Interesting People mailing list archives
Re: Chuckling at Cuil: Not Ready for Prime Time
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2008 07:57:57 -0700
________________________________________ From: Synthesis:Law and Technology Law and Technology [synthesis.law.and.technology () gmail com] Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2008 10:40 AM To: David Farber Subject: Re: [IP] Chuckling at Cuil: Not Ready for Prime Time Dave This got me curious. So I tried it myself First I tried using a term I was familiar with. The term is "P90X+" (i think its a great product but feel free to redact if you don't want to give them publicity) result: BAD We didn't find any results for "P90X+" Some reasons might be... * a typo. Please check your spelling. * your search includes a term that is very rare. Try to find a more common substitute. * too many search terms. Please try fewer terms. Finally, try to think of different words to describe your search. WORSE So I tried the more general (and more popular "P90X" instead. Bad idea. It went away and didn't come back for almost 4 minutes. I had time to sit and wait, think a bit, decide to write this reply and get to the 'didn't come back' before it actually came back and forced me to put in a time. No public engine should take over 4 minutes to yield a result. That's not even public beta time. If we are accustomed to Google and Yahoo and Microsoft then something could be different but it cannot be 'worse'. EVEN WORSE It might almost be acceptable if 'different' didn't mean that I got a url for bittorrents of P90X right next to (and before) a url to the actual product's website. I am sure the owners of this product would be quite displeased to know how they rank. I would be curious to know what cuil.com<http://cuil.com> has in place as for a litigation strategy? Dan Steinberg SYNTHESIS:Law & Technology 35, du Ravin phone: (613) 794-5356 Chelsea, Quebec J9B 1N1 On 7/28/08, David Farber <dave () farber net<mailto:dave () farber net>> wrote: [My reaction is similiar after trying it djf] ________________________________________ From: Lauren Weinstein [lauren () vortex com<mailto:lauren () vortex com>] Sent: Monday, July 28, 2008 4:32 PM To: David Farber Cc: lauren () vortex com<mailto:lauren () vortex com> Subject: Chuckling at Cuil: Not Ready for Prime Time Chuckling at Cuil: Not Ready for Prime Time http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000407.html Greetings. "The New York Times" today ran something of a fluff piece ( http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/28/technology/28cool.html ) about a new search engine named "Cuil" ( http://www.cuil.com ), which includes among its founding staff some former Google engineers. Cuil (yeah, pronounced as "cool" -- too cute, eh?) appears to be trying to position itself as the "anti-Google" -- particularly by trumpeting a "we don't keep search logs" privacy policy ( http://www.cuil.com/info/privacy ). I've spent some time experimenting with Cuil. I'm afraid that my initial impressions may be classified as "cruel" rather than cool by some readers ... Let's start with that "anonymous searches" privacy policy. First off, let's all keep in mind that what Cuil is doing is throwing out data that they might otherwise collect, and that at any point -- either on their own volition or under orders from on high -- collecting identifying search information would typically be as simple as changing a few lines of code. Perhaps more to the point, I've never been opposed to the collection of such data for reasonable periods of time in raw form. It's useful not only for personalized search implementations and tuning of search algorithms and services over time, but also can be invaluable for fighting network abuses of various sorts as well. I do become concerned when such data is held in non-anonymized forms for long or indefinite periods, increasing the probability of it being abused by outside parties demanding access to that log data for their own purposes. So it's really a matter of balance. Frankly, when I see an "absolute" privacy policy like Cuil's, I find myself questioning if a reasonable balance is in place there, or rather if Cuil is currently grandstanding for the sake of publicity, and how this will affect the overall usefulness of their product. And indeed, at least as it stands right now, Cuil needs some serious work. In my testing to date, Cuil's search results generally -- to use a technical term -- suck. Wacky results galore apparent immediately, including combining unrelated results that should have been separated, associating (over and over again!) completely erroneous photos with the wrong texts, and masses of just plain wrong or highly misleading results -- some of which are so ridiculous that one wonders how they became associated within the Cuil index in the first place. However, I'll admit that in its current state there is a certain entertainment value to Cuil. I rarely laugh out loud when using search engines, but I got some good chuckles and at least one good "choked on the water I was drinking" guffaw from some of the hilariously incorrect, twisted search results that Cuil proudly presented. No doubt Cuil will be working hard to improve and we'll see how they develop. But somehow I don't think that the Google folks are sweating buckets about these guys right now -- unless Google plans to start a "Get Some Laughs from Purposely Wrong Results (beta)" search engine, that is. --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein lauren () vortex com<mailto:lauren () vortex com> or lauren () pfir org<mailto:lauren () pfir org> Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 http://www.pfir.org/lauren Co-Founder, PFIR - People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org Co-Founder, NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad - http://www.nnsquad.org Founder, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com ------------------------------------------- Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- ------------------------------------------- Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
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- Chuckling at Cuil: Not Ready for Prime Time David Farber (Jul 28)
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- Re: Chuckling at Cuil: Not Ready for Prime Time David Farber (Jul 29)