Cuil Blog

We are pleased to announce the arrival of maps and local listings to Cuil search results. Users can now search for restaurants, local businesses and over 3.5M other points of interest across the United States. Cuil has partnered with MapQuest, the #1 mapping site, to provide these listings, along with interactive maps to deliver an engaging local search experience. It’s now easy to find address and contact information and even get driving directions.

Searching for local results is easy. Just provide a search term and give a city, state or zipcode. You can search for a particular business name like Salt House CA, a category such as gas stations 94025 or even landmarks like AT&T Park San Francisco or Palo Alto Museums. If Cuil has found any local results for your search, they will appear in the middle column along with an interactive map, allowing you to get contact information or driving directions via MapQuest.

This is only the first version of local results so there’s a lot more to come. As always, if you have any suggestions, find any bugs or generally just want to get in touch, drop us a note in the comments. Maps are one more way we’re continually improving the Cuil search experience. Give it a try!

There are quite a few Irish expatriates in the San Francisco Bay Area, including in Silicon Valley tech companies, I have discovered, courtesy of a group called the Irish Network of San Francisco and Enterprise Ireland, a government agency that assists Irish entrepreneurs and endeavors overseas.

Last night, the two entities jointly hosted a panel discussion to coincide with the ongoing Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Cuil CEO and founder Tom Costello was invited to participate, along with execs from Google, Yahoo, Skydeck and Dial2Do. The panel, which was moderated by former Financial Times columnist and now Silicon Valley Watcher blogger Tom Foremski, covered a number of tech policy issues, from net neutrality to online privacy policies.

About 100 folks attended, many of them having come to the Valley from Ireland within the last few years, including a number of the panelists themselves. While the discussion was interesting, I suspect the attendees showed up at least as much to socialize and network with friendly faces and familiar accents. I dare say a good time was had by all, myself included. And, yes, Harp was served….

Like most college campuses, Stanford University is a beautiful place in autumn. I was fortunate to spend a number of years there, first as a computer science graduate student and then as a research scientist, working for Professor John McCarthy, who is best known for his work on artificial intelligence. My first office there looked out over The Oval, a large park-lawn at the top of the main drive onto campus. On sunny afternoons (i.e., most), the students would set-up volleyball nets, beckoning us out of the computer labs and into the fresh air.

I was back on campus Wednesday night. The fall air was cool and crisp — for California — as I walked through The Oval, past the chapel, to Skilling Auditorium. I was excited to be back, but a little bit nervous, too. I had been invited to be a guest speaker for the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar and it had been a while since I had faced a room full of students.

The students and others were very knowledgeable about technology in general and even search specifically. They were enthusiastic about entrepreneurship and asked interesting and engaging questions. It was a lot of fun. Afterwards, a smaller group of students took me out to dinner to keep chatting. Undergraduates and graduate students alike, they were an impressive bunch, and we talked about everything from engineering to politics.

The ETL Seminar series is a very neat idea and I am grateful to have been asked to participate. If you’re interested, my talk and Q&A is available on the program’s website here.

One of the things that makes the Web exciting is that it is so dynamic — constantly changing, growing, pages expiring, new content being created, etc. So one of the challenges of a search engine is to try to keep up with that dynamism as much as possible. Search engines constantly must be weeding their indices, culling out pages that have dropped off the Web, discovering and removing spam and malware, and adding in new pages that have been posted recently.

Here at Cuil, we’ve just rolled out a new, refreshed index that addresses those issues. We’ve dropped dead pages and spam and folded in new pages from our recent crawls. This will make our index more up-to-date and reduce bad or expired links.

In these new updates we’ve just launched, we’ve also made changes to our search processing that should help us understand your query better, as well as improvements to the “clues” in our index that help our algorithms discover relevant results and more related concepts. I hope this refreshed index and these improvements provide you with an even better search experience. As always, please let us know. We appreciate hearing from you. Thanks!

I visited Brussels last week to take part in a panel discussion on
Competition and Innovation organized by the European Competition
Commissioner. Brussels is gorgeous: one of the main problems for
companies in Europe is getting people to move to where jobs are. If
other places are as pretty and livable as Brussels, I am not surprised
people do not want to move.

The meeting took place the day after European leaders worked out their
plan for bailing out banks, so Francois Fillon (the French Prime
Minister) could not attend – saving western capitalism is an
acceptable excuse for missing most meetings – but Neelie Kroes,
the Commissioner for Competition, was there, despite being very involved
in setting the rules for what governments could not do.

That was my first shock: Competition policy in Europe is a lot about
stopping governments from helping companies unfairly. I do not think
that America has any rules on whether a state can help out local
industry – state governments do not give money to companies, or at
least it does not seem to be a matter of perceived unfairness between
states. HP does not complain that Motorola is being given sweetheart
deals by Illinois.

My second shock was….

Continue reading