Yuil vs. Cuil - The hack wins hands down...

http://laserlike.com/2008/07/30/yuil-vs-cuil/

by mspeiser • 18 years ago

40 22 18 years ago

unalone3• 18 years ago

Compared to Cuil, yes. But I still like the layout of Yahoo!'s normal search. Whose idea was it that stacked results didn't work for conveying amounts of information?

joao• 18 years ago

Stacked results are what work best. But Cuil had to make themselves look visually inovative, just to be considered 'diferent' from Google. If not journalists would say that they were equal to Google/Yahoo - no matter how better, or worse, the technology and search results.

Even, as it is the case, the UI doesn't help the user.

unalone3• 18 years ago

I think the moral, then, is not "innovate visually for no reason." It's "don't pretend like you've got something that can compete with Google."

:-)

spencerfry2• 18 years ago

Wow! The results are 1,000 times better.

Nice work, Sam.

j2d2• 18 years ago

Ahem...

Nice work, Yahoo!

spencerfry2• 18 years ago

Fair enough. :)

I can't wait to see more...

d0mine• 18 years ago

Showing relevant images is hard http://sampullara.appspot.com/yuil/search?q=cuil

unalone3• 18 years ago

Cuil isn't a pulp fantasy hero? But it sounds SO much like one.

bartman• 18 years ago

Except for the semantic part...

IsaacSchlueter• 18 years ago

Nice, but the link should point to http://sampullara.appspot.com/yuil/ not http://laserlike.com/2008/07/30/yuil-vs-cuil/

From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.

beatty• 18 years ago

I submitted http://sampullara.appspot.com/yuil/ earlier today, but HN seems to have deleted it (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=262081).

redorb• 18 years ago

this kinda stuff has to embarrass cuil, the results are better (yahoo) but still perhaps an engine like goog, Y! or MSN will by their indexing technology (that is supposedly cheaper)

KirinDave2• 18 years ago

No, it doesn't. Cuill, like Powerset, is a new search engine still doing relevance and query reformulation tuning. It's a lot of work to get results as good as Google and Yahoo! deliver, and a large part of it is a massive body of training data to work with.

People who think this should embarrass Cuill are profoundly missing the point. It's a technology demo to show, "Yes we can make a functional search engine and our technology is not smoke and rainbows".

Powerset faced the same absurd criticism, and it was frustrating because people were so caught up in the search wars that they didn't see the product as its own entity.

mlinsey• 18 years ago

I agree with you, but this is also why Cuill's enormous marketing push this week was such a bad idea, even though it was executed brilliantly. (what's the last startup that you remember that had an article about it in the New York Times on its launch day?)

asif2• 18 years ago

It's not very difficult to make a functional search engine. With the amount of resources cuil had, all you would have to do is provision a few thousand servers and deploy a nutch cluster on them.

Then you pair random images with random search results. Voila, you have cuil.

The criticism is duly applied as Cuil made the claim that they would be better than Google at the same game. Powerset never made such a claim. The people who criticized it didn't have an understanding about what it was actually trying to do.

geuis• 18 years ago

I'm liking Yuil. It definitely passes my vanity search test that I commented on here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=258828

mdemare• 18 years ago

Searching for my name returns my linked in profile as the first hit ... with a picture of Charles Nutter.

vaksel• 18 years ago

Cuil made the mistake of telling the user they found 0 results. Instead they should have used Cuil for main results, and then if nothing was found should have displayed Google or Yahoo results(probably Yahoo because of the whole Boss thing).

That way at least half of your results would be relevant.

dominik• 18 years ago

Yuil's been taken down? Why?

Yuil vs. Cuil - The hack wins hands down...

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