cousinlucky

If I was a government official at this very moment I would be using:

Corrupt
Underworld
Internet
Leeches

as a perfect example for needed rules and regulations on the Internet. The numbers of children that are going to be exposed to cuil's pornography can not be calculated. It does not bother me that there is pornography on the Internet; what bothers me is that it can be forced onto someone not looking for it.

It also bothers me that cuil has websites downloading walware software into the computers of its users. I hope that I can convince some of the people in office in New York into taking some kind of action about this search engine.

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fingal

I don't stumble on any porn while I'm searching for other stuff. Now that I use Google almost exclusively I've realised it has good filters, so it's rare to get hijacked that way.

I suppose Cuil is still under development, and perhaps its filters aren't complete yet. I can remember being on a work placement in a medical library in Eastern England... The Chief Librarian showed me a search on Alta Vista, and - despite her search being completely innocent - she ended up with a rubber and boots fetish site.

The Internet is a jungle, and you can bet that search engines will index this forum post, finding the words 'fetish' and 'rubber'. Such is life.

I would have liked to see a bit more Beta testing on Cuil before it was launched. I emailed them last night asking if they have plans to develop more powerful search tools. It can handle Boolean searching:

e.g. Tom AND Jerry / Tom OR Jerry

but I search for things all the time, and I need to be able to narrow my results effectively.

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daark.child

I did a few searches on cuil a few days ago and I wasn't really impressed because a lot of the queries returned poor results or nothing at all. I thought I'd check it out again yesterday and the same queries gave results that were more or less relevant to what I was looking for. Its currently not as good as google, but it seems to be a lot better than MSN Live Search. I think we need to give it time to grow, because even google started off small and I remember a time when people said it could not compete against altavista, but look at how things changed.

fingal

I'm grateful for this thread. Its got me thinking about using different search engines, without always relying on Google. This is useful when I come to source information for a variety of people and situations.

There are search engines which cater for niche audiences, and although Google would work very well too, the beauty of a 'niche' search is that it will filter out 'hits' which are no good.

I rather like meta searches (searching other search engines) because these can turn up an extra 1-2% of results which Google somehow missed out. For these I use Dogpile and I'm looking at Clusty with some interest.

At the moment, nothing quite matches Google, but other engines are great for supplemental searches.

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smolloy

I'm sorry cousinlucky, but I really have to disagree.

First, I don't want "the government" meddling in the internet. The internet can be a source of information flow all over the planet, or it can be a source of Chinese-style censorship, and I don't want the latter. Also, who's government should control it? New York? What if it's a Californian site? The Federal gov? Then they'll move to Europe. EU? Then they'll move to Russia. Or China, or Nigeria, or South Africa, ...

The internet is international, and cannot be controlled by a single goverment.

Secondly, I think you've completely misunderstood what happened. Cuil is not pushing porn (why would they?), and they're not pushing malware. The server was completely overloaded by traffic from slashdot, wired, the bbc, and half a dozen other big news sources, and it was screwing up. Like I said in a previous posts, it was giving out erratic results for all searches, and you were just unlucky. (I searched for myself and got a paper that I'd written with a picture of Bill Clinton, so I think I have more of a reason to be upset!)

I'm sorry you were served up porn, but I think, with respect, you're overreacting. Search engines make mistakes all the time. If you think cuil makes too many mistakes don't use it, but don't start some vigilante campaign to get it shut down.

Also, as to the number of kids who will get exposed to cuil "pushing" porn, I bet that orders of magnitude more kids will be exposed to porn by deliberately seeking it out on google, msn, ask, yahoo...

Now if you do want a target to expose the vices of the internet, consider that blogspot (owned by google) is currently estimated to house ~75% of the internet's malware sites. Perhaps Google would make a more rational choice as the target for your hate?

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elija

It comes down to the expected vs the unexpected. I have been unexpectedly served porn by cuil, which is different to me actively looking for it.

I think cuil has potential, I'm going to see how it goes for now

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techieMoe

I wonder if Cuil plans on providing anything like Google's "SafeSearch" option? It's not perfect, but I can at least search for most things here at work with SafeSearch turned on and not have to worry about any random pages of pornography coming up.

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elija

It does, but it doesn't seem to work. I think I'll report the search and link to help rather than just whinging about it

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cousinlucky

Smolley I do not want the ( United States ) government regulating the Internet either.

However, at the present time, government officials that want to regulate the Internet cite the fact that on the Internet children are too easily exposed to pornography as their reason to establish regulations.

I don't like spam, malware, viruses, hijackings, etc on the Internet either but there is nothing much that I can do about them neither. .

I see 15 year old girls that already have two kids of their own. I see other teenagers in New York City already hooked on drugs and unable to read and write properly.

Am I really over-reacting or am I just fed up? At any rate I put up a page about CUIL
on my website and warned my friends to keep their kids away from it.

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You Should Not Give In To Evils, But Proceed Ever More Boldly Against Them!! -from book six of Virgil's Aeneid
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fingal

Anyone who isn't fed up these days doesn't see what's happening. People should be more fed up in my view. A pity that so many of them don't believe there's even a problem.

I believe that education is part of the solution. Not search engines... education.

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