The blagoblag is abuzz with word of cuil, a search engine launched by some former Google engineers. After many hours of downtime, I was able to check it out a short while ago. The unfortunate result: it blows. It’s so bad that it’s as bad as your brain can comprehend. Supposedly there are three times as many sites indexed as Google. Well, that’s because they have not filtered any of the spam sites out. A search for “mendicant bug” yields multiple spam copies of my blog and some wordpress category pages on the first ten pages. My blog is conspicuously missing. A search for my name also yields pathetic garbage. Multiple other searches all led to the same thing: spam pages get the highest rankings.
If your goal is searching for spam, then try out cuil. You might get lucky and get infected by some nasty spyware. Otherwise, don’t waste your time.
It’s surprising how so many of these “Google killers” go live without sufficient testing. If you believe the old adage “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” then maybe it’s okay, but I think it’s the opposite. If they don’t impress a user the first time, that user is never coming back. I still like Searchme.com’s interface, but their results are mediocre too.
oops, screwed up the link: Searchme.com
Fixed the link. That is a cool interface but I noticed the mediocre top results. Reminds me of kazoo, which appears to have died. That was a neat interface, linking terms to related terms and web pages. The results weren’t any better than Google’s and the interface tends to get in your way when you just want to do a quick search, though.
FYI, Cuil seems to have improved. I just tried “medicant bug” (with quotes) and everything was relevant (i.e., a bunch of your posts).
Cuil: 2,215 results for “mendicant bug”
Google: Results 1 – 10 of about 3,440 for “mendicant bug”
SearchMe: no total number given, but results were relevant (but first page was not your home page)
I’m still getting bad results (as in, not my actual blog): wordpress tags, proxy servers, and blogcatalog for the first page of “mendicant bug” (with or without quotes). So probably what the situation is, is that they are using some sort of PageRank variation (where wordpress and blogcatalog no doubt have higher authority than my blog) and they haven’t implemented a good home page discovery algorithm yet. Still the fact that proxy19.info gets the first spot is very troubling to me.
Your blog doesn’t show up on the first page of searching for “lousy linguist,” but a bunch of things linking to you do. Most of which probably have higher pagerank, but then there’s negative-procreative.biz popping up. Very troubling indeed…