Cuil, Semantic Search
Last week, Cuil.com caught my eye. It gave me very good impression in just 5 seconds (BTW, 10 seconds is a survival maximal for any website to me). First, I tried, as many people may do, my name. It didn’t disappoint me by hitting quite precisely my pages. I also love the grid-based layout. A few minutes later, I found its “Explore by Category” option. It looks like that cuil has some sort of ontology hierarchies for web pages.
A few “google” results reveal that cuil may use some clustering technique to build such hierarchies. It is interesting to think will such hierarchies indeed improve search experience. When I search “Semantic Web”, cuil recommends me to browse “Ontology (computer Science)” and some of its sub category; it also suggests me to look at “James Hendler”‘s homepage. I would say that it will be very useful for exploring.
Building meta data using machine learning technology is a cool thing. On the other hand, I believe that human intervention is also critical. When wikipedia knowledge is used in clustering, I expect some gain in recall or preciseness. As “Ontology (computer Science)” is a wikipedia page, I guess that cuil may have already used wikipedia information in their results.
Also don’t forget the “network effect”. I have created a prefix-based, syntactical gmail label hierarchy for a while. I really like to share part of the hierarchy to my friends, so that when I send a mail labeled with “party”, then they don’t need to relabel it again. If millions of users can share their small hierarchies (not only on gmail, but also on flicker, youtube, twine, etc.), each is connected somehow to hierarchies of friends and family, eventually we will have a very large network of ontologies which may improve search much more than we can do now. Just a random thougt.
P.S. I found one interesting thing. Cuil caches my wiki page at Iowa State University. However, that page should be offline no later than May 2008, while Cuil was online officially only on July 28, 2008. It seems its crawler has been alive for a while.
Jie Bao
I didn’t care for Cuil at all. It looks nice and simple from the outset, but popular sites that I visit and that normally show up in at least the top 5 on Google, didn’t even show up at all. They have a lot of work to do before it’s ready for primetime.
My initial impression of Cuil was also good. However after a few minutes, it soured on me. The results were just not good enough. The promise is there, but with the quality, I am not so sure.
Cuil is definitely going for it, but it’s hard to imagine them doing anything but incremental changes to what Google’s done. And even that would take years of effort.
Me.dium.com has taken a different tack. We have a full web index, but we change the results based on the surfing activity of our user base (now over 2,000,000). It’s in alpha, but I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. http://me.dium.com/search