Former Google engineers debut Cuil... pronounced... Cool... :)
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20080728/D926QMU00.html
http://www.cuil.com/
They certainly face an uphill battle. I used to work for a search engine (ask.com) and I can tell you it's a steep climb.
"Finally, Cuil is hoping to attract traffic by promising not to retain information about its users' search histories or surfing patterns - something that Google does, much to the consternation of privacy watchdogs."
I'm sold.
People need to be extremely careful about Google. They retain search records and have no problem sharing that information with the United States government and/or law enforcement, with or without a warrant. When you are using Google for internet searches, email (Gmail), and watching videos (YouTube now automatically prompts you to link your Gmail account with YouTube), you disclose an incredibly deep psychological profile of yourself to be put into permanent record.
It might not seem like a big deal now, but you never know what can happen in the next five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. Circumstances change. Laws change. You really don't want to have to answer for today's internet searches, emails, or internet habits sometime down the road. Medical problems. Political affiliation. Social stances. Daily routine. Even porn sites you may have visited.
It's imperative to take the precautionary route, assume information is being retained and culled, and at the very least use different services for email, internet searches, videos, etc. Further, using a proxy to protect your anonymity really wouldn't be the worst thing in the world either.
Blackle.com!!
Cuil totally sucks, based solely on my test run of it over the past 5 minutes. I searched the headlines of some of the blogs and news sites i have read today, and none of the articles i read popped up. no such problem at the googles. or blackle (even better).
And, if you misspell a word on cuil, it doesn't point that out, like google/blackle does.
I mean, i know it debuted today, but if you are going to challenge Google, you might want to bring the A-game.
i agree...cuil sucks. impotent is a good word describing it. yeah, challenging google was a WAY out of their league.
Did a search for "Metro Jacksonville" and this was the message I recieved....
QuoteNo results because of high load...
Due to excessive load, our servers didn't return results. Please try your search again.
About Cuil | Your Privacy | Add Cuil to Firefox
Jacksonville Confidential showed up!
I finally got it to turn up what I wanted. Call me old fashioned but Google is still the best out there. Simple, intuitive, and fast.
Quote from: Jason on July 28, 2008, 05:52:43 PM
Did a search for "Metro Jacksonville" and this was the message I recieved....
QuoteNo results because of high load...
Due to excessive load, our servers didn't return results. Please try your search again.
About Cuil | Your Privacy | Add Cuil to Firefox
:D :D :D
QuoteWhy Cuil Is No Threat to Google
Rest easy, Google ... The much-hyped new search engine Cuil (pronounced "cool"), purports to index more Web pages than any of its rivals. But based on its Monday debut, the new site poses little immediate threat to industry leader Google, or even its nearest competitors, Yahoo and Microsoft, in either relevance or breadth of results it delivers.
"Anybody who thought [Cuil] was this Google killer can really see now that no, that's not going to happen today â€" and the likelihood is that's not going to happen a year from now," says Danny Sullivan, internet search guru and editor-in-chief of SearchEngineLand.
Despite its lackluster performance, Cuil (which means wisdom or knowledge in Gaelic) got so many visitors on Monday, that its servers crashed around 3 p.m. E.T. "Due to excessive load, our servers didn't return results. Please try your search again," the site read intermittently throughout the afternoon. But even when it was working, the results were fair, at best. Enter a keyword such as "mint" and the first result that comes up isn't the herb or flavor but the U.S. Mint. Type in "Obama," and one of the sub-categories Cuil suggests is "Hispanic-American Politicians". And Cuil lacks the special tabs for news, video, local and image results used by the leading sites.
Full Article:
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1827331,00.html
QuoteThe one area where Cuil excels, however, is user privacy. Whereas Google stores user-specific searches for up to 18 months, Cuil never stores personally identifiable information or search histories. Privacy has become a growing concern among users of search sites ever since America Online inadvertently released the searches of 658,000 of its users in 2006. But that's unlikely to be enough to persuade most users to switch from their search engine of choice. "Anybody who thinks the next Google killer is going to come along is banking on something that's unlikely," says SearchEngineLand's Sullivan. But if the Cuil story is any indication, that won't stop people spending fortunes on beating the odds.