Jul 28 2008

I’m in Cuil

Cuil, apparently pronounced “cool”, is the hot topic in the tech/Internet industry at the moment. It’s a new search engine bragging about a bigger index than our beloved Google.

I couldn’t possibly begin to second guess their claims because in truth I know bugger all about search engines. However, I do know that where Cuil misses some, it’s got me no problem. Page 1 for Jem as per Google, and “7,273 results for jemjabella”.

Obviously I’m just too cuil. (My humour, it’s wasted on you guys I tell ya.)

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Warning

This post is over 6 months old. This means that, despite my best intentions, it may no longer be accurate. Age, motherhood, experience, loss... these things have all changed me from when this blog was started back in the heady (ha) days of my youth.

As much as I would like to go back and edit 10 years of archives to provide an insight into the 'me' of now — to update coding snippets and revise website advice — it would probably take years to do so (by which point I'd have to start again!) This would defeat the point of keeping these archives anyway.

Please take these posts for what they are: a brief look into my past, my history, my journey.

30 Responses so far
  1. Rachael says: July 28, 2008 at 4:45 pm # ·

    Cuil doesn’t load for me so I can’t search for myself. :(

  2. Rhys says: July 28, 2008 at 5:24 pm # ·

    I’m nowhere to be seen. Must try harder Cuil!

  3. Laurra says: July 28, 2008 at 5:32 pm # ·

    You’re the 3rd person on my feedreader today writing about cuil. And the day isn’t over yet.
    But it doesn’t find me anyway :( Even google gets me :(

  4. Stephanie says: July 28, 2008 at 5:35 pm # ·

    wait huh? I’m searching for you and it doesn’t have you o.o; it does have references to Sunbeam Soapbox though. very surprising.

  5. Alex says: July 28, 2008 at 5:46 pm # ·

    I’m not “cuil.” :( What a way to build up self-esteem.

  6. Jem says: July 28, 2008 at 5:56 pm # ·

    Sorry Laurra! I have been at work so haven’t had chance to read any blogs yet; didn’t realise others had already spammed the topic to death.

    Interestingly, a search for ‘jem’ here at home gives me a different result set than at work. (I’m still in there on mine though.)

  7. Hadeel says: July 28, 2008 at 6:02 pm # ·

    I think Cuil is sleeker than Google and is another way to find things online! Thanks Jem!

  8. Grax says: July 28, 2008 at 6:02 pm # ·

    Hmm right now I’m not in the ‘Cuil’ crowd.

    But my mum thinks I’m cool….

  9. Mumblies says: July 28, 2008 at 6:06 pm # ·

    Cuil it may be, but it’s not that cuil because until now I had never heard of it. :)

  10. Robmarie says: July 28, 2008 at 7:03 pm # ·

    Cuil is too cool for meh!! I’m getting an “unavailable” message :(

  11. Amelie says: July 28, 2008 at 7:11 pm # ·

    Heard about it before… Wouldn’t load then, still won’t load now. Boo.

  12. Allee says: July 28, 2008 at 7:14 pm # ·

    Boo hiss. It says it’s “momentarily unavailable.” I guess it was just too cuil for the internet to stay up. (And…I just failed. Miserably).

  13. Vera says: July 28, 2008 at 7:29 pm # ·

    It always returns an error… no matter what I try to search for.

  14. Stepherz says: July 28, 2008 at 9:55 pm # ·

    How do they arrange their results? I wonder… I can search myself all I like, but no matter how many times I’ve tried ‘jem’ or ‘jemjabella’ I got that excessive load message.

  15. Julie says: July 28, 2008 at 10:49 pm # ·

    (why was there a ’6′ in my email address?)

    Anyway, if I search for “julie’s personal site”, I get a whole…14 results. No trace of me, of course. Over 3 million results in Google.

    Your cuil doesn’t like me (but I have no idea where I actually am when you search that in Google :P).

  16. Mat says: July 28, 2008 at 11:24 pm # ·

    Cuil is indeed cool. I like the way they take CONTEXT into account within search; Thank Christ its not just about placing keywords in a miss match fashion and having a bunch of link juice to boot. They’ve actually listened to what bugged people about search like anonymity, skewed results due to paid links, branding etc etc.

    I must admit i won’t be full jumping ship just yet; Personally i admire what they’ve done but i’m just so damn used of how google sorts things that i don’t want to have to ‘look’ to find the results anymore.

    Very interesting things lie ahead for the Cuil team though that is for certain. I’ll definitely be following these guys in the coming months ahead.

  17. Bobbi-lee says: July 29, 2008 at 2:00 am # ·

    “Due to excessive load, our servers didn’t return results. Please try your search again.”
    :(

  18. Vickie says: July 29, 2008 at 5:53 am # ·

    Cuil is not accessible for browsers with images disabled, i.e. mine at the moment. Totally not cool.

  19. Jessica says: July 29, 2008 at 6:25 am # ·

    This has been only the second item in my feed reader in a 24hr period about Cuil. After the last item I checked it out to see how it worked. When I looked for the name of my site, I got tons of copies of my site, and not the genuine article. For some reason, it is obsessed with showing me proxy-accessed versions of my site. To put it briefly, I don’t trust it.

  20. Jabed says: July 29, 2008 at 9:12 am # ·

    On Google, I’m the top/first link when searching for my name i.e. ‘Jabed’
    but on Cuil, I’m nowhere to be seen :(

  21. Mat says: July 29, 2008 at 11:36 am # ·

    It’s a different search algorithm guys/girls… what the hell did you expect? Of course the results will be different.

  22. Melissa says: July 29, 2008 at 7:15 pm # ·

    I’m in there…pretty sleek little search thingie. So…cuil… :D

  23. Roachy says: July 30, 2008 at 11:21 am # ·

    Quite like it…..it formats better than Google in Lynx although search results seem more limited. I’ll give it a chance though – it found roachys weblog straight away :D

  24. Shaun says: July 30, 2008 at 7:16 pm # ·

    Boo, I’m not a fan. :( I don’t like the way the results are organized and I’m not getting results accurate to my search like I do using Google. Although I like their design, I’ll take the simplicity of Google anyday.

  25. echo says: July 31, 2008 at 9:24 am # ·

    I ‘cuiled’ myself and discovered a lot of results — interesting, however most of them were of my domains and web junk delivered through proxy sites, so they were essentially the same results delivered multiple times. Hey, they do claim to search more of the web than the big three, and that does seem to be the case…
    One thing that bugs me is the thumbnails shown along with the results. They often have absolutely nothing to do with the site. What’s up with that? I’m willing to keep tabs on it/them, though.

    By the way, I was totally going to post something about Cuil a few days ago when I first read about it, but I didn’t have the time. I should have known others were going to jump on it! That’s cuil (ha ha), I’m willing to be late to the table.

  26. Dizzy says: July 31, 2008 at 2:28 pm # ·

    Blech. Mostly Japanese sites came out for mine. O_O

  27. Dax Brady Sheehan says: July 31, 2008 at 5:17 pm # ·

    50 million queries in it’s first day that pretty solid. I wonder how many of those were like people like us “Cuilin our own names” ?

  28. Elea says: August 2, 2008 at 2:39 am # ·

    *sigh* I suppose you -are- just cuiler than the rest of us. My website’s nowhere to be found either on there, although it’s not so surprising, considering I’ve been neglecting it quite a bit… Did see you pop up though as the last result on the first page when I looked up ‘Jem’! ;)

  29. Maren says: August 3, 2008 at 12:37 am # ·

  30. wonkotsane says: August 22, 2008 at 3:08 pm # ·

    Cuil sucks ass.