Cuil Blog

Cuil continually strives to bring the information you are looking for from the depths of the Internet to the first search results page. One of our goals is to extract structure from the unstructured web and present it to you in an informative, visually appealing and accessible way. Today, we announce the launch of our newest feature in this direction — Maplines.

You might be thinking, “What in the world is a Mapline?” Just as our Timelines show a concept across time, our Maplines show a concept across a map.

A search for bird watching results in a map with points across the world which relate to bird watching. Let’s look at some of them:

• Krabi Province, Thailand: There are many hard-to-find birds such as: Gurneys, Finfoots, Bigwinged Brown Kingfishers, Egrets, Bitterns and Herons etc.
• Yell, Shetland, Scotland: Bobby Tulloch, perhaps the best known resident of Yell and noted Shetland ornithologist, who rocked the bird watching establishment, by discovering a pair of breeding Snowy Owls on neighbouring Fetlar when working as a tourist guide.

We make it easy to explore the concept you searched for and how it relates to a particular location on the map—hovering your mouse over a pin will result in a pop-up with a longer description and a link to search for related pages.

Here are some queries that result in Maplines:

• John Legend
• Byzantine Empire
• London Bridge
• George Orwell
• Los Angeles Lakers

We hope our data mining experiments and features are helping you find the information you are looking for and explore areas of interest in a more visual way. As always, we’d love to hear from you.

Although we’re based in the US, Cuil has a relatively large following of users from other parts of the world. Some of these countries don’t have the luxury of high-speed broadband internet connections, and to to help them get easier access to information, we’ve launched a new preference to put the site into Low Bandwidth mode. Of course, people with less-speedy connections in the US are more than welcome to use it as well!

When in Low Bandwidth mode, the Cuil search results page loses some of its interesting sidebar information for the sake of speed. The images associated with results are removed, and results are reformatted into a single column. While this means a far less interactive experience, page loads become tiny and fast for slow connections. To turn on Low Bandwidth mode, just toggle the option from the Preferences page (which is also now conveniently linked to from the Cuil homepage).

As a reminder, we also have a version of Cuil optimized for mobile devices. You can access the mobile version by simply going to http://www.cuil.com on your Apple iPhone, Palm Pre, or any Android device like the T-Mobile G1.

A lot of users have written to us asking how to make Cuil the default search engine in Safari. Our response up to now has been that it simply isn’t possible. Apple restricts Safari’s search to Google only, and there is no way to change this in Safari’s preferences. However, there is another method out there that works quite well, but it involves installing a Safari plugin. In the past, we have shied away from recommending this due to the involved installation process.

Our users have spoken loudly though, and there are now better plugins available than when we first surveyed the issue. In this post I will guide you through the task of installing Glims, a great Safari plugin, and configuring it to search Cuil. It’s not that painful. I promise!

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In case you haven’t noticed, Cuil is now available in seven languages, including French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese and Turkish. If you’re interested in translating Cuil into any other language, please let us know. As always, we welcome your feedback.

Haben sie das gesehen? Cuil ist jetzt in sieben Sprachen, eingeschlossen Französisch, Spanisch, Italiener, Deutsch, Portugiesisch und Türkisch. Als allemal, wir Willkommen ihrer Rückkopplung.

Cuil ya está disponible en siete idiomas, incluyendo Francés, Español, Italiano, Alemán, Portugués, y Turco. Como siempre, agradecemos sus comentarios.

Au cas ou vous n’auriez pas remarqué, Cuil existe maintenant en sept langages: anglais, français, espagnol, italien, allemand, portuguais et turc. Comme toujours, n’hesitez pas à nous faire part de vos commentaires.

Se non hai notato, Cuil è ora disponibile in sette lingue, inglese, italiano, francese, spagnolo, tedesco, turco e portoghese. Come sempre, vogliamo i vostri suggerimenti!

Caso você não tenha reparado, Cuil está agora disponível em sete idiomas, inglês, português, francês, espanhol, italiano, alemão e turco. Como sempre, apreciamos as suas sugestões!

Cuil’da artık Fransızca, İspanyolca, İtalyanca, Almanca, Portekizce veya Türkçe arama yapabilirsiniz. Her zamanki gibi, yorumlarınızı bekliyoruz!

When you see the right image, you know it instantly. And if it’s not quite right, you know it right away, too. We’ve gotten lots of feedback on our image work since launch and we really appreciate the input and ideas. We’ve looked, listened and learned, and have made some changes. Today we are rolling out some more changes to our image algorithm that address some of these issues. We hope to find more photos and less title bars, for example. And we have to be able to find more good images from the results themselves.

Please let us know what you think. We still have more work to do. Hard problems don’t get solved all at once.

Happy searching.