One keyword search has one of my domains on the 1st page, and there is some stock photo of a man in suit. It isn’t me, and I’ve never used such stock photography.

I also found a picture of a well known NLP trainer next to a site that he’s not connected with.

And for another search I did, it was cluttered up with about a dozen or more pages (within the 1st 3 search pages) from one website. Google and everyone else figured out how to cluster results from one website into an indented listing years ago.

This thing has a long ways to go…

Would you spend $26M on a search engine that wasn’t satisfying visitors yet?

In most cases I’m familiar with the results I entered, and they bore no similarity to Google or Yahoo! result sets. Very strange. Also had the porn entries as mentioned earlier.

Doesn’t even seem like a beta to me. Maybe they should label it an alpha? It does seem like they released a bit too early.

Also, I’m not convinced the relatively verbose displays for each listing will survive. Too much real estate used for too few relevant results. Maybe that will be an option on the page “Verbose” vs. “Traditional.”

Expected more from having read the articles. Maybe it’ll all work out. We need other search paradigms online.

I ‘cuiled’ Nishi Viswanathan and Cuil threw up a few results- only two of them with Nishi Viswanathan in them. The rest were for “Viswanathan” which is a really common last name in India. I even tried “Nishi Viswanathan” but no luck.

By the way, a few mins ago, I got this message:
_________________________________________________

Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity.

Thanks for your patience.
__________________________________________________

33 million could not buy efficient servers???

You thought listing a competitor’s image next to your search result was a gaffe? Wait until you listen to this one- I found one of my articles about tetanus shots and right next to it was a picture of a man holding a gun!!

The snooty “we can just launch, no need to wuss out with a beta” (alpha???) approach may not have been justified in this case. It will be a while before I give it another look.

I then searched for our company name and while we showed up in the results, the images used were relevant only in that they were found on the same page. In most cases, they weren’t even the primary image for that page. I can’t figure out how they chose the images displayed (not first, primary, or size relevant).

What good is caching 121 Billion webpages if you can’t find what you’re looking for?

Regarding, “Lee your blog is good, but there are many others that are also worthy” that’s a pretty consistent response from other marketing bloggers that haven’t quite figured out how to market their blogs as well as we have.

Although, Future Now blog shows on the first page for “marketing blog” so you’re obviously doing something right.

The inaccurate image associations are certainly an issue and probably because of the article, it’s pretty slow.

I rank right up there for the “conversion rate” search, as hoped for and expected. This is a startup and obviously has lots to tweak. I was offering one more recommendation to their already impressive effort. Afterall, I am in the “marketing optimization” business (even if this blog has the eMetrics summit logo next to it in the search results).

Thanks for your comment.
Bryan

Anyway, I would look at broader perspective. Size of index is impressive, it is done in garage, even we now discuss about them and it demonstrates that search is still not done. Could you imagine some distributed system like skype bundle search? eBay would get the most powerful search engine on the world… why distributed?
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?
“Multiple index based information retrieval system”
Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=/netahtml/PTO/search-adv.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&p=1&S1=20060106792&OS=20060106792&RS=20060106792

If you ask me your article is like comment of first people who saw balloon flying above Paris, some said that will burn Paris when falls, Napoleon planned invasion of England but everybody underestimated how far airline industry will go.

Jerry: I would hope so. I was there for the first implosion and you’d hope people would get the message by now. But there is a saying that goes, the reason history repeats itself, is because we were too stupid to pay attention to it the first time. I hope not!

When I read the article in the NY Times this morning about Cuil, I was really excited about someone new coming onto the search scene with such pedigree. Upon my first relevant search (no, not my name), I too was shocked at the images artificially inserted the results. Further, as I actually looked at the results, it included porn related domains (safe search was on) and also included pages that immediately re-direct to simple search platforms to sell click-fraud.

Cuil claims their platform is better because of the depth of their pages. While the number of pages crawled may be more vast (like 90’s eyeballs), haven’t we learned that it is the relevancy of those results that matter (next generation = conversion).