New search engine
 

on cnn today there is an article about the new search engine to enter the fray... Cuil
lol I def dont think its ready today, its running REALLY REALLY slow and its not bringing back results for things I know should be there. It has a way for you to request they crawl your site if you're a webmaster so that was kind of cool.

Who has heard about this? do you think it will ever be bigger than google?

Cuil's search robot ignores robots.txt and spiders at an unrestrained pace. The result is that is causes websites to crash and indexes content that its not supposed to. Its brought down a couple of our (my work's) sites so far. We had to block its range of IPs. What a pain in the ass.

because Im trying to understand how all this works....could you explain "indexes content its not supposed to"?

if you have a website that doesn't have permissions built into it like a invision or vbulletin, but just a raw HTML site with directories, you can limit spiders with a small file robots.txt. It is a nice convention to tell spiders please don't crawl this directory.

Not cuil. :lol:

They will need to work that out, but Cuil might have some potential. I think this is generally a good sign. The Internet will always need innovators if it's going to be a place for people to find relevant information. It's just that they need to approach it the right way.

I think the intelligent organization of infinite information is way cuil.

I'm indexed in Cuil already.

I tried searching my name--my real name--to see what they came up with; when I tried to advance a page, it told me it found no results. Very strange. It also only came up with super-old archived content here on the TFP when I searched for my username. Let's just say I won't be switching any time soon.

I tried it out earlier today. I'm not sure about the presentation of data; the 3 columns is kind of nice, but then requiring scrolling as well kind of defeats the usefulness of columns.

Also, I tried a search on something that I don't get a lot of hits for on other sites: "Perfect Thyroid", a ska-funk band I used to like that isn't together anymore. I was impressed that the auto-guess algorithm found the band name, but I was confused that it gave me zero results on a term that it knew.

Hearing Halx's report, I'm much less inclined to give them any more of my time. No, wait, I just Googled for "cuil robot.txt"* and found that they claim to respect robot.txt, and further that...Truth or a cover story? Or a botnet trying to damage the reputation of Cuil? I don't know.

____
*Yes, I appreciate the irony of this statement.

The site seems to throw a "we didn't find any results" page if it has problems - I'm pretty sure it has at least one page indexed with the word "Iceland" in it..

Anyway, with a search site, brand name and usability are much more important than total indexed paged (as long as a sufficient amount of pages have been indexed). Most users do not go past the first page of results.

Cuil obviously has no brand name yet, and I don't like the presentation - have columns is interesting, but since the results are not lined up horizontally, it makes it difficult to get a good view of the result on the first look. Too much eye movement is required.

The explore by category box is interesting but it helps you broaden out your search instead of narrowing it down. So I don't think that's particularly useful.

So I'm impressed at this point. We'll see how it evolves.

Oh, and crawling aggressively and ignoring robots.txt files is just rude.

dont like the layout..aint cuil with me. maybe its cos its new..maybe im still used to the listings looking like googles...

i too searched my name and got nothing.. maybe i should be relieved..

Hey, at least someone is trying to do things another way. Competition should spark both sides to do things better than they even are at present.

I will stick with google for now, but it is a good thing to have others trying stuff out.

i agree hambone. the more competition the better.

speaking of which what ever happened to magellan, lycos, webcrawler adn all those search engines that were there at the start of the internet revolution?

While search certainly could do with a boost, I'm not sure if Cuil has the right idea. Their layout is not swaying me by any means.
Search needs to be simple, direct and above all help the user find what they're looking for. Or at least try and point them in the right direction.

A search for my name only came up with my grandfather's obituary in our local newspaper called the messenger.. There's a logo of the Joan of Arc movie beside it... My username doesn't find as many results as Google although it does find different cybermikes.

Oh, it would certainly be nice to see some strong competition to google. Unfortunately this site isn't it.

I searched my username. There's a bad poem on allpoetry dot com by an itwasme, and so ya know that is someone else.

Now I can't get it to do anything.

I kind of like how the other search engines have images/maps options. This one may very well come back with 1000 pages of results instead of the usual 100 pages or so, but I rarely get past page 10 without getting bored looking. Most of the time, I've found what I want on the first page result, maybe the second.

Its new, give it a break.

I don't really care to try it out as of now as google is just fine with me and I know that it doesn't have any problems (that I know about or that effect me). But its always good to have competition and I hope the best for Cuil and their future.

In fact I would go so far as to say that I hope they upstage google. Google is kind of becoming too large and powerful for its own good, they hold more sway than I think any one company deserves to have. Corporate power should be distributed at all times, too much corruption is acquired with size and power.

oh man. every search page of my previous user name was a tfp page.
apparently, i don't exist in real life. :lol:

You exist in our hearts, dear noodle.

Search engines be damned!

servers overloaded.

Here's a couple of interesting, more visual search sites.

They're not actually that useful for searching (except perhaps in a wikipedia-type search-widening way) but they have innovative interfaces:
Quintura
Kartoo

I wonder what a search engine of the future will look like...

Kartoo is VERY scary ... :paranoid:

This is definitely a neat little search engine. I don't think it'll match Google, based on the simple fact that Google is less complicated - and that's what keeps 90% of people that find you. The big bulky look doesn't help, nor does the dark color scheme. Most people tend to like brighter color schemes.

With that said, this search engine is pretty neat. The fact that it takes your original search and generates a bunch of "related category" tabs is really nice. I'll probably use this engine a lot when I'm looking for things information on things that I'm less knowledgable about. The keywords might help someone more accurately find what they are looking for. The engine is running very nicely here, also. Don't see any slowing down.

Overall, I'll definitely be putting it in my bookmarks... But Google stays on my homepage.
-----Added 28/7/2008 at 09 : 24 : 59-----
Not to come off as offensive, but that seems more your fault than Cuil's fault. Robots.txt is silly, anyway. Your server should be able to handle anything their crawler can do :P

Blocking yourself from an entire search engine is a good way to lose users... Albeit, probably not many.

i seen this on attack of the show at 7 o'clock.

ive yet to check it out. from what i read here im thinking that its not going to work to well.

I couldn't get it to do much earlier. I did a search for paint shop pro just now. I like how it separates it into catagories for you. This one says all results/paint shop pro tutorials/paint shop pro 5/paint shop pro tubes/more. Except for the fact that psp5 was many years ago ~ psp 10 or 11 is out now ~ that's pretty cool.

I'm not sure what they are boasting about really...

a search for my real name came up with almost nothing and google usually gets plenty. My TFP username brought zero results, which seems impossible.

I also agree the visual layout isn't great.

But innovation is always good...who knows, it might actually be cuil sometime soon.

Though I've got to say that's a silly name heh.

One thing is for sure.. they definitely underestimated the traffic that would come their way on launch day. It's crippling their servers which means people are getting 404s and 'no results found' errors.

It'd be interesting to see it when everything has died down and its working at full speed.

Yeah, that works excellent for music searches.

Say i type in "NoFX."

Right from the results screen i can look up tabs, lyrics, similar bands, bands on the same record labels, bands on Fat Mikes record label, ext., ext.

My first assumption on the name was "Cool" speeling with "UI"(user interface) instead of "OO". Which could kind of go along with their different layout idea.
Maybe I'll give it a shot if it gains some success.
However I don't see the mainstream, non tech-news-following, average user using this instead of the tried and true.
Nevertheless, as others have said, this is not a bad thing, and I'd like to see google come under some pressure. It's hard to become No.1, let's see how long long they can stay No.1.
But I do hope Google never shuts down. i love my Gmail too much.