Monday, July 28, 2008

How to test Cuil

Cuil is clearly having teething troubles so I haven't been able to test it, but here are the things to search for when you're testing it.

1. Reproduce the last search where you were actively impressed by Google's results. A while back someone told me about someone they know who lives in Toronto and has two very disparate and very cool jobs. Googling the names of the two jobs with the word Toronto returned the exact person they were telling me about as the first result. Can Cuil compete?

2. Search for something you can't find with Google. I can't find a torrent of the 1973 movie soundtrack of Jesus Christ Superstar. I can't find certain people from high school I've tried to look up. I can't find the French lyrics to the Log Driver's Waltz. Can Cuil do better?

3. Search for some random article or website you read once. I once read a very good Miss Manners column where she lays a smackdown on a LW for attempting to fix up a friend (whose late husband was blind) with another blind man, despite the fact that the friend had quite specifically asked not to be fixed up. It was the first Google result for the keywords miss manners blind date, which was also the first keyword combination I tried. Can Cuil compete?

4. Search for the sort of thing you mindlessly google as part of everyday web surfing. I find legislation by googling its title, not by navigating justice.gc.ca. I go to the smog alert site by googling ontario air quality. I get to the Jeopardy website forum by googling Jeopardy boards. Would you have to change your navigation habits with Cuil?

The thing about aspiring to be a Google-killer is that you have to be not only as good as Google, but consistently and remarkably better. Remember when Google first came out in 98/99, how much startlingly better than the alternatives it was? You'd have to be at least that much better than Google to kill it.

2 comments:

M@ said...

I hadn't heard of Cuil, but I'm already unimpressed. I wanted to find a review of a yakitori place in Manhattan, which I've had trouble finding on Google. I put in "yakitori chicken gizzard new york city" (I remember the gizzard being particularly enjoyed in this review).

Servers overloaded, please try again.

This happened every time I tried the search. I went away, checked out the About and Philosophy pages, came back.

Servers overloaded, please try again.

Then I tried "yakitori chicken gizzard manhattan".

Servers overloaded, please try again.

Then I tried "yakitori gizzard manhattan".

Success! Not in the sense that it brought me to the review I wanted, but in that it brought me to a page where I searched for yakitori which brought me to a review that referenced the original review I wanted to find.

So a search engine that craps out when you give more than three terms, and doesn't find what you're looking for anyhow. Nope, not gonna be trying Cuil again any time soon...

impudent strumpet said...

Oh ewww! (At both the three-term limit and the prospect of eating gizzard). That's why it wasn't working for me, all of those searches naturally ended up being more than three terms long. That excludes so many things - song names, names of books, people's names qualified with city names.

I've been trying some shorter searches and it's utterly useless. I search for pieces of legislation, and it turns up pages on which the legislation is mentioned but not the legislation itself.

I search for impudent strumpet, and there is no hint that it's a line from Othello. (Being the first Google result is cool, but I shouldn't take over the whole first page at the expense of Shakespeare.) Plus some of my pages are illustrated with images that aren't on my blog.

The first category for a search for Eddie Izzard is "The Ramones Members". A search for Build Me Up Buttercup lyrics has two pure spam pages on the first page of results. A search for longhairs toronto fails to produce longhairs.com, which is a Toronto-based business. I've been searching for stuff on and off for an hour and I haven't had a single search that was easier or better than Google.

Actually, a search for porn - just the word porn with the safe search off - produces three pure spam pages on the first page of results (along with a few porn pages and a few articles about porn). Not even porn spam, just pure junk or dead links. This thing can't turn up a page full of porn on the internet using the keyword porn!

This is the worst search engine I've ever used, and I used Ask Jeeves for a while back in the 90s. I don't think it's been beta-tested at all.

I predict the next big internet meme will be to search for stuff on Cuil and laugh at the most bizarre results it turns up.