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New Search Engine Cuil "analyzes the Web, not its users"

Posted by Sander_Marechal on · 10 comments
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Privacy is a hot topic these days, and we want you to feel totally comfortable using our service. BecauseCuil analyzes Web pages and not click-throughs, we don't need to know your search history and habits. So our privacy policy is very simple: when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookie. Your search history is your business, not ours. We don't need to keep logs of our users' search activity, so we don't. - Cuil

[And to top it off, it's actually a pretty nifty search engine too - Sander]

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Comments (10)

Oops! We couldn’t find that page.

tracyanne ·


Please verify that the URL is correct and try again.
tracyanne ·
And then it worked.
zenarcher ·
I like their privacy policy....Added to my Firefox Search Bar.
Sander_Marechal Story submitter ·
I really like the drilldown box you get on the right side next to search results. It makes it very easy to search for something specific that you don't know how to search for. Just type in one or two keywords and start drilling down.
jdixon ·
Hmm:

We’ll be back soon...

Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity.

Thanks for your patience.

Looks like their servers aren't up to being LXer'ed.
Sander_Marechal Story submitter ·
LXer'ed, Groklaw'ed, Slashdotted, TechCrunshed, BBC'ed. Cuil seems to be attracting a lot of attention in a very short time.

Little detail: I read that the Cuil founders are ex-Google.
Sander_Marechal Story submitter ·
Cuil really should have updated it's press release though. They claim that with 120 billion pages indexed, they are bigger than google. Google hasn't published it's size in a few years now. Last know figure: 8.4 billion. Until last friday that is... Google published some gib news that they crossed the 1 trillion mark. So, Cuil has some catching up to do :-)

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_hits_one_trillio...
TxtEdMacs ·
Quoting: ... Cuil has some catching up to do


From my minimal testing, I would say you excel at the art of understatement. Most results were dead wrong and it went down hill from there. I will wait a few weeks to see if the gross errors I saw were problems induced by limited capacity causing unexpected errors. I noted too subsequent pages were gibberish. I hit one link and an email form came up.

With this great outpouring of unjustified, premature interest this group has a limited time to recover. I wish them luck, because Google deserves a legitimate competition*. We do need an alternative to some of the bad trends in Google's evolution.

* I cannot believe any combination of Yahoo, MS and AOL could even come close.

Birthing pangs

vainrveenr ·
At this time, Cuil's 'About Us' page http://www.cuil.com/info/ has a tendency to 404-out (or whatever the term du jour is for this), giving an error of
Quoting:Oops! We couldn’t find that page.

Please verify that the URL is correct and try again.
Also at this time, the main Cuil search engine is getting many hits and is causing slow-loading throughout its system. Today's Press Release listed at http://www.cuil.com/info/news_press/ gives a summary of Cuil’s features:
Quoting: * Biggest Internet search engine—Cuil has indexed 120 billion Web pages, 3x more than any other search engine * Organized results—Cuil’s magazine-style layout separates results by subject and allows further search by concept or category * Different results—Unlike other search engines, Cuil ranks results by the content on each page, not its popularity * Complete privacy protection—Cuil does not keep any personally identifiable information on users or their search histories
Apparently, fast-speed is not one of Cuil's current feature strengths.

A Cuil search for 'LXer' first gave zero results, and now gives over 86,000 search results. A two-page listing using the default 3-column view per page gives about twenty separate LXer paragraphs and an expanding Linux Distribution 'Explore by Category' box near the top right of each page.

Distributions are organized and listed as follows (VERY quirky to say the least!): * Debian-based Distributions o Linspire o Linux Mint o Xubuntu o Kanotix o Dreamlinux o Gobuntu o Xandros Server * Ubuntu (Linux Distribution) Derivatives o Linux Mint o Freespire o Xubuntu o Gobuntu * RPM-based Linux Distributions o openSUSE o SUSE Linux o Mandriva Linux o Scientific Linux o SUSE Linux Enterprise Server * Linux Distributions o Freespire o Mandriva Linux o Vector Linux o Kanotix

Again, all the above are clear signs of Cuil's birthing pangs at launchdate.

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