People may have noticed some new or different results rising to the top for their queries lately. This is because we’ve made some changes in the last few days, from ranking and processing tweaks to index size. We have increased the number of pages we search and serve up by more than 3 billion. (This brings our index to 124,426,951,803 pages, for those keeping score at home…!)
This should help on a number of fronts, from giving us more results for certain topics to increasing the categories and subjects in our “Explore By Category” feature. It should help improve our image matching a bit, as well, now that we have more images to choose from. These additions may make an obvious difference in some areas and may be more subtle in others.
Either way, a bigger index helps us find more interesting and relevant results for you. It also gives us more data to help our engine “learn” what is on the Web and how it relates in the real world. This is another reason why we will continue to crawl the web and grow our index.
Of course, we’ll also re-crawl fast-changing sites and publish “refreshed” sections of our index on a regular basis. These new changes are more about improving coverage and continuing to push the boundary.
Let us know what you find!
Dirk Faust · Oct 9, 11:33 PM
Nice to see that you keep going.
I tried a search for “jquery” and noticed that more or less all results are relevant now (even if some appear twice with exactly the same URL – visualjquery.com for example at pages 1 + 2). Even the category quality has raised. Good job!
But the image matching need some more work. Way too often I have to grin on the results (and I suspect some will be angry about some instead) :-)
Did you ever thought about chaning the main font? It’s nice, but not too good readable (as many people think in forums that talk about you).
Ubiquit · Oct 11, 02:15 AM
This is great news!
However, why is that if i search for ‘ubiquitense’ I see on the top right corner ’414 results for ubiquitense’ – but actually only 10 results are displayed!?!?
James · Oct 11, 07:51 AM
Congratulations! It is really an amzing progress you have made. Keep ahead. We will support Cuil forever!
Heston · Oct 11, 04:32 PM
@Ubiquit: Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I’ll pass this info on to someone who can look into this.
Robin · Oct 11, 07:52 PM
Thanks! – I wondered when a good category-based search engine would arrive. The IT maven at the library told me about you, and I found the info I needed right away, minus the clutter other search engines push.
Marcus · Oct 12, 02:38 AM
A German search would be nice.
Dawson Metcalf · Oct 12, 11:22 AM
Some interesting observations. Cuil seems like a new site, not sure, but effective.
Wayne · Oct 12, 08:20 PM
The linking of images to pages in search results remains a problem – why does CUIL continue to drag in images from other sites? – annoying the people you’ve taken images from and annoying the owners of the sites that are assigned incorrect images in search results. EG. If I do a search on cub scouts in our suburb or in our District (in Victoria, Australia), my site and others in our district get assigned images for American Cub Scouts (we’re Australian!), a Scout symbol with a map of Queensland, an image from a ‘District’ in the UK, someone’s family shield, an image from ‘Pack 397’ in the US…. all sorts of rubbish!
Why try to second-guess website developers, indicating that you know better than them? If you’re going to assign an image, have one from their own site. Better yet, allow siteowners to verify their identity (via email back to them etc., and then allow them to assign their own images – or just get rid of them altogether. The current system is ludicrous
Mike Johnson · Oct 12, 08:23 PM
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What is status of the image issue? I still see a lot of my images linking and displaying with my competitors sites and the other way around.
I find that your search results around Tourism in Latvia and the tourism in Riga are simply bizarre.
The Head Rooster in Riga
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knupdiputs · Oct 13, 01:46 PM
Maybe it’s just me, but every time I’ve tried using Cuil, I cannot find what I want at all. Seriously. I get something completely unrelated. I really want to not use Google or some other privacy-infringing engine, but I feel like it’s either use them or never find the information I want. I hope that changes.
Karthik Mohan P · Oct 13, 01:47 PM
Hello to every crew on board
The effort that you guys have made really looks worth it and is spreading to the full in my country (Inida), Till date Google is the KING of search engines, But you are the prince now, Just make sure that you guys do advertise properly and I am sure the king will hand over the crown.
Heston · Oct 13, 02:17 PM
@knupdiputs: Can you give any specific examples of queries that do not return adequate results? We’re always working to make Cuil better and this information will help.
Corey · Oct 15, 10:03 AM
Anna you rock. You are an amazing woman and have inspired me with what you’re doing. Keep up the good work!
Ahmed Omer · Oct 15, 12:01 PM
Your search engine has come on leaps and bounds
One useful feature would be to have an option to display results in a more conventional line-list format. More results can be eye-scanned, that way. Of course your standard display has its merits too!