Cuil Internet Search Engine — Um… Not found?

My friend and former student John Jenkins alerted me to the following potentially embarrassing design flaw in the newest entry in the search engine wars. The challenger — Cuil (pronounced Cool), designed by former Google engineers and touted by them as a vastly superior search engine.

I’ll let John’s text from the email he sent me introduce the flaw:

First rule of creating an index of web pages to search: make sure to include your own web page.

cuil.JPG

5 thoughts on “Cuil Internet Search Engine — Um… Not found?

  1. Update: Google indexed this posting approximately 2 hours after it was published, and brings it up when searching for “John Jenkins Cuil” as the top hit. As for Cuil? They still have no clue.

  2. This is so awesome… it just made my day.

    I did some more testing. Here are my search terms on cuil.com and the top hit (top hit hard to figure out because not numbered)

    “cuil” -> cuil.com

    “cuil engine” -> seroundtable.com

    “cuil internet” -> cuil.com or internet.com

    “cuil search” -> various blogs *about* cuil, but not cuil.com

    “cuil search engine” -> seroundtable.com

    “cuil internet search” -> search-22.com (a collection of search engines including Cuil) or yahoo news about cuil

    “cuil internet search engine” -> still nothing.

    So, the moral of the story is, it’s not just how many web pages you have indexed, but how well you match search terms to the indexed pages.

    — SJN

  3. so I live in Houston and hurricane ike has just come through. We have power back but we’re still isolated. Decided to test out cuil again. Searching for “one updates” brought up *nothing* related. On the other hand the same search on google produced nothing but results about the hurricane. Again it’s not the size of the index but the power of the contextual mapping.

    Sent from my iPhone

    –sun

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