Ex-Google engineers debut 'Cuil' way to search • Hacker News Board

Re: Ex-Google engineers debut 'Cuil' way to search

#111

Post by bayareaguy » Tue, Jul 29, 2008, 10:16 AM UTC

bOR_ wrote: post #89

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 ...

Heh. I'm not amongst the top 10k, but I've been cursing yesterday, trying to use search to find out in what version / gem of ruby {| [ ]| } is a valid block (with just being random variable names). And a week before that the same problem when trying to find out what &@/ ment in a mathematica script. Search engines tend to ignore symbols in normal search, and while you can search for symbols in google's code search, t…

Indeed. Good luck finding out information for the common shell <<END feature if you don't know that's called a "here document".

Re: Ex-Google engineers debut 'Cuil' way to search

#112

Post by mattjung » Tue, Jul 29, 2008, 4:04 PM UTC

marcus wrote: post #54

gaius wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I don't know what algorithms Cuil are using, I can't say at this stage if they are able to deliver better search results than Google without personalization. Perhaps they're better at contextualization for example, and don't need to know what you did last time. I'm a Python programmer too and the first link I get from Google for 'python' is a Wikipedia article on the Delphic Oracle... Admittedly I have often…

Context is always helpful and obviously should be used in addition to personal history and even override it, but if the query has little context, the only context you can get is from the users historical data. Personalization doesn't guarantee better results but it obviously improves results.

Historical data may as well be misleading because the profile of a user is not "static", simply because there's a human being behind it (and sometimes even more than one, but that's another story). His personal and professional environment, his wishes and necessities, the context of his life may change from one day to the other. The assumption that the past queries of a user will improve the results of his current queries is at least questionable (especially for former programmers that start selling reptiles...)

Re: Ex-Google engineers debut 'Cuil' way to search

#113

Post by netcan » Sun, Aug 03, 2008, 4:06 AM UTC

softwarejim wrote: post #63

marijn wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I've seen some Google ads that were a bit too targeted lately -- related to stuff that I searched for last week -- and it is getting spooky. I'd like to have a decent alternative. Maybe I should just get used to Yahoo, but this looks hipper, no? That being said, they haven't indexed my site yet. Amateurs!

what I find shady is that its against the law to spoof your competitors domain name, but google will allow you to display ads for when people search for your competitor. thats a little underhanded if you ask me

Not exactly the same thing. Spoofing you comp's trade name is pretty much the definition of trademark violation.

It (Google's policy) flops around a bit. It differs between countries and seems to get tweaked or turned over every so often. I believe in the US bidding restrictions on trademarked terms were recently removed. But you are still restricted in using trademarked terms in ads.

Personally, I agree that restrictions (bidding on trademarked terms) should be removed. I would compare it to handing out flyers on the street outside you competitions' shop. Tasteless maybe, but shouldn't be illegal. Companies don't own the search results, trademark or not any more then they own the street.

Re: Ex-Google engineers debut 'Cuil' way to search

#114

Post by netcan » Sun, Aug 03, 2008, 4:18 AM UTC

marijn wrote: post #39

axod wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very worrying. Adverts people might be interested in shown to them? Cause for concern...

You're probably intentionally missing the point -- but what I was referring to is the fact that they are quite unashamed about retaining data about me.

I don't think that's worrying. If Amazon or Facebook or any other site did it wouldn't even be noticed. I think that's just reaching for a way to fault Google.

BTW, an interesting application of personalisation is not so much search ads (They are already pretty much the most targeted ads because search term is enough to target ads with) but content ads (eg adsense). Currently, ads are targeted using relevance to page content/site content or demographics of the users. But search history reveals a lot about interests & could be the key to 'fixing' context advertising (from the advertisers perspective).