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.