Regular users of Cuil know we pride ourselves on taking a different approach to search: indexing more of the Web, basing results on content not popularity, offering a different user interface, and providing complete privacy protection.
Our content-based relevance starts by extracting a huge amount of data from the pages of the Web. We then make associations among this data set, divining relationships and matching concepts. Besides using this approach to return search results, we also give users access to this set of parsed data through our feature “Explore by Category,” which makes up the right-hand column of our results page.
On a very basic level, we take your search term and try to link it to concepts on the Web that correlate with the search results. Some folks checking out our recent UI changes have wondered about certain categories that have appeared. As always, we value the feedback and have taken it to heart; we have pushed live an update to our “Explore by Category” algorithm. We are still working on this feature, so please let us know what you find and what you think.
And to Rich Skrenta — who Twittered recently that he found it odd to see the category “Athletes At The 2004 Summer Olympics” come up in conjunction with his name — sorry to have mistaken you for an elite specimen of physical fitness prowess. There is hope, however: an athlete named Skrenta did compete in those Games (a long lost relative, perhaps?) and his efforts were discussed on a number of Web pages, though admittedly in German. We’ve tried to address this issue now by only considering for our categories feature data taken from Web pages in the language of your search.
As for Joshua Schachter, who found “Turing Award Laureates” appearing as a category in his search: Wow. You’re right, what a crazy association to make. What were we thinking?!
Greg Lindahl · Mar 12, 02:55 PM
Good thing I wasn’t taking a sip of anything while reading this blog post.
guest · Mar 13, 12:00 AM
A search for DSB Bank results in the “Explore by Category” being filled with topics about cycling.
By the way, it is good to see the search results themselves have improved considerably since the launch of Cuil.
Keep up the good work.
Vince · Mar 13, 11:33 AM
@guest — thanks for the feedback and positive words. Looks like DBS Bank sponsors a womens cycling team called…Team DBS Bank. That’s why there are so many cycling concepts appearing in the category section. There is a “Banks” category that shows up further down, but maybe it should come first. Thanks again!
christian · Mar 13, 02:42 PM
i took cuil link from statcounter. i made some search with it and it’s fantastic, the search results have a small photo. i just submited my website. one more time, you did a great job ;)
Djerba · Mar 13, 05:37 PM
Great work :-)
I thing categorizing the web is difficult !
If Cuil will give human categorizing access, there is a spam risk :-(
And if Cuil think that keyword familiarization and serialization is sufficient, I think it would bring poor SERPs ;-)
So I think that Cuil have to win webmasters popularity by announcing for Ex : that Cuil is reading
<meta name=“category” content=“movies,videos”>
Things would be easier and spams ejection would be also easier ;-)
I really like Cuil evolution
Greetings from Djerba
eccles · Mar 23, 08:52 PM
I was able to add Cuil to Safari (on Mac) using an add-on called AcidSearch; it apparently tweaks with Safari’s internal variables.
Are the searches getting better relevancy? That seemed to be a problem with the way past Cuil data was presented; so far things seem okay — more relevancy.
chenhui · Mar 24, 12:56 AM
thank you!
shoops.fr · Mar 25, 01:37 PM
very nice look.
My website http://www.shoops.fr is note indexed
Vince · Mar 25, 01:52 PM
@shoops – glad you like the new look.
BTW, if there are websites people would like Cuil to include in our index, we have a web form you can fill out to let us know under our Contact Us footer at http://www.cuil.com/info/contact_us/feedback/?to=crawl%20me
I’ve filled one out for you this time, @shoops.
Match · Mar 25, 09:27 PM
You know what, I read this and I didn’t think it was such a big deal.
Then I went and actually tried it. I searched for ‘codeigniter’ (a PHP MVC framework) and the results in the category section were actually useful.
For example, if you are using a certain code framework, but you wanted to compare to others, you would normally have to find what other options you have, and then compare them.
But this actually does the first step for me, and may save a lot of searching time.
Good job