People are raving (ranting?) about www.cuil.com and I just have to do it too.
For me it’s simple: search engines can help you find the stuff you think is relevant but not give you stuff they thinks is relevant.
When I tried cuil today the first thing that ticked me off (for a start) was it’s Apple look and feel. All right, we get it, iPods, iPhones, they look nice. But c’mon, get over it already. Let’s let that one fly though.
The people behind Cuil claim that they will find relevant stuff and that is what really gets to me. I’m sorry but relevance is a highly subjective and human notion. Computers, hands off. If you fancy a read there’s tons of literature on the subject and only recently (since 50 odd years) it’s has been being discussed in the Information {Retrieval/Science/Seeking} communities.
Size also seems to be Cuilt’s self-proclaimed strength, together with a large random number on their main page. So, I would assume that they’re bigger than the well established search engines and whatever I can find through them I could also find through Cuil, but even more relevant?All right, let’s give it a go then…
I tried searching for myself (being an egotistical bastard) and I did indeed find my homepage through Google. So obviously Google thinks I’m important enough to be indexed. Cuil? No thanks, they don’t seem to even acknowledge my sheer existence. This raises the question of size vs. coverage. Does bigger size equal better coverage? Of course not. Think of a search engine indexing every possible web page of about 10 different sites totalling a whopping 10,000 pages. Now think of a search engine indexing only the index page of about 10,000 different sites. They both have the same number of pages indexed (same size) however I’d argue that the coverage of the second might be a bit better.
All and all, and in total fairness, my opinion that cuil is just another search engine derives mainly from my belief that search is a really difficult task but that we could start making some serious progress as soon as we started acknowledging (instead of ignoring) that there are certain things that a search engine cannot (and possibly never will) do.
Cuil? No thanks.
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