Warning About Cuil!!

[elija]

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.

I don't think they are doing anything particularly sinister. As a programmer I can tell you that while reasonably accurate database searching is easy, very accurate and relavent database searching is hard. Searching the web is somewhat trickier.

These are probably teething troubles. I would suggest that you report the searches that turn up unexpected porn or other potentially nasty results along with the relavent links. That way, if it isn't the sinister thing, you can help them improve the engine. If it is the sinister thing, at least you will know.

I agree with you completely about kids with kids, drugs, knives and guns but I blame the education system and I'll leave that topic here as it has the potential to descend into a real rant and politics are rightly not allowed in these forums!

[Sporkman]

Here's a writeup on Cuil's launch:

Technology Review: A Google Killer Stumbles

[fingal]

Here's a writeup on Cuil's launch:

Technology Review: A Google Killer Stumbles

Thanks for the link. I'm surprised by some of the stuff in that article:

But Sullivan notes that relevance may be the most important quality of search.

There's no doubt about this. Relevance (or 'relevancy' if you're an information scientist) is absolutely the most important quality.

"Size matters because many people use the Internet to find information that is of interest to them..."

No! Relevancy matters. Size is only useful if it contributes to relevancy, otherwise it's useless.

Maybe these ex Google employees know less than we've been led to believe... Or maybe they just wanted a lot of money to play with.

I was taught that the 2 key aspects of an information search are relevancy (as mentioned above) and recall. People looking for information want 'just enough' recall to have some useful results to search for, but high relevancy within a given set of hits. Cuil currently produces high recall with very low relevancy and is therefore useless to an information professional.

Geeky link - the term used here is 'precision' but same difference.

[cousinlucky]

Thank You for the link, Sporkman.

Thirty-Thrree Million Dollars is a lot of money. What was promised to people to convince them to provide that much capital for C.U.I.L to come into existence??

A relative of mine claims that the most lucrative ( moneywise ) websites are the websites dealing with, and promoting, pornography. I do not doubt his statement. The listings that I clicked in C.U.I.L. were, I thought, legitimate firefox links because they presented themselves that way.

In its advertising C.U.I.L stresses that it is not going to keep any records of anyone's searches done while using its service. That may be good advertising but I do not understand how they can make such a claim in light of the fact that the U.S. government requies every phone company and ISP to install a tracking system.

I will never go back to the C.U.I.L. website even if they clean up their act in the future.