Cuil.com - New Search Engine

[Hostels]

Cuil.com is a new search engine launched by some ex-Google engineers.

The link above gives an overview. I hope Cuil is successful because there needs to be more choices...

[Tim]

I think it has potential but I'm not yet convinced.

For starters the multi-column layout just looks messy, perhaps that's because it I'm used to the different layout used on Google, etc.

Also the images just don't make sense. In theory it is a good idea, but the images bear no relation to the site and in many cases the images aren't even from the same site.

I did a search for "backpackers hostel reviews" and my site accounted for 4 of the top 10 results. Not bad, but the pictures bear no relation to the results and the number one result (my site www.bugeurope.com) features my main competitor's logo (Hostelz). That image certainly doesn't come from my site!

[Hostels]

A Hostelz.com logo next to bugeurope.com?

I'm hoping they can fix the bugs and get it to work. I'm not sure about the odd layout either, but it's an interesting experiment.

[Tim]

It would be a big - and relatively easy - improvement if all the images only came from the pages that they are supposed to represent.

Also the layout would look less messy if the top baseline of each listing is aligned across all columns.

Also the description text doesn't come from the description tag, but instead the first text on the page. On many sites (including mine) the first text is the top and left hand-side menu.

[Hostels]

Originally Posted by Tim

Also the description text doesn't come from the description tag, but instead the first text on the page. On many sites (including mine) the first text is the top and left hand-side menu.

Very interesting.

Interesting image for the hostels.com listing (a hotel). I'm not sure where the weird text is coming from:



If Cuil gets popular, I think the SEO trick is going to be to figure out how to get them to show the most clickable image

[sreeja]

I think it become a great success.Thank you fro such a big invention.Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

[Scotch Argus]

I really think it's got a long road ahead trying to match google. A search for our hostel in quotes shows 4 hits, none of which are to our page. 3 are just to a free listings site we're on. And we rank 2nd on google, 2nd on yahoo and first on MS live seach for that term, so it's not as if we're unknown. Personally I don't like the layout, and if you rely on an automated system to associate images with the search it's always going to be problematic. I know competition is good etc, but if something else becomes big we'll just all have to learn SEO for that.

More work - sigh.

[Hostels]

I tried using Cuil for a little while but had to go back to Google because I couldn't find anything. I hope they can fix the problems...

[Hostels]

Just found this article in The Register:

But what amazed her most was the way Tom Costello and the Cuil kids spent their $33 million in venture capital. "Lunch is ordered in every single day," she writes. "Huge fridges burst with snacks and drinks. Bowls of strawberries and muffins lie around the rest area.

"The company pays for a personal trainer and gym membership for everyone. A doctor calls round each Friday, after the weekly barbeque, to see if everyone’s in good health. Employees drift in an out at times that suit themselves."

[Scotch Argus]

I feel google's advantages are its number of pages searched, the relevance of searches (though this is always under threat of course) and the speed at which it re-indexes files. MS live search still had a link to our old site that has been down and unreachable for 5 months. While it wouldn't list our new site at all - 3 months after it was put up - and was on google and yahoo (strangely enough it's now up - a week after we put it on MSadcenter - co-incidence?). One thing tha google proved I think is that you'll get to number one as a search engine by results only - that's why its uncluttered interface succeeded so well. I remember back in the ollllld days using metacrawler - I used to like that - but within a few times of using google I had switched.

Whilst the results on google aren't perfect, I regularly try other searches, but haven't found anything better yet. I could imagine it would be reasonably easy to sell a new engine to some VCs and get a few million - bowls of strawberries aren't cheap after all!