Cuil is a new search engine competitor to Google, offering magazine digest-style search results, and since all the Net progonosticators are talking about it, I decided to try a compare-and-contrast of the first page results for "Second Life" on Cuil, versus Google. Here's the first page results, above-- click the pic for a larger view. Google offers video and image results, while Cuil does not; Cuil, however, has a much more readable format, and from a purely vain point of view, New World Notes is on Cuil's very first page. (Google, by contrast, lists NWN on "Second Life" search many, many, many pages back, probably because the words are not in the actual URL.)
Anyway, which do you prefer?
From a smilarly vain point of view, Google ranks me higher for "Katharine Berry" than Cuil does, which returns a load of books by Katharine Berry Judson - despite the categories it suggests looking in being "Second Life", "Virtual Worlds", "Virtual World Communities", etc. Also, the results for Katharine Berry aren't actually my sites, they're articles about me.
From a practical point of view, "Due to excessive load, our servers didn't return results."
Google very, very rarely says that. If ever. I can't get any other answer right now.
Posted by: Katharine Berry | Monday, July 28, 2008 at 02:51 PM
Well, it sure looks pretty! But I'm not so confident about the search engine itself. After all, if you search for "Kit Meredith," you only get 28 results, and my blog isn't even in them. That's what I call "epic fail"! ;)
Also, when you search "second life" like you mentioned, Hamlet, the result for secondlife.com inexplicably comes up with an image for EVE Online next to it. Can't imagine the Lindens are too happy about that one.
Cuil might have a future, but they have some kinks to iron out (and some Web to crawl) before it's ready for prime time.
Posted by: Kit Meredith | Monday, July 28, 2008 at 07:35 PM
I'm definitely giggling that the image next to the link to Linden Lab's web site is from EVE Online. Where'd that come from?
Searching for "jacek antonelli", Cuil comes up mostly with comments I've made on other people's blogs, JIRA issues I've filed, and -- rather creepily -- a SLURL to my old home in SL. It's only on the second page that it has a link to my blog; and for some reason it chose to use the tentacle ribbon image that I removed from my sidebar several months ago.
But, y'know, aside from the images not being appropriate, and the results not being relevant, it's nice...
Posted by: Jacek Antonelli | Monday, July 28, 2008 at 07:39 PM
Boo...not one result for me on Cuil. And as a side note, the pics listed next to the results are "not" filtered in anyway, as a search for me returned a picture of "Naked Women" in the top 20 results. Not going to be very child-friendly...as if a child (or anyone for that matter) will be able to resist clicking on the nude pic if its in the top results!!
hehe.
Posted by: Logansan Oh | Monday, July 28, 2008 at 08:43 PM
Agreed to the above comments.
Searching for Alan's name required it in quotes for even relevant output. The pics appear to be 'sub searches' based on the title (which make them very wrong all the time). And sites like T_S_Journal (an Uru 'IC only' story site) show data for an earlier version of its feed, which no longer exist as of six months ago.
You Lose, Cuil. Good Day, sir...
--T_S_Kimball
Posted by: T_S_Kimball | Monday, July 28, 2008 at 11:59 PM
My blog just got its first hit from Cuil yesterday.
I did a search for Face Lights Second Life, and was pleased to see that I own half the first page of results. But none of the images that appear alongside the results are mine. No idea where they've come from, and clicking them only leads to my blog, so what's happening there?
Posted by: Gaynor Gritzi | Tuesday, July 29, 2008 at 04:48 AM