Earlier today when we saw Google Blogoscoped point out some of the issues that search engine Cuil was having with placing random images of people next to searches for popular people like Bill Clinton and Eric Schmidt (they display a photo of Steve Ballmer next to him, is that not funny?), we thought we’d see what kinds of problems Cuil had with products, services, and companies. The images are supposed to help users identify topics, according to Cuil and sometimes they get it right, but often times they don’t. After much searching, it looked like Cuil was doing okay with placing relevant photos next to companies like Microsoft, Sony, and Dell, but it was having terrible issues with Apple and their products.
What we ended up doing was performing various Apple related searches to see what kinds of images they paired with the results which again, are supposed to help users identify topics. What we found is just as astonishing as what Google Blogoscoped found when searching for individuals. All of the screenshots you see below are the first results that appeared when we performed a search. This didn’t take digging through pages upon pages of results to find an image that didn’t make sense.
Another issue we have is that Cuil implies that the images they display next to a search result come from the page they link to, except they don’t. The first example below shows what happened when we performed a search for the iPhone. No where on the iPhone page that they link to did we find the image for “The Dance Technique of Lester Horton.” Yet another issue is that Cuil does not disclose where they get the images from. Clicking on an image will not display a larger version for you from the original source. Cuil has all of these images downloaded to their servers, so there’s no way to easily find out where the images come from.
Now on to our findings…
A search for iPhone:
Because people purchasing an iPhone need to learn the dance technique of Lester Horton…
A search for iPhone 3G:
Once you get your iPhone 3G, you’ll want to go to an empty room to play with it. Whatever you do, don’t let others see that you have it, otherwise they’ll want to touch it…
A search for MacBook Pro:
Sure the MacBook Pro operating system has ties to Linux, but we hardly think Apple will be throwing up a “Linux-Powered” badge on their site…
A search for Steve Jobs Interview:
The first image appears to be a screenshot from Internet Explorer and the second is an image of Adam Pash from Lifehacker.
A search for Mac Leopard Released:
It’s touch to see exactly what’s in this photo, but it doesn’t look as though it’s related to the Mac Leopard release…
What we might have here is a leaked photo of what the next generation iPod will look like…
A search for Mac OS:
Steve Jobs replacement crew?
It’s sad to see how a promising software felled flatly on its face. All over the Web, users are running away from Cuil. It’s not so “cool” anymore.
Cuil is hrapp!
I don’t necessarily think that users are running away from it. No one was probably using it in the first place in order for them to run away from it.
Cuil is hilarious – Everyone’s talking about it these days
Google FTW!
Cuil are scraping images from our web sites and others and using them against search results showing sites of other companies – hardly a search engine – more like incompetent theft. I emailed them on the 29th and till today – no reply; perhaps they are snowed under with complaints from companies seeing their copyright images against competitors web sits on search
Between their search engine not working half the time and the complaints people are sending in, I imagine it’ll be a while before you get a reply from them.
The same thing happened to us.
Searching Cuil for keywords closely related to my website, I found that our logo (and other of our proprietary images) appears next to descriptions for, and links to, our competitors’ websites.
I emailed Cuil about this on Monday, July 28, and received no reply. On Wednesday, July 30 I emailed again.
That finally prompted canned replies (using exactly the same wording) from James Akers (crawler) and Pete Szymanski (legal counsel) assuring me that the problem would be “resolved promptly.”
It hasn’t happened. This has been ongoing for 6 days now, and no changes have been made.
Cuil’s lack of response to this issue which, apparently, is widespread is most troubling.
I believe they should discontinue displaying images with the search results until they resolve this issue.
sincerely,
Denise
@Denise – yet another example that points out an area that Cuil needs to work on. I didn’t think about all of the situations where they’d be displaying a competitor’s logo or image. Not good!