The World According to Cuil

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-07-30-n88.html

by trs90 • 18 years ago

18 16 18 years ago

blogoscoped.com

bprater• 18 years ago

Be sure to scroll half-way down to see what Cuil thinks of our friend Paul Graham.

cypress-hill• 18 years ago

yeah i may have to start using this

tokipin• 18 years ago

that image was probably from here:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001080.html

pchristensen3• 18 years ago

Hilarious! They should probably consider taking pictures from the same source as the info. I'm pretty sure that's not what goes on at the Mormon Missionary Training Center :)

pchristensen3• 18 years ago

Hey, I was there for two months, I should be able to make that joke!

jm4• 18 years ago

All these posts showing bad search results on Cuil are getting ridiculous. We all get it. Cuil sucks. Big time. The results are, at best, of dubious quality. The pictures don't match. The launch was a complete and utter failure.

How long are we going to beat this dead horse? For three days it seems like there has been at least one link to some random jackass blog with screenshots of crappy search results on the front page of HN. They're not even funny like the screenshots of questionably placed Google ads that you see on Fark sometimes. They're just inaccurate results.

I'm beginning to think Cuil is going to be the CueCat of this millenium... The hyped up startup that fails miserably and everyone talks about for years afterward. Is anyone else tired of this?

raganwald• 18 years ago

Let's put it this way: I got heartily sick of the Twitter doesn't scale posts, and some of them contained morsels of technical substance within the speculation. Any asshole can write a blog post saying "Lookit! _____ sucks!!" It's just as tiresome for Cuil as it is for Vista.

Rare is the person who offers some insight into what could or should be done to compete with Google. Even rarer are the people who are busy hacking together their own ideas for how to do it right. That's the very best way to say something else is wrong: demonstrate how you think it ought to be done.

Roger Ebert has an excellent book called "Your Movie Sucks," it contains nothing but zero, one-half, and one star reviews. It's an excellent book because it shows the challenge of writing something more informative and/or entertaining than "Your Movie Sucks."

And of course, Roger has to write those reviews, because it's his job to review movies as they're released. Bloggers are under no such pressure, they can write what they choose, when they choose. Therefore, I hold bloggers to an even higher standard of writing "Lookit! _____ sucks!!"

Since bloggers have the option of saying nothing, they shouldn't say anything unless it is worthy of being read.

edw519• 18 years ago

Rare is the person who offers some insight into what could or should be done to <anything>. Even rarer are the people who are busy hacking together their own ideas for how to do it right. That's the very best way to say something else is wrong: demonstrate how you think it ought to be done.

Great comment!

Perhaps this should be part of the hn guidelines :-)

unalone• 18 years ago

Ebert's book also fascinated me because he so rarely dislikes a movie. He's an open guy. He likes a lot.

Bloggers (including ones here) like writing to the masses. If it will get them readers, they'll write about it. Few writers really hold themselves to standards online, which is a shame.

davidw• 18 years ago

Actually, the results aren't half bad, all things considered. It's the photos that don't match up at all with the queries in a "so bad it's funny" sort of way.

pchristensen3• 18 years ago

Don't worry, people will forget about Cuil by the end of the week (well, it's already Wednesday so maybe by next week).

t0pj• 18 years ago

"I'm beginning to think Cuil is going to be the CueCat of this millenium"

Still awaiting the Cuil article in Wired magazine with bated breath.

angstrom• 18 years ago

CueCat wasn't all bad. I received several free barcode scanners which had better uses than scanning magazine ads once they were hacked...

asif• 18 years ago

We're certainly beating a dead horse here, but I just can't get over how bad it is. I keep trying different searches and I keep getting astonished at how off the results are. Did they run any test queries at all? I'm calling conspiracy on this one. Something is up.

TrevorJ• 18 years ago

I've seen results just as silly from Google images, and I'd be willing to bet Google's search wasn't nearly so solid as it is now back in the day.

ajju• 18 years ago

The only possible explanation for having an image of a monkey associated with Paul Graham is that they applied to YC and were rejected.

The World According to Cuil

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