I wish them luck, and some people are saying it works quite well for academic searching, but I think they should have left this locked up until it worked – not have it in everlasting beta (like Goggle) but also not launch making claims it can not match.

Michael: very interesting thought.

Alex

This discussion is very interesting. I agree there could be potential to Cuil. And the privacy issue is a very important one. Cuil was started by former Google employees I believe, so they must be very aware this is an issue. Unfortunately they got off to a very bumpy start, and as a result all the fabulous word of mouth traffic they generated could work against them as people came, saw, and decided they weren't interested.

Having blogs so thoroughly indexed is a mixed blessing. The regular Google search currently serves up only two hits from any one site, so you get a real mix of sites but not an idea of how much applicable content is available from that site. On the other hand with Cuil, they do not seem to place that restriction on the search, so you could get any number of hits from one site. In the case of a blog with hundreds of posts, you may have to search through all the blog posts to find other content (search my name and you will see what I mean–good luck slogging through those 900+ blog posts from the past 4 years!).

I am interested to see what they do with this start. How will they overcome the negative impression they generated?

In the meantime, you've done a great job kicking off your presence here, David.

Cheers,
Connie

Yes it does display info in an array format. I rather like that, but it is more a personal preference related to design.

The search algorithms may need some further refinement, but after all it does search differently from Google and I think Google has focused our way of thinking to date.

But perhaps the strongest point is the lack of any search history in Cuil. As lawyers I think we should be concerned about on-line privacy and should support efforts to deliver useful information without having to trade-off our bits of our personal privacy in return. After all, if you go into a library and do research, there is no record of the information that you have referenced if you just browse. If you use Copernic, for example, with its hundreds of sources – are you leaving electronic fingerprints all over the web?

I say give Cuil a chance to adapt and respond. This is just the initial release. I would expect that initiatives like Cuil will spawn other innovations that will lead to more meaningful search methods outside of the shadow of Big Brother.

A newer search engine using different algorithms is not something I'm particularly happy about. I quick look around and it definitely produces more results. It also seems blog-heavy, which is good for us involved in the space. But there's also a lot of redundancy (and bugs), and I already see areas that could be easily exploited.

Finally, I take some comfort in knowing that no matter how much better it may (or not) be than Google, consumer habits mean that it's not going to change any time soon, irrespective of whether the lat Per Bak was right about self-organized criticality (1996).

Try a simple search for our PM Stephen Harper. #1 is a wikipedia article on a fictional character of the same name. Really… it should be able to have our pm.gc.ca page come up number one.

Second example, tried a search of my own name. Cuil inserted photos OVER the results – none of which were me! The two people licking each other, well, I won't dignify…

I don't use copernic, but have had it installed in the past with good results. My preference after Google is actually Yahoo. There are many times I could argue that Yahoo results are better than Google, but for the fact of limited search-share, I would be tempted to switch.

Cuil? big waste of GC funding so far. And 5-10 years too late.

Copernic comes into its own when one needs to be more confident that you've looked under more stones. As I tell younger lawyers when speaking about search engines, no engine is more than partial – see searchenginewatch.com generally – and different engines will raise unique results which are invisible even from Google.

I use Copernic when I want to be more definitive – and can wait to pull an expresso, while the search is being run.

For those of us who grew up with five minute waits for results from old Lexis and QL, that's acceptable. I can't imagine anyone under thirty however, waiting more than five seconds for a screen to load or a result to materialize.

Do you find Copernic preferable to Google for certain types of tasks? If so, is this because of the depth of its search or because of its functionality?

I haven't used Copernic in many years, but I was under the (perhaps mistaken) impression that Google had long won the battle. Metasearch engines like Copernic and Dogpile seemed to be trendy in the 1990s, when search engines were in their infancy, but do they now offer anything that a single, well-designed search engine does not?

Alex

On the good side, it did include blog postings.

As for an alternative try Copernic, and then in the preferences set the default for the depth of search from 10 to 250 hits per engine, and tick the maximum number of engines. Copernic slows to a crawl, but the results when they come are far deeper and are stacked by relevance with duplicates excluded.

What I also like is that one can then run searches within the search set.

Nice rhetoric Cuil, though the Guardian is sceptical – and why a name drawn from nook or cranny in Gaelic?