Ex-Google engineers debut 'Cuil' way to search

Post by axod » Mon, Jul 28, 2008, 5:28 PM UTC

gcv wrote: post #69

gaius wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any product that you have to explain to the user how to pronounce will fail. I looked at the word and my first thought was "how do you say that" - you don't win people over by making them feel stupid.

Don't overgeneralize. Consider "Audi." While obvious to a German speaker, an English speaker who has never heard the word before will wonder if it should be "oh-DI," "OH-di," "OW-di," or "ow-DI?" I think Cuil is a decent name, far better than Srchr or some other Web 2.0 contraction. If it overcomes its growing pains and solves all the hard problems involved in search, it'll do well.

Post by tlrobinson » Mon, Jul 28, 2008, 6:32 PM UTC

dhotson wrote: post #28

beaudeal wrote: post #5

first things first...am i the only person who wants to keep saying "kweel" and not "cool"?? in terms of the site itself, i am sort of liking the design / layout of the search, although like agotterer said, it still needs a lot of work -- from what i can tell, popular search terms have pretty darn good results but unpopular search terms return sub-par results (see his example haha)... in terms of a threat to google??…

I personally found the search results page a tad confusing. Having the results in a grid layout, my first impression was that they were all ads! .. also, how do I know which result is #1 ? Top left? Middle?

Post by protothomas » Mon, Jul 28, 2008, 6:35 PM UTC

jonknee wrote: post #79

Searching Cuil for 'cuil' results in a lot of hits, none being their site. Searching Google for 'cuil' has them up at number one, plus news results from today's PR bash. That's a big ball of fail.

Post by pg » Mon, Jul 28, 2008, 7:27 PM UTC

thomasmallen wrote: post #86

pg wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you should make is a specialist search engine for hackers. They're the early adopters in search engines, so if you get them you have the quickest path to getting everyone else. Imagine how alarmed Google would be if there were a different search engine the top 10k hackers all used, even if they had everyone else. And rightly so. http://news.ycombinator.com/apply ...

That's optimistic, but to be successful with "hackers" the search engine would most likely have to steer its user experience in directions that wouldn't appeal to an everyday user. Typically, us geeks want both maximum control and elegant usability, always preferring control to usability. With most users, the inverse is true.

Post by aneesh » Mon, Jul 28, 2008, 7:57 PM UTC

parenthesis wrote: post #61

It seems to me that a way to potentially creep up on google would be to make a specialist search engine. Some topic area that google is not so useful for searching on. Make a search system that 'understands' the domain in question, allowing it to index and search it really effectively. As a random example, say, a movies search engine. If it could be consistently more useful than google for finding out information abo…