Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Cuil Runnings: Valley People vs. Dot-Com People

So, I Cuil.

I may be the only one using Cuil on a daily basis since their Case Study in How Not to Launch launch last week. My interest is in seeing how the search evolves over time. Because, theoretically, it can only get better, right? They have seemingly solved one part of the search conundrum - access to a sizeable, in this case possibly massive, corpus to play with. id est, their Index. The other, albeit harder, part is to make sense of it and Make it make sense to the user.

The latter has been, in my opinion, a mix of hit and miss, missed hits and hits missed. Or, something like that. And, terribly entertaining.

Take this, for instance:
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=google%20Marissa%20Mayer%20Larry%20Page

[Let's ignore the actual search terms, and any searcher intent, for now :)] What caught my eye was the 'Explore by Category' section. Specifically two of the suggested ones: Silicon Valley People, and Dot-Com People. Expanded them to see what I can find, and this is what Cuil suggests:

Silicon Valley People:
Larry Page
Sergey Brin
Andy Bechtolsheim

Dot-Com People:
Jerry Yang
David Filo
Terry Semel

Nicely drawn battle-lines, ya? The Google Guys vs. the Yahoos. The Silicon Valley types vs. the Dot-Com types. The ... Wait! This doesn't make any sense at all to me. I wonder about the logic at work here. They have taken two sets of names - the relationships between them I can understand (AndyB?) - and found a category to match each of them. How does one not associate the Yahoo folks with Silicon Valley, or vice conversa? [I know, I make up words]

I decided to explore further and looked under the tab of "Google Employees". Whadya know [though, I suspect anyone who's used Cuil is not immune to surprises anymore], they have Sheryl Sandberg listed there. But, Fine [I know, I do random Capitalizations]. Beginner's mistake. Index hasn't been refreshed. etcetera. Then I mouse-over her name and: "Sheryl Sandberg is the COO of FaceBook, Inc ..." Hmm. So, you knew. And yet ...

Cuil, dahling, if this was real life and you were a girl and you did this to me, I would have left you for ... alright, I'm Weak like that.
Same time, tomorrow?