Cuil: Vanity Search Reveals Strange Results
30 Jul
There’s been a lot of buzz about the new search engine Cuil (pronounced cool). Someone IM’ed me about it so I decided to check it out. I did a vanity search for “allmond” and on page 3 found out that I’m a guy.
Apparently I’m not the only one with a phantom image. Samara Lynn at ChannelWeb has random images come up in the results of a search on her own name. And search results of some brands are popping up with pictures of competing or even irrelevant brands. When I went to the page referenced in the results there is a section for Featured Users with various photos but not the one shown in the results. I think including images in search results is a good idea but only if they are relevant. (BTW, I don’t use Naymz and the information they have must have been scraped from LinkedIn in 2006 as that was when it was accurate.)
Taking a look at the other results, I’m interested to know how results are ranked as most of it was old or outdated. They certainly have some kinks to iron out.
