Cuil’s Local Search Algorithm Clearly Broken

The UI looks nice but it’s hard to scan. I think that they can make improvements in the algorithm, but it seems that their design is what gives them their uniqueness–and it’s hard to read quickly!

I think there could be some nice ways to adapt this design to a local search.

It definitely needs some lovin’, but it’s a decent start. I think its hard to scan only because we aren’t used to this sort of layout. Had the roles been reversed, we’d probably be complaining that the other layouts were had to read.

Also, it may be worth mentioning that they may not have registrar status, which means they can’t necessarily add in things such as domain age, etc.

A search for St Louis SEO on Google gives nice results (including yours truly) but the same search on cuil gives much different results, including a mesothelioma link. Hot!

http://www.google.com/search?q=st+louis+seo
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=st+louis+seo

Nonetheless, it’ll be interesting to watch.

I think that search is extremely relevant 🙂

McStud, I think you may have mistaken the search query for “local search spammers”.

I clearly see some relevance for that search 🙂

Not sure where their pulling images from though? Cause the image in my listing does not exist on my site.

Which one is yours Stever?

Anyone know if there is any type of “submit my site” or sitemap concept that CUIL uses? So far I haven’t been impressed with the quality of the results.

I checked them out yesterday and really did not like it. Like the earlier poster said it was very hard to scan the page and see what interested you. That, and it gave me a few searches with zero results and it was something simple (http://www.cuil.com/search?q=business+cash+advance).

I wish them luck but I’m not switching soon.

so cuils search results are a little rough right now for sure. But I think everyone in here could benefit a bit from asking the question why?

…the errors and bad results were actually because unlike Google.com Cuil uses separate search appliances that specialize in a particular subcategory of results. There are servers that index sports; others are experts on medicine, colleges, etc. As these servers get overloaded, they dropped offline for some queries, and the machines left online return less-than-relevant results that then appear at the top of users’ pages. So basically if you search for “Ohio Buckeyes” you could get Cuil results that are all about “The Dark Knight.”

All of that appears on my blog (plug). But really guys the non relevant search results both local and international could have a lot to do with servers falling off.

side note: or nothing at all because the cuil team may have not deemed local search that important for launch (google didn’t).

I am sticking with google. Cuil does not seem like it is going to take control of the search scene any time soon. They must not have very good crawling bots.

I think Cuil should offer some type of webmaster panel, just like google does