop/
Hey, I don’t exist either! Oddly enough, my part-time nome-de-web, chemrat, has 148 hits, and most seem to be about my blogs. So, maybe I’d better change my name to my alias!
Why did I feel I needed another identity, anyway, asked the caped crusader? Here is one site I publish under my complete name, and it has a moderate readership (my largest by far). It’s all very confusing.
Chemistry for a sustainable world
This best site is published under my alias. It gets about 1% of the traffic that green chemistry gets, but my alter ego gets all the fame.
Solar Power lens
OK, here is partial if confusing answer!
I turned off “safe search” and went from zero to 1,252,253 results for James Bashkin. I only write safe stuff! Really!
For example, see Sustainability and the environment group or Guitar Lessons for Kids to Adults, Playing, Gear and Semi-Pro Gigging. Vital reading, of course, but you could take it home to Mom.
So why does cuil think I’m unsafe for general consumption? Everything under my name is rated G! How many of the rest of you fellow invisible types have been flagged by Cuil as unsafe?
@James I tried turning off safe search and went from 8 results, one of them me (improvement over yesterday, but still icky) to 3,265 results, two of them me (the same reference that came up twice). Still no relevant links like the 6 pages I just pulled up on Google (improvement over yesterday too - thank you Ecademy for all the hits but jeez) all of them me and me only.
One other observation though. Cuil said 3,265 results but only let me look at 5 pages averaging 11 links each… where are the other 3,210?
On the other hand, it pulled up gold on a search for articles about my great grand uncle, Tex Rickard. Articles I’ve been trying to get google to cough up for years!
It didn’t find my URL either!!
http://www.carlknibbs.net/blog/2008/7/28/cuil-better-than-google.html
[…] test run on search results for my name, returned 864,605 results (Sorry Chris, ha), compared to Google’s 2,400. More results, but less relevant and quite a headache to […]
@ Toni and all:
Thanks for the feedback. I just tried to look at my search in more detail and found I could only see the first page of the 1.2 million results. Clicking on “next page” gave me a “sorry, we didn’t find any results for your search” message, even ethough 10 pages were listed at the bottom of page one (and 1.2 million hits implied a few more pages, also). There were some irrelevant links on the first page, but also one about my late father that I’d never seen.
I have some articles and photos at http://www.gather.com/viewArticles.jsp?memberId=467519&nav=MyGather Gather.com (which features my environmental articles, fiction reviews, articles on music instruction and select and photos), but I don’t think anyone indexes them at all.
[…] appears that a lot of people are unhappy with Cuil. “Cuil Misses Me” http://www.chrisbrogan.com/cuil-misses-me/is one of the many blogs that share a similar dissatisfaction with […]
I tried Cuil again tonight and I got only two results for a title of mine that can be found on many dozens of major websites like Amazon.com. Why can’t Cuil find Amazon.com? The two sites that Cuil linked to were both spam sites; one hijacked my browser. Both links showed on Cuil the keywords I typed in, but neither site’s source coding had the words. Seriously, if Cuil isn’t deeply infested with viruses, it has to be extremely buggy. I have linked this blog from mine, and I’m warning everyone to not use Cuil at all now.
Yup.
Me too.
I just submitted my site to get crawled.
I guess I just don’t understand what the big advantage to Cuil is…
[…] immediately compare results between the new and the old, often starting out with vanity searches. Chris Brogan tried it and noted that it didn’t return his main site’s URL after ten years of […]
Apparently Cuil was not quite ready for launch during the first day or two - many medium long tail queries did not return results at all, and even general queries returned way fewer results than they should have considering Cuil’s claims of having indexed so many pages already. They did improve somewhat afterward, however, and seem to be picking up more results and increasing relevance as more people have been testing out the engine.
In the long run, I hope they get things together and perform well enough to compete with the major search engines and then maybe do some advertising. I would like to see more serious competitors to Google in order to hold their power in check and encourage more transparency overall.
Sympathy for a flopping bragger? Ugh. I’ll dumb down my response for your kind.
Competition good. Cuil flopped. Cuil is no different than other bad search engines except for hype.
Google was once an underdog. Now Google is now on top.
Cuil is an underdog now. Someday, Cuil may be on top. Will you then look for the next underdog? Abandon Cuil?
Until my site exists on Cuil and other searches produce relevant results on Cuil, I will not support Cuil. They suck away potential customers.
They divide us. If Cuil wants to compete, they have to earn the status they desire and not claim it.
[…] a good idea if they actually appear when they search for themselves. If Chris Brogan searches for Chris Brogan and he doesn’t show up, well that’s just bad isn’t it. You only get one shot at […]
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FriendFeed had this many likes and comments: hide
Egotistical? Sure. Me too.
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=Louis%20Gray&sl=long
Of course, none of those pictures are remotely like me.